Vanity Fair on Tinder

Boys, we grew up in the wrong time:

Tinder and Hookup-Culture Promotion | Vanity Fair

And yet a lack of an intimate knowledge of his potential sex partners never presents him with an obstacle to physical intimacy, Alex says. Alex, his friends agree, is a Tinder King, a young man of such deft “text game”—“That’s the ability to actually convince someone to do something over text,” Marty explains—that he is able to entice young women into his bed on the basis of a few text exchanges, while letting them know up front he is not interested in having a relationship.

“How does he do it?,” Marty asks, blinking. “This guy’s got a talent.”

But 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.”

Tinder is not pleased:

Tinder goes on an epic Twitter rant over Vanity Fair story - Yahoo News

 

When has it ever been the wrong time to lie about your sexual exploits?

 

Is Tinder more or less likely to embolden rapists?

 

Nah, I'd say I grew up in the right time, during which I learned to communicate like a human being and appreciate women as more than just fuck toys. I am extremely grateful these kinds of apps weren't available to me in high school/college/immediately after graduation. I know I would have used them, but I think I'm better off having not.

 

I actually agree.

The women quoted in the story don't cover themselves in glory, either.

I graduated in college in 1999. I started dating my wife in 2001. I never used a dating site. (I "hooked up" a couple times via old-fashioned chat rooms, though.) I have to imagine that would be a complete anomaly today.

 

So you grew up in the wrong time and the right time?

 

Dated a woman from New York last year for a couple of months. She kept going on and on about how nice it was to meet someone "normal." We only ended things because she got a job in Berlin. I kept asking how a city with so many people could be so shitty for dating. After getting two graphs into that story, it all makes sense now.

 

Paging Freq, repeating paging Freq to the white courtesy phone.

 

Yeah that would definitely be an anomaly. I've used a dating site, match.com, in the past. But when I used it, it didn't provide the immediacy of apps like Tinder. I actually had to exchange a number of thought-out emails with a girl before we would agree to a drink. And that drink never led to sex, usually just to an awkward goodnight. Perhaps I just had no game.

Every meaningful relationship I've ever been in came about organically, either through work or friends or just random interactions.

 

I have a couple of recently divorced friends. (In the last three or four years.) It seems like they get real dates from the Internet, and one-night stands organically. I don't know that that's how things go generally now, but if so, it's a pretty big flip-flop from the early days of the Internet.

 

It is entirely possible I suck at dating and was doing the whole thing backwards. Then again, I've never been the kind of guy looking for one-night stands. I know if things go wrong with my current girlfriend (who I fell ass backwards into dating because she is way too good for me), I'd probably give match.com another try, but I don't think I'd turn to Tinder.

 

Interesting read ... and as a father of two teenagers, kind of disturbing.

The article's list of things that changed human sexual relations missed a pretty big one, though: the pill. In fact, there was no mention of birth control or STDs at all amid the graphic Tinder pick-up lines.

I also wonder if this endless parade of hook-ups and faking is mostly an urban thing, where there's an endless supply of 20-somethings.