Spill the Tea: Are online spaces affecting men and women differently?

“We are seeing a global retreat from romantic relationships among young people” - Dr Jenny van Hooff

Gossip used to be a village sport. Every TV show about a tight-knit community highlights this: Traitors, Succession, Newsnight… Reputations rose and fell with the speed of rumour and the mercy of forgetfulness. There was a ‘right to be forgotten’ and no screenshot button in 5,000 BC.

In this episode of The Great RomCon?, I sat down with Jenny van Hooff, sociologist at the University of Manchester and co-director of the Contemporary Intimacies, Sexualities and Genders Research Group, to discuss whether online spaces are affecting men and women differently, and if so, what does that mean for love, power, and modern intimacy?

The catalyst for our conversation was the Tea Dating Advice app - a platform from the US allowing women to share information about men they’ve dated - and the subsequent leak of user data onto darker corners of the internet. Tea may have been created with the best of intentions, like the Facebook page ‘Are we dating the same guy?’, to catch wannabe players in the act. Those who have seen the film ‘Promising Young Woman’ (2020) will know that there are bad actors out there, and so there is value to female safety in knowing everything you can about that guy you just met. Gossip, once ephemeral and local, is now searchable and scalable. What was once said in confidence can now be forwarded to thousands, stripped of tone, context, or mercy. Just look at what ‘offence archaeologists’ do to people standing for public office.

“Men’s reputations can be damaged, a fear of public shaming can make men less likely to open up.”

As Dr van Hooff pointed out, gossip has always had a social and societal regulatory function. It keeps communities in line - it protects and punishes (more or less fairly). But in the age of dating apps and encrypted group chats, the private can become permanently public. In our use of technology over the past 20 years, we have struggled to come to this realisation. The Epstein files show how emails, once sent and forgotten on old devices that no longer work, have a digital record that can come back to bite. This can allow vigilante justice, “What’s wrong with street justice?” as Denzel Washington puts it in ‘Training Day’ (2001) - not legal due process, but people get what’s coming to them, what they deserve. The social cost can be devastating: just look at Peter Mandelson. Once the darling of political punditry, he now warrants a post-show person non grata notice in any documentaries he appears in.

“We are seeing a global retreat from romantic relationships among young people.”

Dating apps, we agree, were designed like online shopping: Search, Compare, Add to basket, Returns are free and easy if the product disappoints. It’s hard not to see the logic of capitalism seeping into our emotional lives - what Eva Illouz once called “emotional capitalism.” While choice proliferates, this results in commitment and loyalty to decline in the ‘buyer’. People report feeling overwhelmed by perceived abundance and paralysed by the fear of settling, “the constant what-if” as Dr van Hooff puts it - marriage rates have fallen in the UK by over a quarter according to the ONS since the advent of the first iPhone in 2007. There is also the concerning rise of ‘relationship litigation’ suing your former partner for promises made, services not rendered - this is a sad trend for Jenny: “People want to reduce risk, but you can’t insulate yourself from heartbreak.”

And the experience isn’t neutral. Some women report feeling less safe on dating apps than men -  “it’s a real shame that there is so much misogyny online”, laments Jenny. Some men, meanwhile, speak of invisibility, rejection, and status anxiety: “It’s like having a second job”, men said in research. I spoke with Jenny about this gender disparity, where we discussed how tech platforms may be amplifying long-standing gender tensions rather than creating them. If some perceive that straight white men have become cultural villains in some post-#MeToo narratives, what does that do to masculine identity in some corners of the internet? Where does male stoicism and chivalry sit in the 21st Century?

Whilst Jenny doesn’t think we should romanticise the past, “It wasn’t until the 19th century that people started talking about love”, her research on dating profiles suggests that many women still look for competence, stability, health: the sporty, professional, emotionally literate man. Gender roles haven’t disappeared, they’ve been rebranded, updated: “There has been a critical evaluation of the sexual revolution.”

“I think we thought dating apps would liberate us from gender roles, but they seem to have entrenched them further.”

But tech isn’t just reshaping romance. It’s nudging the architecture of friendship, infidelity, and even midlife intimacy. Private messages can blur into emotional affairs. Porn is more accessible than ever (outside the UK or with a VPN). Romance fraud is rising, with lonely men and women targeted in different ways to drain their bank balance and their heart. There is a split in the subversive content on show on differing platforms as well: Trad-wife aesthetics trend on TikTok (cottagecore was so 2021) while feminist discourse flourishes on female-dominated Instagram.

We also touch on safety and governance. What would a genuinely “safe” dating app look like? More transparency? A not-for-profit model? Stronger enforcement of the Online Safety Act? Jenny suggests that platforms cannot wash their hands of responsibility. When your business model is intimacy, your product isn’t just harvesting ad data - it’s shaping people’s lives and their relationships.

Dr van Hooff was ultimately keen on taking the “ordinary” in relationships seriously, and going back to first principles. Men in particular, have been shown to be happier when in long-term relationships - however alluring the online dopamine slot machine might be. In a culture obsessed with disruption, maybe the most radical act is to pay attention to the quiet work of forming, building and sustaining love with one person. The question of the episode lingers: are online spaces corrupting us, or merely revealing our true natures? Are these inate human behaviours, or has the noble savage been sullied with a smartphone. As with most things in sexual politics, the answer is inconveniently inconclusive.

And perhaps the real task isn’t to spill the tea online - but to talk to the people whose opinion we really value. Put on a brew.