Tinder Is A Cesspool
If we take Tinder as a microcosm of the real world, it’s very difficult to avoid despair. This is true regardless of gender, I think.
Take the example given in the screenshot I’ve included with the text of this post. I’d like to be clear that I don’t consider this interaction to be rude or violating, just catastrophically out of touch with reality. This guy has a specific goal in mind, and has pursued it, which is FINE. Genuinely, it’s fine. He didn’t threaten me or call me names or generally behave like an asshole. But he clearly has a very poor understanding of statistical probability (or perhaps just a willingness to waste everyone’s time in the clumsiest possible way).
I’m fully aware that I am a dating-site trap, in the sense that I have very few hangups about discussing sex in the abstract and I’m even (gasp!) prepared to have Real Sex in Real Life, but not at all willing to suffer fools or interested in treating either myself or my partner like a sex toy with a heartbeat. If all I wanted was a dick I could buy one for less than $30 on Amazon and save myself the trouble of interacting with the morons they so frequently come attached to.
The sad thing is? If this guy had treated HIMSELF in a way that was less reductive and sad, he had a genuine shot at having actual sex with me. Granted in retrospect it’s obvious he would most likely have failed subsequent tests, given his reaction to this first one, but in theory there was at least a 50/50 chance. He was well within my range of “I find this person attractive”, and we had at least a few things in common, even based solely on Tinder’s extremely limited capacity to communicate common interests. Also, unbeknownst to him, at the time of messaging I was significantly more receptive to casual sex than I usually am thanks to my uncomfortably high sex drive having gone untended-to for an unpleasantly long period of time. The odds were as good as they ever get! All he had to do was treat me like a whole human being rather than a Fleshlight with inconvenient opinions.
Why on earth is the bar this low?
It’s easy to just write it off as “men are stupid” but that’s a) not really fair and b) not especially helpful. I have also had women do this kind of thing (though admittedly a much lower proportion). I have spoken with plenty of men who don’t. I have had actual sex with men who don’t. The thing that always strikes me is not feminist despair that all men want from women is something to ejaculate into. It’s humanist despair that men don’t want MORE than that for themselves.
I talked briefly once with a guy who seemed to be looking primarily for casual sex (which, again, is FINE), and whose idea of how to go about it seemed to sum up everything that makes me sad about this pattern. He asked if he could send me a photo of himself naked, I suppose imagining that this was the only possible basis for judgement. I, however, told him truthfully that while I certainly found his physical body attractive, that was far from the only criterion with which I made my sexual decisions. That I wanted to know more about him as a person.
He seemed taken aback by that response, as if it had literally never occurred to him as a possibility. “Usually girls just look at my pic and say yes or no,” he informed me, as if that was totally normal and not at all a dehumanizing nightmare scenario.
I found myself having to explain to this child (and yes, despite having clearly been hit by puberty like a falling cartoon piano, he deserves to be called a child) that a nice body does not equate to any kind of technical skill; that pretty people are often worse at sex precisely because they have no trouble getting it; that I considered it enormously unethical to treat a sexual partner like a mobile humanoid plaything, unless that exact treatment is what gets them off (and even then, the concept bores me); and that sexual activity is a conversation not possible to have with a piece of marble, no matter how beautifully carved.
“I’ll have to think about that,” he said, and vanished, hopefully to reconsider the trajectory of his life.
The guy in the accompanying screenshot also vanished after that joke, which is a shame, because I think he took it as a rejection rather than an invitation to apply. He probably would have failed anyway, especially considering that his first message to me consisted of the single word “nice” and, when asked to provide a noun to go with that lone adjective, implied he did not know what a noun was. But I can imagine a world in which that was not a fatal error, and rather a temporary lapse.
To people everywhere who perpetuate this system: I am sorry we live in a world where bad sex at any cost is less terrifying than no sex at all. It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse - I have spent most of my life starving for that particular base-of-Maslow’s-pyramid need. I don’t know what it is about me that makes me choose starvation over bland or spoiled food. I just wish there were a place I could go where that choice was the norm rather than the exception.
Anyone who comments “try OkCupid!” can go fuck themselves. You know who you are.