Manhunt.net, an ethnographic study

To continue my theme of studying masculinities in the media, I studied the website manhunt.net for my ethnographic study. Manhunt.net is a dating site that caters exclusively to gay men. At the moment I am writing this posting, there are more than 50,000 men logged in to Manhunt.net. Not members, logged in at this very moment.

To conduct my study of Manhunt.net, my colleague and I created a profile. The process of creating a profile revealed a lot about the site. Manhunt leaves spaces for detailed physical information and a laundry list of sexual preferences, but not much else. There is almost no room to put information about non-sexual interests. Anything unique or personal must be typed within 650 characters or fewer.

Almost immediately after creating a profile, (in which we placed no information other than a photograph of a clean-cut young white man) we began to receive messages from other members. Many of these messages were in the form of "winks". The wink on Manhunt.net signifies much the same as a wink in person--a non verbal indication of interest. Most of the other messages we received were shorter than one sentence long, and often grammatically incorrect. Many included photographs of the writers' penises or posteriors. The implication was that the writers of the messages we received saw our photograph, found us attractive and wanted to meet for sex, simple as that.

I had a difficult time conducting this study without passing judgment on the culture of Manhunt.net. The site encourages men to meet for sex with little to know background knowledge of each other, something that could lead to a multitude of unsafe situations. The site requires that members be over the age of 18, but has no way of verifying age. And, perhaps most frightening, the profile page has a place where members can check whether or not they are HIV positive, but no mechanism in place to prevent people from lying. All of these things would make me caution anyone against joining this site.

All in all, I found my time on Manhunt.net illuminating. I don't think I'll be back.