Tag Archives: Dating Apps

Can New Dating App “Click” Replace Lesbian Bars?

Where do you go if you want to find the woman of your dreams?

Back in the day, you and your gal pal super squad would flock to your nearest lesbian bar and connect with cute girls over gin and tonic. But lesbian bars have all but disappeared.

So where do you go now? You could swipe right on a few dozen faces on Tinder, Her or Feeld, but hookup-oriented apps get old fast.

You could go drinking at a regular bar and hope to get lucky, or join a softball league and hope the pitcher is finally over her ex.

Click is the solution.

Liz James, queer entrepreneur, was tired of lacking a safe space for her and her lesbian friends.

She told Curve,

Lesbian bars have almost completely disappeared due to gentrification, mainstreaming, the internet culture and a shift in how we identify with more fluid gender identities becoming the norm rather than the exception.”

She modeled her groundbreaking dating app Click on one of the lesbian bars of days past. The home page even features a neon sign boasting “Open 24/7.”

Click calls itself an alternative to lesbian dating apps. There’s no swiping here. Instead, the app matches users based on shared interests, values and desires.

Want to meet that feminist, nerdy, surfer who likes sushi and hamburgers?” says James. “The one that plays Texas Holdem and watches Star Trek re-runs?! She’s out there.”

Click is more than a dating app. It’s also for people who want to find new friends or reconnect with old ones, hang out with the general lesbian community, find emotional support, hunt for a hook-up, reunite with an old flame or meet the potential love of their lives.

Will Click succeed where most lesbian apps have failed? After all, perhaps there’s a reason that lesbian bars are shutting down and most lesbian dating apps aren’t taking off the way Grindr and Tinder have. However, maybe Click will fill a much-needed void left by closed bars and mundane swipe apps. Only time will tell.

Download the app in order to decide for yourself. Do you click with this app?

What’s Wrong With Lesbian Dating Apps?

Your couch is getting cold, and you want someone to snuggle with on your next movie night. Like many people, you’re looking for love – and like many millennials, you turn to your phone.

You have a dozen apps to choose from, from women-only apps like Her and Scrissr, to predominantly heterosexual apps such as Tinder and Bumble. You try Feeld and OKCupid and JDate and FarmersOnly, but nothing works out. All of these apps promise love. Are you just unloveable? Or is something about all lesbian dating apps predominantly broken?

1. The swipe-happy match style is geared toward straight men.

While men are predominantly visual creatures, many women require more than just a pretty face to become truly invested in someone. Swiping apps require you to make relatively hasty judgments based on six photos and a short bio. The focus is on looks, not personality.

2. Straight dating apps adhere to an outdated gender binary.

Most dating apps are for men and women. Or perhaps for men and men, with a few apps for women and women. But gender doesn’t always fall along straight lines.

Some queer people identify as butch women or femme women, or genderqueer, or transmasculine or transfeminine, or agender or bigender – the list goes on and on. Most dating apps do not allow people to break outside of rigid binaries, which are insufficient for queer millennials.

3. Straight men keep many apps from being safe spaces.

On Tinder, women can say that they are only seeking women, but that doesn’t keep the occasional man from sliding into the options. Some heterosexual couples create female accounts in order to lure queer girls into threesomes.

On sites that do not require mutual acceptance before swiping, many straight men will message lesbians anyway, thinking they can turn her straight or that she will be up for a threesome. This keeps many queer women from feeling safe enough to explore dating apps.

4. Most dating apps are used for hook-ups.

I’m not saying that all lesbians want deep, monogamous relationships or that people don’t find everlasting love on OKCupid. But the romance options are slim for queer women looking for more than a ménage à trois with a heterosexual couple. Many queer women want a friendship, relationship or companionate partnership that goes deeper than a glossy Facebook photo and a cheap drink. It’s hard to sell “meaningful relationship” through an app.

5. App developers are predominantly straight white men.

Straight white men create what they know other straight white men will like. Although the diversity of Silicon Valley is slowly increasing, there is still an alarming lack of representation when it comes to queer and transgender people, especially people of color or low socioeconomic background.

The solution? Silicon Valley needs more queer developers, and it needs queer developers who are willing to think outside of the box, not just to create a “queer” version of apps like Tinder and Grindr, but to create a dynamic and innovative new app that starts with the question: What do queer women actually want?

Creepy Things Guys Say to Lesbians on Dating Apps

Men aren’t very good at hearing a “hard no” in person, and online – pah!

It’s partly due to their socialisation to think if they persist and find the right phrase or action, then they’ll win the prize. And partly thinking that women are “just playing hard to get”.

So when confronted by a lesbian on dating app they go into overdrive, especially when those dating apps have a good chance of being for lesbians only?

One lesbian woman decided to find out and blog her experiences on her tumblr account. The results are mind-blowingly sad…

What do lesbians look like???

The ‘but I’m a lesbian too’ guy

The empathetic man

‘I like women… you like women’ must be a match then

The confused male

Has to be a racist

The confused

The ‘cock shot’ convincer guy

The downright rude

The ego

Comment below if you have a dating app horror story.

Lesbian Dating Apps (sigh) – The Best and the Worst.

Disclaimer: In the interest of anyone who may be interested I have managed successful relationships without the use of dating websites.

Scissr

So! The app to beat all other lesbian dating apps arrived. Welcome ‘Scissr’. It has promised to be the lesbian version of ‘Grindr’. So far, I’m in two minds…

Yes, the app itself is smart, easy to use, and it’s great to be able to see more accurate distances between you and other users, and online times.

It also requires you to connect through Facebook, filtering out many fakes who can’t be bothered to create alternative Facebook profiles I’m sure.

However, the closest person to me currently sits at 2.5 miles. Ok, it’s only just getting going, but it takes only 12 people down the list and we jump to 32.8 miles. And I live in Birmingham. It’s a pretty big place.

So possibly it hasn’t been advertised enough yet in order to attract more users. Or maybe it is more U.S based. I’m guessing, it has been out about three weeks now- I would have thought that’s quite a while in the dating app world? Correct me if I’m wrong.

First downside to this app; you have to actually go into your messages to see if you have any new ones; unlike other apps such as POF, which will give you a notification on screen.

Second downside is that you can’t see your sent messages. There isn’t that option.

On a plus side to that, if you can’t remember if you’ve sent someone a message (and I don’t send THAT many), when you hit the message button to contact them it will show what you have already sent. Maybe this is how Grindr works too.

I used Grindr once… Hold up… Myself and a good guy friend of mine had a competition to see who could get more messages within one hour. And yes. I won. I also felt so guilty at some of the guys messaging me that I had to reply and confess I was a woman on a dare mission.

If only that many messages came through per hour from women! One can dream.

‘Crushes’ and ‘Crushed on me’ – this is great, but, one user who has ‘crushed on me’ recently, I already sent a message to two days previous. Has she seen it? Possibly not if there aren’t notifications to let her know she has messages waiting in her inbox, and I’m not going to message twice. Or, she could have just hit the wrong button!

You also have coloured lines around people’s profiles on the main screen; green to show that they are online or very recently online, yellow to show they have been online in the past 24 hours, and red to show 1 day or over.

Unfortunately, all I am seeing right now is a lot of red…

Current rating: 5/10.

I hope it can and will improve with a bit more time. I’m confident it will be better than some others…

Brenda

Terrible lesbian dating app. Terrible. And not just because it doesn’t rate highly for successful interaction.

I must have used this a very long time ago then deleted it (because it was shit). I then downloaded the app to my phone once again a few months ago however received a message on screen to say I had been blocked from using this app.

Well, I am definitely over 18, and I definitely do not send or post sexual or abusive content. When I sent an email to ask why my profile had been blocked, I received no reply. Soooo… I guess I’m still blocked.

Rating: 2/10.

Badoo

Badoo (And I just knew I shouldn’t have bothered). Another awful dating site, not just for the simple fact you can’t see who ‘likes’ you and the whole app requires a level of concentration you simply cannot be bothered with; But for the fact they clearly don’t understand the entire population aren’t a straight Ken & Barbie:

I received a message from Badoo to say my photos didn’t match my gender therefore my account had been stopped, or something to that effect. Excuse me? What? If you could have possibly insulted me more, I probably could have sued you under something I’m sure.

So I sent a very unpleasant email expressing my anger and to who the fuckwits were deciding on MY gender. To which I did receive a ‘sincere’ apology.

However, was a bit late for an apology, no matter how sincere, and I swiftly deleted my profile and the app. Unless I’ve been walking round with my eyes closed for near 32 years, I am fully confident of my own gender. Take note. Thank you.

Rating: 0/10. Yes. Just for that.

Gaydargirls

Gaydargirls. This followed on from gay.com for me. If anyone remembers gay.com, it was way back when we still used dial-up connection; when it was guaranteed you’d start talking to a really cool girl in a chat room and you’d get disconnected.

I left Gaydargirls back in 2005, and only rejoined in 2014. I don’t use it on my phone, I only log in when using my laptop and I don’t think I have bothered logging in for about 3 months now.

Unfortunately for Gaydargirls, it doesn’t seem to have moved on so much from years ago, and I think what used to maybe be quite a popular and modern site, possibly the number of active users has decreased somewhat. And it looks exactly the same. It needs a revamp.

Rating back when: 7/10. Rating now…. Probably a 2.

Tinder

Tinder is actually ok although it isn’t a “gay” dating app. I haven’t been registered on it I’d say any more than 4-5 months, and I’ve not met anyone off of it. However, I think Tinder has quite a good thing going on. It’s simple, it works on users profile photos that you swipe left for no and right for yes. You have to have both said yes in order to speak to each other.

I think it could be a lot better, but the idea itself is a good one. The downside to that though is I fear there are probably many people who will swipe yes to EVERYONE just to get more matches.

Not only that but there is no option for sexuality- it’s simply show only men, only women or both. So there’s a hint for Tinder on how it could instantly be better!

I’d say out of every 20 ‘matches’, I only engage in conversation with two. And unless I think someone really looks as though they might have something about them, I’m unlikely to make the first move.

Rating: 6/10

Plenty of Fish

I have to say my best score for a dating app would have to go to POF (Plenty of Fish). It’s always been easy to use and I have the most interaction and meets from there, and there seem to be a lot more genuine people using this app.

You can filter your search results by age, area and relationship intent. You have onscreen notifications to tell you when you’ve received a message. You can see who has viewed your profile and who you have viewed. You can see who is online. It also stores a substantial amount of past messages.

The only one thing I would complain about is that they have changed their “meet me” set up (which is kinda like a Tinder swiping system), so you have to upgrade the app (which means paying) to view who would like to meet you.

Saying that, it’s not a huge issue as when you receive an email to say “User123 wants to meet you!” you can still go to your search facility and type in the username of that person to view their profile. It’s just a bit more long winded than before.

Rating: 8/10

While dating sites used to be something we were embarrassed about admitting we used, they now seem to have become a normal part of the single person’s life. It would be interesting to hear other’s experiences with these sites and others.