“You’re gunna [sic] be like ‘ugh typical guy’ but I gotta [sic] say it! You have a breath taking [sic] rack”
At least he used the proper form of “your.”
While this may seem like a shockingly forward message, this is nothing out of the ordinary. I get loads of similar messages per week—enough to catalogue them onto a blog. And no, I am not a prostitute, stripper, call girl, or any way involved in the sex industry. I’m a 23 year old trying—and failing—to find someone datable. On Tinder. Or Hinge. Or Coffee Meets Bagel. Or CatholicMatch. Or at a normal place like a bar.
I was first introduced to Tinder my senior year of college. For the unaware, Tinder is an app that purports itself as “it’s how people meet.” The app shows users profiles of other users within a certain mile radius and instructs them to “swipe right” on profiles of users they find attractive, and to “swipe left” for those they are not attracted to. (Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel share the same basic design and functionality as Tinder.) If two users both “swipe right” each other, this is a “match,” and the app will let both parties know about the other’s mutual attraction and allow them to chat with each other via the app. A person’s profile consists of a few pictures and lines of information, and is fully viewable to all potential suitors (or hookups, spouses, etc. etc) until a swipe direction is decided.
Nobody really knows what these apps are for. Sex? Dating? Finding a spouse? There are elements of all three, and yes, people have gotten married to their Tinder matches. For me personally, Tinder has been an eye-opening look into what happens when boys can say whatever they want to a woman while hiding behind the screens of their phones. I seriously doubt any normal human would waltz up to a girl at a bar and proposition her for sex without so much as a hello, yet I’m hardly the only one who experiences this on an uncomfortably regular basis on dating apps and sites.
I know you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “hey, just stop using this app, you silly girl.” Well, there is that option. But what else is a person supposed to do to potentially meet someone? The dating culture in this country is all but dead and gone. Men don’t need a girlfriend when they’ve got someone literally a swipe of a finger away who is willing to service their desires without any long-term commitment. Alternatively, pornography can fill the role a real, in-the-flesh woman would normally occupy, to the point where Japan is facing a demographic winter due to the fact that nobody is getting married and having children. This is a huge problem!
In a generation that is more interconnected than any before, it is strange that millennials (globally) are unable to actually speak to each other in a civilized manner. Men have become cowards and retreated to their rooms, and women are stuck, confused and alone, valued only for their bodies. Tinder and other modern dating apps haven’t caused this, but it’s certainly a symptom of how sick society has become.
Notebook