The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing money and deals on Wall Street all day, and now they’re out looking for hookups. Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening. Or not. “Ew, this guy has Dad bod,” a young woman says of a potential match, swiping left. Her friends smirk, not looking up.
Alienation so deep, they’re even alienated from their own hedonistic activities.
“Tinder sucks,” they say. But they don’t stop swiping.
Addiction.
“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.
Mutual masturbation.
“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.
Why would anyone pay top price for meat that is cheap and readily available?
Short-term mating strategies” seem to work for plenty of women too; some don’t want to be in committed relationships, either, particularly those in their 20s who are focusing on their education and launching careers.
The boilerplate feminist defence in an article where women do little but lament the hook-up culture.
“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.”
Women have the power to decide what enters their vagina. If they wanted to be relationship material they’d be relationship material, and find relationships.
“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 give a wary laugh.
Can it be called self-deception, when you know you’re deceiving yourself?
They tell me how, at their school, an adjunct instructor in philosophy, Kerry Cronin, teaches a freshman class in which an optional assignment is going out on an actual date. “And meet them sober and not when you’re both, like, blackout drunk,” says Jane. “Like, get to know someone before you start something with them. And I know that’s scary.”
Autistic alienation.
“And it reaches a point,” says Jane, “where, if you receive a text message” from a guy, “you forward the message to, like, seven different people: ‘What do I say back? Oh my God, he just texted me!’ It becomes a surprise. ‘He texted me!’ Which is really sad.”
“It is sad,” Amanda says. “That one A.M. text becomes ‘Oh my God, he texted me!’ No, he texted you at one A.M.—it’s meaningless.”
They laugh ruefully.
How fulfilling. How starved for affection can they be?
“It’s not, she says, that women don’t want to have sex. “Who doesn’t want to have sex? But it feels bad when they’re like, ‘See ya.’ ”
“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.
“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.
Why would a man care about the personality of his sex toy?
If you object to calling a girl a sex toy, why don’t you object to the girl treating herself like one?
“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.
That’s how society got in this mess in the first place.
“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.
See
here.
“I hooked up with three girls, thanks to the Internet, off of Tinder, in the course of four nights, and I spent a total of $80 on all three girls,” Nick relays proudly. He goes on to describe each date, one of which he says began with the young woman asking him on Tinder to “ ‘come over and smoke [weed] and watch a movie.’ I know what that means,” he says, grinning.
$80. Hookers make more and probably receive more affection.
They all say they don’t want to be in relationships. “I don’t want one,” says Nick. “I don’t want to have to deal with all that—stuff.”
“You can’t be selfish in a relationship,” Brian says. “It feels good just to do what I want.”
I ask them if it ever feels like they lack a deeper connection with someone.
There’s a small silence. After a moment, John says, “I think at some points it does.”
“But that’s assuming that that’s something that I want, which I don’t,” Nick says, a trifle annoyed. “Does that mean that my life is lacking something? I’m perfectly happy. I have a good time. I go to work—I’m busy. And when I’m not, I go out with my friends.”
Alienation.
He’s a womanizer, an especially callous one, as well as kind of a loser. The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings; it’s only in about the last year that it has become so frequently used by women and girls to refer to their hookups.
“What percentage of boys now do you think are fuckboys?,” I asked some young women from New Albany, Indiana.
“One hundred percent,” said Meredith, 20, a sophomore at Bellarmine University in Louisville.
“No, like 90 percent,” said Ashley (the same as mentioned earlier). “I’m hoping to find the 10 percent somewhere. But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy.”
How blind can they be?
‘He drove me home in the morning.’ That’s a big deal,” said Rebecca, 21, a senior at the University of Delaware.
Heh.
Bring all of this up to young men, however, and they scoff. Women are just as responsible for “the shit show that dating has become,” according to one. “Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault,” says Alex, 25, a New Yorker who works in the film industry. “They act like all they want is to have sex with you and then they yell at you for not wanting to have a relationship. How are you gonna feel romantic about a girl like that? Oh, and by the way? I met you on Tinder.”
Someone brings the truth.
Rebecca, the blonde with the canny eyes, also mentioned above, hooked up with someone, too. “It was O.K.” She shrugs. “Right after it was done, it was kind of like, mmmp … mmmp.” She gives a little grunt of disappointment.
Sounds fun.
“I’m on it nonstop, like nonstop, like 20 hours a day,” says Courtney, the one who looks like a 70s movie star.
“It’s, like, fun to get the messages,” Danielle says. “If someone ‘likes’ you, they think you’re attractive.”
“It’s a confidence booster,” says Jessica, 21, the one who looks like a Swedish tennis player.
Self-esteem addiction.
“A lot of guys are lacking in that department,” says Courtney with a sigh. “What’s a real orgasm like? I wouldn’t know.”
They all laugh knowingly.
“I know how to give one to myself,” says Courtney.
“Yeah, but men don’t know what to do,” says Jessica, texting.
“Without [a vibrator] I can’t have one,” Courtney says. “It’s never happened” with a guy. “It’s a huge problem.”
“It is a problem,” Jessica concurs.
Sound like they’re enjoying it, no?
“I think men have a skewed view of the reality of sex through porn,” Jessica says, looking up from her phone. “Because sometimes I think porn sex is not always great—like pounding someone.” She makes a pounding motion with her hand, looking indignant.
“Yeah, it looks like it hurts,” Danielle says.
“Like porn sex,” says Jessica, “those women—that’s not, like, enjoyable, like having their hair pulled or being choked or slammed. I mean, whatever you’re into, but men just think”—bro voice—“ ‘I’m gonna fuck her,’ and sometimes that’s not great.”
“Yeah,” Danielle agrees. “Like last night I was having sex with this guy, and I’m a very submissive person—like, not aggressive at all—and this boy that came over last night, he was hurting me.”
They were quiet a moment.
And yet they all go along with it enthusiastically.
This article by itself is
justification for
patriarchy. These young women are addicted to attention. They are not enjoying themselves, they are neither respected nor loved, they are starved for affection, and they are willingly
making themselves sex toys for men who don’t care in the least about them and enjoy hurting them. It is
destroying their emotional core, but they can’t quit their addiction.
They need a stern father to drag them back home and force them to respect themselves.
The men are aimless and alienated. They need responsibility. Instead, they get untold free poon. Why do they need to care, when they can drown themselves in hedonism? They need the women’s fathers to to be
cut off from empty masturbation with their breathing sex toys and be
forced to contribute and care before hedonism can take them, so they can
grow into men.
This is not healthy.
