‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’

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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.)





 

184 comments

  1. no he’ll marry a younger woman, and convince himself that she has had few partners and she’ll lie if he asks her — and meanwhile she’ll be comparing his performance to all the younger better looking men who have gone before him while he’ll believe he’s special to her thus making her special to him — and he’ll deserve it when she leaves him and takes his money

  2. The Dark Herald fisked the Vanity Fair article in his typically brutal fashion, then tied it into another article on Why Millennial Women Want to Date Older Men and fisked that too. An excerpt:

    “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.”

    This is a man who we wasted an entire education on. The statistic that this howler monkey in corduroy isn’t looking at is, that it is only the top fifteen percent of men that are invited to the feast. The other 85% get the big Left Swipe.

  3. No, a subset of men won. Very few young men could do what Alex is (purportedly) doing. And, even among those who can, many would prefer not to be doing it. But men like Alex damage the dating pool for all other men.

  4. That depends on which hive becomes dominant. There is only one segment of the left that promotes promiscuity and that
    is the relatively recent phenomenon of 3rd wave feminism. Historically
    collectivism has sought to destroy all competing pleasures to their
    precious but superficial solidarity.

    There has been a resurgence
    of 2nd wave “all men are rapists” feminism and they have gotten the
    Affirmative Consent law passed in California and a few other states.

    Yes
    I can agree that the hookup culture is stupid, but that can should be
    discouraged through responsible parenting and personal responsibility. Not statism.

  6. I don’t think caddery is the natural desire of most men, but I suspect some degree of polygyny may be. You could replace your sentence with “Men naturally want to be respected by the women they cherish . . .”. But that ingrained desire is tempered in most by a desire for bonding that would be difficult in such a situation, as well as a desire not to hurt those that you cherish.

  7. My Mom taught me not to talk to strangers in that context (dating). She said that a young lady waits for a proper introduction. On the grounds that no friend or relative will introduce you to a known puke. Of course, my Mom would be appalled at the thought of any decent person, male or female, looking to hook-up with a complete stranger.

  8. “Whatever the game, winners win and losers lose. ”

    That’s true. The men who are having lots of sex are the ones who have always been able to pick and choose. Now they can have a lot more sex without ever having to commit to a woman.
    Women have been told that they can have sex just like a man – i.o.w many casual encounters. The fact that they don’t feel happy should tell them something: that men and women are different, not rivals, but complementary.
    The real losers are the ordinary guys who can’t screw around because women don’t find them superficially attractive.

  9. The real losers are the ordinary guys who can’t screw around because women don’t find them superficially attractive.

    OTOH, they won’t get herpes. Winning!

  12. “Hey everybody! Let’s go get STDs and unwanted pregnancies and act like morons just to piss off our Dads! Wheeeee!”

    Yeah. Real mature.

  13. If you read the whole article, toward the end you’ll see some University of Delaware coeds noting that a lot of the hook-ups they’ve had have been with duds.

  16. Until it comes time for these young women with herpes to “settle” in order to get the relationship they want.

  18. Even with his money and decent good looks, and even if he hadn’t been a sociopath who probably set off all kind of alarm bells in the women he met, I doubt that Tinder would’ve worked for him. IIRC, he was half-Asian and quite short.

  19. There are different types of feminism. They can generally be divided into pro-sex and anti-sex classifications. None of them care for children (except the 19th century feminists who considered abortion an effect of the “patriarchy”) and men are either a means to an end (sex positive types) or hated (anti-sexual types).

    The only constant to all types of 20th and 21st century feminism is that men and children do not have any rights.

  21. I suppose I’m now in the demographic of “older men,” whom younger women are ostensibly seeking. If I were to become suddenly single, I cannot imagine wanting to deal with hassle of dating someone half my age, if for no other reason, there would be too many life experiences which I’ve had which would be lost on someone so much younger. Not to mention I would be worried that such a woman is not really interested in me, but rather in the various accouterments the come along with someone who’s lived a moderately successful life.

    Further, there seems to be something suspicious about people who refuse to acknowledge their age and insist upon acting like they’re decades younger. Such people bring to mind the character Gustav von Aschenbach from “Death In Venice,” and that did not work out particularly well.

  23. There is a vaccination for that! Isn’t it wonderful how much time, money and energy is expended on trying to cure, not prevent, the outcomes of our increasingly poor lifestyle choices.

  24. So, he’d have to have looked for shorter, maybe Asian, girls. Of course, a big part of his problem was that he was a 4, who thought he should be getting 9s.

  25. I think it was Woody Allen who said that being bisexual doubled your chances of a date for Saturday night, but apparently Tinder has blown that equation right out of the water.

  26. My wife uses the term whore-monger and it isn’t technically correct. I like the term manslut far better, and that’s what they are. I have seen few of them able to sustain a marriage.

  27. That’s the case, but it’s harder to sustain a marriage the larger that number is, and that applies to men as well as women.

  28. It’s the ultimate cop-out for those who can’t develop the skills to engage with the opposite sex.

  29. Yes, and these are the types of women who then want to get married. What an attractive offer…..I think I will give it a pass.

  30. Funny you should mention that. The Dark Herald also linked to Gavin McInnes’s article, In Praise of the Benjamin Button Babes. An excerpt:

    My single friends often text me pictures of the twentysomethings they’re paired up with and I almost feel sorry for them. Sex lasts, what, 10 minutes? Now you have 23 hours and 50 minutes to talk to someone who says “like” every third word. The sex is terrible, too. They pump away like they’re working at a pump factory and there’s no intellect or imagination involved. It’s like playing tennis with a toddler.

  31. It’s amazing how much of liberalism stems from never getting over the “You can’t tell me what to do, DAD” phase.

  32. I think it was Bobcat Goldthwait who said that being bisexual doubled your chances of finding someone to disappoint.

  33. It is a fair description of the Sexual Revolution, though not of the kind of feminism that held sway a century ago.

  34. Even among the men who imagine they want to (and have the capability of) behaving like Alex purportedly does, most are going to find that that is not how it is working out for them, that they really don’t have the capacity, even given the opportunity.

    Here is an ugly, or at least unwelcome, little secret about sex — in this regard, men are actually the weaker sex. What I mean is this — even if a man enters a sexual relationship intentionally intending to “pump and dump” the woman, unless he is really strong in his caddery, he is going to begin to desire to cherish her, and in short order he will almost-cherish (*) her.

    (*) I say “almost-cherish” because there will still be a bit of holding back, of not fully giving himself to her, because he knows he was using her, and realistically, he knows that she was using him.

  37. Even being the fifth guy is three or four too many. With each n+1, her ability to form an attachment goes down. One theory for this observation is oxytocin resistance, but it could be simple math.

    Think about it. Take two guys at random, and the average expectation is that the second one would fare worse than the first in about half of all characteristics. He could be more successful, but shorter; in better shape, but with smaller equipment; more socially dominant, but crueler about her perceived shortcomings; etc.

    Add a third random guy, and each would only be the best in about a third of their characteristics. The fifth guy would only be the best in 20% of things, and the tenth only the best in 10% of things.

    The math is brutal and inescapable: the higher a woman’s n count, the less favorably you will compare to one or another of her prior lovers.

  38. Yeah. I saw that.

    There is something with our society’s fascination with youth and the inability of young people to actually become adults.

  39. Exactly. Pre-marital sex is damaging to one’s future marraige — even if the *only* person with whom one has engaged in pre-marital is the person one eventually marries. And this is true for both sexes.

  40. Gasp! How dare you even think of denying your children a normal and healthy biological function, you… you… abuser!

    /sarc

  42. Sad, we’ve turned sex into sport, and the end result of all this degradation, and a completely demoralized population. Anyone who thinks pornography has nothing to do with this is absolutely wrong, too.

  43. Couldn’t agree more with that article. Just imagine being 40
    years old, and having to listen to
    23 year old know it all Ella Dawson lecture you on sexism to just have some half assed sex? I would have to become a functional alcoholic to deal with that on a regular basis.

  45. Blaming pornography for sexual maladies is like the left blaming guns for crime.

    It all comes down to personal responsibility. Statism is no substitute for it, and in fact makes it worse as forbidden things tend to become more attractive. Consider the “success” of the war on drugs.

  46. The gals will continue lining up to be the next one night stand until cads stop being so sexy or fathers start keeping their daughters under lock and key.

  48. Um, no, it’s not the same thing, and I’m not suggesting we ban porn like we did drugs. There is absolutely no doubt though that the glut of hardcore pornography available to people online, including teenagers who are getting their sex education from the guys on the Bang Bus, is fueling this. To hear lots of young women tell it, their boyfriends, and guys they hook up with are requesting “facials”, “anal”, and are verbally abusive in bed more and more. To call that just coincidence when that is now the norm in pornography is ridiculous. I’m not making this a first amendment issue, either, because that would be useless.

  49. the sexual revolution is over, and the men won.

    And THAT is why third-wave feminism is trying to kill the sexual revolution.

  50. 2/2-Porn reduces sex to bodies, and not much else, and frames the activity as a sport where the player with the most easy, degrading conquests wins.

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