Girls Still Wait for Boys to Love Them

Warning: this post is sexually graphic and vulgar. Please don’t read it if that upsets you. It’s about online dating.  

In the Sept. 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, Nancy Jo Sales writes that twenty-somethings are hooking up via mobile apps like Tinder, OkCupid, Happn, etc.

One study reported there were nearly 100 million people using their phones “as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida.”

After posting their profiles, here are some of the modern-day greetings used by young men to attract women. I mean vaginas.

• “I want to have you on all fours.”
• “Send me some nudes.”
• “Wanna fuck?”
• “Come over and sit on my face.”
• “I’m looking for something quick within the next 10-20 minutes. Are you available?”
• “I’m looking for a cute girl like you that has a kinky side. Do you think you would like to get choked…” (He goes on.)

Clearly, the kids aren’t meeting at the library anymore.

According to the article by Nancy Jo Sales, normal dating is dead. These days, kids go online, find each other, screw, and start over. This is great for the guys. For the girls, God, they’re so stupid I want to put a gun to my head. Apparently they think this is the game they have to play, hoping one of the guys will notice their inner beauty and become their boyfriend and maybe even something more long-term.

Nothing changes. The song above depicts the same mindless capitulation, from fifty years ago. The only thing that’s different is the men’s casual disdain, if not outright misogyny. Here’s a quote from one of the johns. (Is it okay if I call you that? John?)

I think to an extent it is, like, sinister,” he says, “because I know that the average girl will think that there’s a chance that she can (convince him to enter into a serious relationship with her). If I were like, Hey, I just wanna bone, very few people would want to meet up with you…”

Another says,

When it’s so easy, when it’s so available to you, and you can meet somebody and fuck them in 20 minutes, it’s very hard to contain yourself…Now is that the kind of woman I potentially want to marry? Probably not.”

Yes, sure, women like sex as much as men do, and some women want it without strings attached. But according to Elizabeth Armstrong, professor of sociology who specializes in sexuality and gender at the University of Michigan, girls are still waiting by the phone:

For young women the problem…is still gender inequality. Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious (or not)…There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have (not made strides) in the private arena.”

Here are some quotes from the young women interviewed for the article.

• “Who doesn’t want to have sex? But it feels bad when they’re like, ‘See ya.'”
• “It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less.”
• “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.”
• “Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing. 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.” (Please sign up for a women’s studies class, stat.)

One reason mobile dating proliferates is because the kids are so busy thumbing their smartphones that they don’t learn how to converse in person, sober. At one college, there’s a class in which an optional assignment is going out on an actual date. Per a girl quoted in the article, “(You have to) meet them sober and not when you’re both, like, blackout drunk. Like, get to know someone before you start something with them. And I know that’s scary.” Per the article,

…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.'”

According to Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction,

There have been two major transitions in heterosexual mating in the last four million years. The first was around 10,000-15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled. And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.”

Is this really the way society is going, or am I overreacting? Would love to hear from young and old alike who use these dating services; what’s your view? Is it as mercenary as this article portrays? Please share this post so we can hear from the greatest range of voices. Thanks.