Don't Cry Over Spilled Tea!

Gossip, Dating, Surveillance and the Apps that Fuse Them Together

Art by Jordan Baker

In our current cultural and technological epoch where matters of the heart are administered, governed, and  corroded by the screen, it feels almost natural that someone would use those same digital means to attempt to mediate the dangers inherent to such a digitized experience of love. The Tea app was created in 2023  by Sean Cook, a white man with a Business degree from UConn. The Tea app – officially Tea Dating Advice, was launched as a women’s -only information sharing app created to help protect women from the dangers of dating online. Indeed, the idea for the app was supposedly born from the founder’s own anxieties when witnessing his mother’s troubling experiences with online-dating. 

‘So how does the Tea app work?’, you may be wondering. Well, first, in order to ensure a women-only  userbase it uses surveillance methods most commonly found in law-enforcement settings, such as facial  recognition and biometric data. When signing up for the app, users must submit a selfie that is then analyzed by AI in order to “verify” that you are a woman. Once approved, users (who are all kept anonymous as part of the app’s  policy) are made privy to an interface that looks like a cross between Instagram and Tinder. The images of men that populate the Tea app’s feed do indeed replicate the esthetics of a dating app, with square and rectangular images of faces paired with a first name. However, in lieu of the classic heart or X emoticon of an app like Tinder, one finds either red or green flags, which indicate how many women have alerted the positive or negative aspects to dating this person. As you scroll, you  can click on these men’s “profiles” and find comments left by other women relating their (often negative) experiences with dating them, or simply things they have heard about said man. Gossip, indeed, is the fuel  for this metric system, the majority of comments resembling things like: “this guy has no personality”, or “I heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that he’s a known cheater”.  

These posts/profiles of various men are uploaded  by women either hoping to garner further information about someone before going on a date, or as a  warning to other women who may be unlucky enough to cross the uploaded man’s path in the future.  Along with scrolling, you can look up men by name, and sign up for notifications if a post appears about  a man who has not yet been posted about on the platform. The app also boasts a set of other surveillance  tactics such as Reverse Image Search, Phone Number Lookup, and Background Checks. In the summer of 2025 the app rose to number 1 on the US App Store, and, as of February 2026, has garnered over 6.6 million users. 

A number of issues are raised by the Tea app’s “safety-ensuring” methods. First, the selfie evaluation process posits that one’s gender identity can easily be distilled into outward appearance alone. This is not  only the gender-essentializing argument par excellence of the right, but is also often used as a tactic for  transvestigating – the act of scrutinizing people’s gender identity online in the hopes of “exposing” them  as secretly trans. Furthermore, since this gender policing is delegated to AI, it can only be assumed that  the algorithm is basing its understanding of what a woman looks like on heteronormative standards of hyper-femininity – in other words, what white patriarchal society thinks a woman should look like. The  reinforcing of gender norms persists in the very hetero-sexual premise of the app. Indeed, its protective  services are presumably reserved for straight cis-women who are (justifiably) concerned about straight 

cis-men, thereby largely excluding gender non-conforming queer people who are equally (if not more) at risk of physical and emotional abuse on dating apps. Gender essentializing also creeps its way into the  marketing of the app. For example, praise on the website is headlined with “Women Love Tea”,  reinforcing the age-old association of gossip with femininity, and therefore frivolity, and even vice.  

The garnering of data by the Tea app to ensure women’s safety has repeatedly had the opposite effect: the platform was victim to two major data breaches in July  of last year, exposing thousands of images, government ID photos, and private messages of the app’s users. Not only have these data breaches highlighted the Tea app’s failure in actually keeping women safe, in practice the app is used more to expose men’s asshole-ish behaviors rather than warn for sex offenders and potential scammers.

Without discrediting the very real risks that come with dating straight men (according to the UN office on drugs and crime, 50,000 women and girls were murdered across the globe at the hands of intimate partners across in 2024 – that’s one death every ten minutes), I would argue that this use of the app ultimately reflects our risk-averse culture which is desperate to avoid the occasional discomfort inevitable in all human relationships. More than that, the Tea app demonstrates our embrace of mass surveillance tools as a means to these ends.

Regardless of the app’s questionable ethics and its actual effectiveness in keeping women safe, its  popularity (and mere existence) undeniably reflects widespread dissatisfaction – and distrust – within heterosexual relationships, and a dating landscape dominated by apps and corporations. To be clear, there has never been a time where heterosexual romantic relations have been equal and  harmonious. There exists no glorious past to long for, and attempts to open up how we define  a relationship are a good thing – the very concept of straight romantic relationships has been historically  defined by ownership and subservience of the woman to the man. However the radical potential of such a re-definition is stunted by the commodification of romance by corporate dating apps, which create an illusion of abundance and  streamlined connections.

Gossip, that beloved and disparaged sharing of informally verified information, has long been an  unavoidable component to romantic relationships, and to relationships in general for that matter.  It is often a double-edged sword, creating a sense of community and intimacy for those gossiping, and excluding and potentially demonizing those being gossiped about. Gossip is above all, however, an activity born from, and best practiced in, face to face human contact. So, for the sake of honest gossip, keeping each other safe, and navigating patriarchy’s treacherous waters, maybe it is simply time we finally get off of these damned apps – and I mean all of them.

Ksenija Carleton

Art by Jordan Baker