Studies of underage boys and hookup apps.

1. "Nearly one in four teenagers are using dating apps — and it may not be hurting their mental health, suggests a new Northwestern Medicine study. The findings challenge the popular belief that dating apps are harmful for teenagers. Instead, the study — which monitored adolescents over six months — suggests these apps may provide teens with valuable social connections, particularly for those who identify as sexual and gender minorities populations. “Perhaps parents don’t need to immediately panic when they see their teens using dating apps,” said study author Lilian Li, a postdoctoral research fellow of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “What’s more important is for parents to have a conversation with their kids about why they are using these apps in the first place.”" https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2025/07/teens-are-using-dating-apps-more-than-youd-think-it-may-not-be-a-bad-thing 2. "These [news media] accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture." https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/60981d118b006454de9222b2/61d364a68536fc3f5cf77933_Roth-Dissertation.pdf 3. "Overall, 52.5% of participants [comparable to adults at 54-63%] reported using MSM-specific apps to meet partners for sex. Of these, most participants [mean age 16.6] reported having oral (75.7%, n = 78) and anal sex (62.1%, n = 64) with those partners. Of those who reported having anal sex, 78.1% (n = 50) had sex with those partners more than once, and only 25.0% (n = 16) always used condoms with those partners. [...] Previous work has demonstrated that the Internet serves multiple functions in the exploration and acceptance of sexual orientation identity, including communicating with and meeting other sexual minorities and connecting with the sexual minority community. Hookup apps may be another avenue by which AMSM perform normative developmental tasks of adolescence, such as dating and initiating sexual behaviors. AMSM have a smaller pool of potential partners relative to their heterosexual peers due to the smaller size of the sexual minority community, as well as the relative lack of sexual minority male peers who are out in any given school, where youth tend to meet partners. As such, MSM-specific apps may be one of the few ways in which AMSM can explore relationships with same-sex partners." https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.01.001 Negative perspectives: Here’s why teens don’t belong on dating apps https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/25/health/teens-dating-apps-wellness Confronting the Toll of Hookup Culture https://ifstudies.org/blog/confronting-the-toll-of-hookup-culture