The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’

Posted on | August 31, 2015 | 184 Comments

Online dating apps are fueling an “apocalypse” of hook-up culture, Nancy Jo Sales reports in a frightening Vanity Fair feature:

[Alex] says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder — “Tinderellas,” the guys call them — in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.
“Brittany, Morgan, Amber,” Marty says, counting on his fingers. “Oh, and the Russian — Ukrainian?”
“Ukrainian,” Alex confirms. “She works at—” He says the name of a high-end art auction house. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs. “I could offer a résumé, but that’s about it … Works at J. Crew; senior at Parsons; junior at Pace; works in finance … ”
“We don’t know what the girls are like,” Marty says.
“And they don’t know us,” says Alex.

Hey, guys, let’s add a word to your vocabulary: Herpes.

Did you know that herpes is incurable, and that condoms don’t protect against herpes? You could ask Ella Dawson to explain this to you. Ms. Dawson was a student at Wesleyan University (annual tuition $47,972) who said she “never had unprotected sex,” but experienced a “tidal wave of shame” when she was diagnosed with a herpes infection. (Ms. Dawson graduated in 2014 with a bachelor of arts in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “theorizing the feminist possibilities of erotica,” so I guess that makes her an expert of sorts.) A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the herpes rate “was nearly twice as high among women (21%) as men (11%), and more than three times higher among African-Americans (39%) than whites (12%). The infection rate among African-American women was 48%.” For obvious reasons, promiscuity increases the risk of infection, and the CDC found that about 27% of those who reported 10 or more partners are infected with herpes.

So while Alex is congratulating himself on hooking up with five “Tinderellas” in the span of eight days, he should perhaps be thinking in terms of epidemiology. Yet the herpes virus may ultimately be less harmful than the emotional damage inflicted by mindless promiscuity:

Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

See? Marty understands the game he’s playing. Pretend that you’re emotionally available — “a boyfriend kind of guy” — and “racking up girls” via online hook-up sites is not difficult nowadays for any reasonably attractive young man. The more a guy succeeds at that cynical game, however, the lower his estimation of women in general, because each “win” for him just proves how easily girls can be deceived. No amount of feminist “consciousness raising” can change the fundamental reality of human nature. Casual sex is a game in which guys have a decisive advantage, and therefore any girl who plays that game is a fool. When so many young women are willing to play this foolish game, however, it produces a culture shift that hurts women:

“It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on the Gen Y Web site Elite Daily, in 2014.
It is the very abundance of options provided by online dating which may be making men less inclined to treat any particular woman as a “priority,” according to David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” Buss says. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”
“For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not — they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”

Will feminists ever wake up and realize that human nature is an immutable reality impervious to ideology? Viewing sexual problems as a quasi-Marxist struggle between two classes — men and women as collective groups — does not necessarily help any individual woman and may arguably make her life more difficult. Strategies recommended by feminist ideology may seem to “work” for lesbian sociology professors who view all males as hostile and dangerous, but political rhetoric about “gender inequality” doesn’t help the college girl trying to negotiate personal relationships. Are we to believe that Professor Armstrong (author of the 2002 book Forging Gay Identities) is best qualified to advise young heterosexual women on how to find a guy who will treat her right? Nancy Jo Sales reports the anecdotal evidence:

At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships, ranging from work in a medical-research lab to a luxury department store. They’re attractive and fashionable, with bright eyes highlighted with dark eyeliner wings. None of them are in relationships, they say. I ask them how they’re finding New York dating.
“New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.”
“People send really creepy s–t on it,” says Jane, the serious one.
“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.
“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt — well, not on the surface.” . . .
They say they think their own anxiety about intimacy comes from having “grown up on social media,” so “we don’t know how to talk to each other face-to-face.” . . .
“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.
“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.
“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.
“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.
“Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing,” says Reese. “It’s that bad.”
“But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism,” says Amanda.

No, ma’am. You got the memo. It’s just that you seem to be smart enough to realize that the memo was completely wrong. What feminist ideology tells young women they should do — being sexually “empowered” and expecting this empowerment to lead to “equality” in their relationships — is the exact opposite of what common sense based on an actual knowledge of human nature would advise them to do.

The accumulated wisdom of centuries still holds true. If you want to be loved, be lovable, and if you want to be respected, be respectable. As I tell young women, don’t just “play hard to get,” be hard to get. A girl who acts like trash thereby forfeits the right to complain that guys treat her like trash. One of the worst things feminism has done is to attack the sexual “double standard” by encouraging women to lower their standards, to screw around heedlessly and to view short-term “relationships” as an acceptable substitute for actual commitment.

This strategy of “equality” doesn’t work to women’s advantage. It has never worked and will never work, and any girl who plays that game is a fool. Yet feminism teaches women to blame men for taking advantage of the foolishness that feminists themselves encourage. If millions of women are on Tinder offering themselves as hook-up partners, how are men to blame if they react to “a perceived surplus of women” by playing that game? “Hit it and quit it.”

Certainly, I would never advise my kids to play that game. No decent parent would ever want their daughter to be offering herself to random strangers online, and decent parents would be horrified if their son brought home a woman he’d picked up that way. “Tinder trash” for a daughter-in-law? No, son. Leave those trashy women alone.

Remember that herpes is incurable, 21% of women are infected, and I’ll bet the rate of herpes infection is even higher on Tinder.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)





 

Comments

184 Responses to “‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:04 am

    It is like Logan’s Run (remember early in the movie where you can select a partner to amuse you that night), seemed like a fabulous place…so when will Carousel be started (to save the planet of course).

  2. Martin Davies
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:07 am

    Interesting quote: ““Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not…”

    Their main complaint seems to be that men have any kind of power in a relationship. I guess they’re too used to being the ones with the power over sex, so that makes them think they get to make all the decisions.
    It’s been said before: ” Women are the gatekeepers of sex and Men are the gatekeepers of commitment.”

  3. Mike G.
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:15 am

    Funny you should mention dating aps. I was talking to a young lady last night at a tavern who was looking at a dating ap. I asked her what was wrong with the old fashioned way of talking to people face to face.

    Her response was much like what the author of the first article said… they were raised on social media and that’s pretty much how these young people communicate.

    She told me she would never think to walk up to a total stranger and start a conversation because…they were a stranger, as odd as that may seem.

  4. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:21 am

    Maybe, just maybe, Alex was able to copulate with five different women in eight days because all five women agreed to copulate on the first meeting, without any bit of commitment from Alex.

    And, of course, Alex is a great potential mate: the Vanity Fair article identified him as a “budding investment banker,” recruited from an Ivy League college, which means a good possibility of a high income in the not-too-distant future. That means that the girl who wants to actually land Alex has to sleep with him on the first date, or she’s off the list for consideration for a second date; the men know this and the women know this. Yet the woman who doesn’t let Alex take her to bed on the first date is the one who’s actually the more promising mate for him, if he was actually interested in a permanent mate at this time, which he isn’t, because he has so many temporary bed partners available.

    A friend of mine put it simply: the sexual revolution is over, and the men won.

  5. CrustyB
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:28 am

    I had a co-worker who frequently bragged to women that he had read the bible, the torah, the quaran, buddhist scriptuires and the i’ching.

    He used that line to bag chicks left and right. What a goat.

  6. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:34 am

    Of course, when Alex finally does grow up, and decides that maybe it’s time to look for an actual wife, he’s going to be in his late thirties/early forties, and the women who will be available to him as potential mates have amassed a sexual history to match his, having copulated with a couple hundred other men, and probably having a little bastard, paternity unknown — and, therefore, child support also unknown — in tow.

    Then again, that might be a fair enough trade, since Alex might have begotten a bastard with one of his previous couple hundred conquests, and he won’t know about his whelp either.

    That which you have sown, someone else will reap . . . and vice versa,

  7. Peregrine John
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:35 am

    My thought exactly.
    Alternate headline: “Feminism Overwhelming Success: Women Hardest Hit”

  8. Peregrine John
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:39 am

    Of course the men won. The women absolutely insisted on scoring own goals over and over.

  9. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:48 am

    RSM:People say I’m judgmental, but I’m a father. Fathers are supposed to be judgmental.

    Parents have a proprietary interest in the well-being of their own children.

    And now we’re getting to how feminism really started and what it’s really all about.

    As I’ve mentioned before, feminism wasn’t started by the man-hating shrieking crazy cat-lady harpies who now run that show.

    Rather, feminism was started by, and given its shape or trajectory by, a certain class of (biological, but not social) men; specifically, cads. Feminism was started by “men” who wanted to have easy sexual access to other men’s daughters … without fear of the fate fathers (and brothers) tend to deliver to “men” who use their daughters as disposible recepticles.

    The cads’ success depended on a two-pronged approach —

    1) on the one hand, they needed to convince the majority of men that what they really wanted was to be cads themselves;

    2) on the other hand, they needed to convince women to continuously rebel against their fathers; they needed young women to resent their fathers’ interest in the daughters’ well-being as “just wanting to ruin my fun”.

    This is why, even to this day, the feminists are always wanting to “smash patriarchy”: for the stronger the patriarchy, the fewer young men trying to be cads who use young women as sluts and the fewer young women allowing themselves to be used as sluts. And the fewer young people ruining their lives by the misuse of sex, the less the hostility between the sexes and the fewer the recruits into “radical” lesbian crazy cat-lady feninism.

  10. robertstacymccain
    August 31st, 2015 @ 10:51 am

    “That means that the girl who wants to actually land Alex has to sleep with him on the first date …”

    But you can bet on this:

    1. No woman will “land” Alex that way; he won’t marry a cheap bit of Tinder trash;
    and
    2. An attractive woman never has to play that game; she can play it, but she doesn’t have to play it.

    Women who think it’s “smart” to play that game have been deceived, usually by media or by peer pressure. This is why it is so important to teach your kids to resist peer pressure, and teach them to view media with a critical, skeptical attitude. “Be ye not conformed to this world …”

  11. Don’t play hard to get. | Dalrock
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:02 am

    […] Stacey McCain gets close, but misses the fact that women’s sexual impulses are no more naturally “pure” […]

  12. robertstacymccain
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:04 am

    Let me say that, whatever the game may be, the smart players always win, and if the game is rigged against you, the only way to win is not to play.

    Whatever the game, winners win and losers lose. What a young guy has to think about is, “What does ‘victory’ look like in this game?” Love, marriage and fatherhood — this is success, this is victory. Therefore, even if he’s not in a position to get married and raise a family now, he must alway play the game with that victory scenario in mind.

    “Coffee is for closers.”

  13. CrustyB
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:05 am

    There is no sanctuary.

  14. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:09 am

    From the Vanity Fair article:

    “Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

    And herein lays the failure of feminism: feminism purports that women are the equal of men, and can compete with men on a level playing field. Well, in sex, many men do view it as a competition, and some women are now trying to compete with the men on that playing field, and they have to lose, because winning in that competition is still losing for women.

    The guy who has bedded 200 women will get an “Attaboy!” from his friends when he tells them his “number.” The woman who has bedded 200 guys will get a “What a slut!” from her friends when she discloses her “number.”

    My darling bride an I were at a Hallowe’en party a couple of years ago, one which had a lot younger couples — mostly early thirties and married — and the discussion came to the “number.” It was the accepted wisdom that when your mate asked about your “number,” it was always five. Any more than that would cause problems.

  15. RKae
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:11 am

    And where are the churches? Oh! That’s right! They’re too busy falling all over themselves to see which one can be the most gay-friendly.

    They can spout off all they want with their absurd claims that “Jesus would have performed a gay marriage,” but Christ repeatedly spoke against adultery – even extending its definition to include the act of thinking about adultery.

    So where are they while this stuff goes on?

  16. RKae
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:13 am

    The guy who has bedded 200 women will get an “Attaboy!” from his friends when he tells them his “number.” The woman who has bedded 200 guys will get a “What a slut!” from her friends when she discloses her “number.”

    And the progressives’ answer to making a better world is to stop calling those women “sluts,” and see to it that they get admiration for it just like men.

  17. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:16 am

    How many twenty-something guys would define that as victory?

    Everyone should read Humanae vitae. Pope Paul predicted all of this, amazingly accurately.

  18. RKae
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:16 am

    Hey, Gemma Brown:

    Doing things just because you were told not to do them is in no way thinking for yourself.

    It’s amazing to me that people question authority and question the status quo, but never question rebellion or question pleasure.

  19. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:20 am

    Men didn’t win; cads did.

  20. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:21 am

    Box: “Fish, plankton, sea greens… protein from the sea!” “Welcome Humans! I am ready for you.”

  21. Peregrine John
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:22 am

    Sounds good, but damned if I’ve seen any actual history to that effect.

  22. theBuckWheat
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:23 am

    Not only does The Collective thinks that your children are theirs to indoctrinate and monitor, they want your very thoughts to conform and comply with progressive ideology. This is the very meaning of “hive mind”. It is forbidden to think any thoughts that hive mind does not approve of.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:24 am

    An “attractive” woman is not necessarily what would be defined as “hot” on tinder. An attractive woman is a woman that a man would be attracted to to make a life together with.

    As Jeff Goldstein would note, many of us (I do not mean ‘us’ in particular here) use terms without knowing what they mean.

  24. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:25 am
  25. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:26 am

    The irony (or karma if you will) is his wives (there will be more than one) will take him for a lot of the money he made on Wall Street.

  26. AwD
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:29 am

    The real double standard: promiscuous women want to act like sluts and be treated like virgins.

    If women were actually angry about the “double standard” of elevated social status for promiscuous men, they’d simply stop having sex with men who don’t “put a ring on it” first, instead of lining up to be the next one night stand.

  27. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:32 am

    Trouble is, for the progressive women, the girls haven’t taken that advice to heart. As the father of a couple girls who were in high school a few years ago (classes of 2006 and 2010), I can tell you that no one uses the word “slut” to describe girls like other teenaged girls. And it wasn’t my daughters as much as their friends.

  28. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:36 am

    An obvious question: if all of these women Alex has copulated with are hot, hot, hot, why is he never interested in seconds? Or, perhaps the other obvious question, if none of the women are interested in seconds with Alex, is it possible that he’s a dud?

  29. Quartermaster
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:43 am

    The best number has always been “1.” That will never change except among pervs.

  30. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:45 am

    Just a couple of generations ago, nearly all “twenty-something guys would define [Love, marriage and fatherhood ] as victory”.

    Contrary to the “education” to which we were all subjected, caddery is not the natural state or desire of men. Men naturally want to be respected by the woman whom they cherish (in much the same way that women naturally want to be cherished by the man whom they respect).

  31. Quartermaster
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:47 am

    The cognitive dissonance is high on that one. It’s a shame she doesn’t see it.

  32. RSM: Hit it and Quit it on Tinder | Constantinople (Not Istanbul)
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  33. Quartermaster
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:51 am

    The smart ones still define that as victory. The mansluts running around almost universally have personal lives that are little more than chaos. When they are 60 they will regret it as all they have to look back on is life in rubble.

  34. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:52 am

    And the thing is, it’s not *men* who give “elevated social status [to] promiscuous men”, but rather women.

    Cads can be successful as cads only by using women as disposible sluts. And those women have fathers and brothers (and maybe husbands and sons) who have a vested interest in their daughters and sisters not being disposible sluts.

  35. Fatherless
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:53 am

    Why should he care if he’s with somebody else?

  36. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:55 am

    manslut

    The word I remember my grandmother using was “whore-monger” (*), and it was so obvious that she despised such “men”,

    (*) though, technically speaking, a “whore-monger” is a pimp.

  37. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:56 am

    Well, in a way, the social media way of “walk(ing) up to a total stranger and start a conversation” could be seen as safer than doing so in person.

  38. Peregrine John
    August 31st, 2015 @ 11:59 am

    The rules of their game are: it’s women and men only. Anything else is Judging and Slut-Shaming and Labeling and so on. Of course it’s more refined than that, in reality. Which is why it’s imperative to the narrative to keep it as binary as possible.

  39. ConstantineX1
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:00 pm

    More likely the latter than the former. Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.

  40. ConstantineX1
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:01 pm

    Tinderella, Slut Princess. I’m shocked Disney hasn’t sued.

  41. ConstantineX1
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:01 pm

    Yeah, soon it will be illegal to insist your children practice chastity.

  42. Gulermo
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:02 pm

    “Remember that herpes is incurable, 21% of women are infected, and I’ll bet the rate of herpes infection is even higher on Tinder.”
    Should be noted that there is strong statistical evidence that links cervical cancer to HPV and herpes.
    So, they have that going for them.

  43. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:05 pm

    But, see, getting everyone to believe that facile saying is *part* of how the First Feminists (that is, the cads who wanted to fuck you sisters and daughters … and to get your “blessing” as they did so) were able to corrupt our culture on this matter.

  44. Ilion
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:08 pm

    “Should be noted that there is strong statistical evidence that links cervical cancer to HPV and herpes …”

    … and abortions

  45. Dana
    August 31st, 2015 @ 12:51 pm

    Except that there are very few people who enter marriage as virgins anymore. Perhaps the best number is one, but for almost everyone, myself included, the number is greater than one.

    But I don’t have to take off my shoes to count them all, either. 🙂

  46. Mike G.
    August 31st, 2015 @ 1:03 pm

    Yeah, she was complaining about getting so many notices and how much of a pita it was to have to answer every one in order to find one guy to maybe go out with.

    That’s when I asked her why she didn’t just walk up to a guy and start talking.

  47. Lulu
    August 31st, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    why by the cow if you can get the milk…

  48. RS
    August 31st, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    I wonder how ubiquitous this sort of “culture” really is. I don’t dispute that it exists, but you’ll note, what’s described is a culture existing within the confines of Wall Street among the privileged youth. Is this another situation where, “if it happens on Manhattan, it must be a national trend” favored by journalists who’ve never been on the ground west of Hoboken?

    Nonetheless, it is certainly true that fewer young women define life’s “victory conditions” as including a marriage and children anytime in their twenties. Feminism changed not only social mores about chastity, but also demeaned the institutions of marriage and family in favor of career. The young women mentioned are all in New York hoping to parlay an internship into lucrative post graduation employment. They bemoan a lack of commitment on the part of their suitors, but how many of them would laugh if a young man indicated that he was seeking a mate and mother for his children?

  49. Lulu
    August 31st, 2015 @ 1:06 pm

    Seriously, I’m thinking this might be a minority of 20 somethings a small minority — I can’t imagine large numbers of girls wanting to meet strangers to have sex — probably bad sex

  50. Lulu
    August 31st, 2015 @ 1:09 pm

    If I was a young woman, and my only choice was these diseased slutty men I’d consider the convent