How to use smartphones to pick up sex partners is a problem that’s been studied by scholars. Now, three other scholars have studied those studies. Here’s what they say they found:
“Using Smartphone Apps to Find Sexual Partners: A Review of the Literature,” A. Anzani, M. Di Sarno, and A. Prunas [pictured here], Sexologies, vol. 27, no. 3, July–September 2018, pp. e61-e65.
The authors, at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, explain:
The current paper aims to offer an overview of recent research on mobile dating apps as a way to find sexual partners… The average app user profile is that of a white man having sex with men (MSM), between 25 and 35 years of age, with high education and income, who has a large number of sexual encounters and often engages in risky behavior (e.g., unprotected anal intercourse, drug or alcohol use during sex). Studies in the field suffer from several limitations, including a… paucity of studies on the positive sexual and relational outcomes of app use; finally, few studies explored app use in the LGBTQIA population as a whole, in addition to heterosexuals….
Finally, the large majority of studies were conducted in the United States, Australia or Asia, and there is still a lack of data from European countries.