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A couple of months ago, Brianna, a 22-year-old who lives in Milwaukee, downloaded the Tea app. It was created to provide a space for feedback on potential dates for other women, and she understood that it was almost akin to Yelp, except that instead of rating businesses or restaurants, users were rating men. She scrolled through photos of those in her area, accompanied by either red flags or green flags and anecdotes from women who said they had dated or interacted with them. She read warnings about men who were too persistent and couldn’t take no for an answer. “It felt like an app full of men to avoid,” she says. But Brianna noticed that genuine harms were being conflated with differences in compatibility. “It’s like, this guy might not be terrible, he just may not be for you,” she says. “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” (Brianna, like many of the women in this story, asked to go by her first name to protect her privacy.)
The concept behind Tea is simple: It’s a place for women to warn each other about men in their communities and find out if the guy they’re dating is on the up and up. Tea is not the first service to allow users to review potential romantic partners — apps like Do I Date, Lola, and Stroovy have already done that — but it seems to have reached a level of popularity its predecessors didn’t. Though the app is free, there is a $15 a month subscription, which offers services like phone number lookups (“to check for hidden marriages,” the app’s website says), background checks (“to uncover criminal records”), and reverse image searches (“to catch catfish”). To gain access to Tea, a user must take a selfie to prove they’re a woman (previously, uploading your driver’s license was also required). The app was launched in 2023 but remained relatively underground until last month, when, for unknown reasons, it sailed to the top of the app download charts.
LeeAnn, 35, is single in New York City. She says she’s had some “really poor experiences” with men and was intrigued by Tea. She even toyed with the idea of posting about a guy from her past but worried that the details of the situation would make it clear that she was the one who had posted it, despite the anonymous nature of the app.
“Being a single woman in today’s world, it can lead to a lot of dangers,” LeeAnn says. “People want to try and avoid that or manage that if they can.” But the types of posts on the app can be discordant and jarring. LeeAnn remembers posts detailing a man not picking up the check next to posts about alleged assault. “A man not paying for dinner is something I probably would like to know, but it’s not the same for me as a safety concern,” she says. The most common complaint on the app seems to surround men sending unsolicited nude pictures or pressuring women to send their own.
LeAnn isn’t the only one seeing a disconnect between the stated purpose of the app and the actual reality of it. Sasha, a 34-year-old who lives in Texas and requested to be identified by a pseudonym, is a domestic violence survivor. When she saw talk of Tea while scrolling on TikTok, it seemed like a much-needed place where women could gather in the pursuit of keeping each other safe. But when she downloaded the app, Sasha was taken aback. “I was expecting to see like, ‘Oh, this man got acquitted on charges of beating me,’ or something,” she says. “Not something like, ‘Oh, they’re a workaholic and a bisexual,’ and it didn’t work out with them.” There also seemed to be no verification process for the information posted about the men. Anyone, essentially, could say anything. Sasha found this strange, especially since the app requires verification of the user themselves.
In some corners of the internet, the app has been cause for outrage. On the Reddit forum r/MensRights, one poster encouraged fellow subreddit members to report the app. On the same post, one commenter wrote that there should be a male version of the app: “I deserve to know my date’s STD history, body count, etc.” One viral X post, viewed over 14 million times, read, “Gonna make an app called ‘coffee’ where the boys can warn each other on which girls are absolutely ran through.” Though the app doesn’t allow screenshots — when attempted, the screen simply goes black — it seems that some men who appear on the site have been tipped off. On Reddit, one anonymous poster wrote that a female friend told him he had been posted on the site. Because of the details included, he was able to guess who had posted about him. In the comments, other users encourage the man to seek legal action against the woman who posted about him. The top-rated comment reads: “There should be a male version of this app warning us of diggers and child care freeloaders.”
The backlash against the app reached new heights on July 25, when hackers released 72,000 images of the users of the app, including selfies and photos of drivers’ licenses. In a statement, Tea said they were launching a full investigation into the breach. A second breach was exposed just days later when more than 1 million messages, discussing sensitive topics like abortion and cheating, were obtained by 404 Media. Two class-action lawsuits have been filed against the app following the hacks, and users are questioning whether the app is actually useful in safeguarding the lives of women.
The app, which is designed specifically for straight women, has also received some criticism for its gender policy. There have been reports of trans women being rejected from the app, igniting accusations of trans-exclusionary feminism. One trans woman, commenting on Reddit, said she would wait until she had been on hormones for a few months before trying to apply to the app. (Citing an ongoing investigation, the company declined to comment to Rolling Stone.)
Instead of being a source for women to get information to keep themselves safe, as is the purported purpose of the app, some users view it as a source of entertainment. Les, a 44-year-old man from Montana, signed up for the app using a selfie of his partner and her driver’s license. (He says he asked her permission.) Les and his partner searched through the men in their town, wondering if they would find people they knew. They didn’t. “That made me feel really good,” Les says. “I searched for myself, and thankfully, I was not on there.” Once, Les says, a woman posted with her concerns that her husband was cheating. Another woman commented, claiming to be the person he was cheating with. “They were yelling at each other for a good 10 comments. It was crazy.”
Brianna, the 22-year-old from Milwaukee, is rethinking her use of the app. The experience of dating can be full of fraught decisions, but Brianna wants to make them herself, instead of relying on crowd-sourced information from anonymous users. “We are so reliant on our phones to tell us what’s the right choice,” she says. “We forget that we can make these choices ourselves.”
