Dating Apps: Giving Men What They Want But Not What They Need

Time for your vibe to grow on a girl used to be freely accessible to everyone

Dating apps were built on the bones of Grindr. I have been known to joke that everything wrong with dating apps is divine retribution for culturally appropriating them from the gays.

Gay men, specifically, that’s important - the overwhelming majority of people making apps are still men, and most of those are still straight men, and while I don’t exactly have insider knowledge on this, it couldn’t be clearer to me that some open-ish minded straight tech boy heard from one of his gay male friends about being able to summon sex partners to his bed from the immediate vicinity after filtering on a bunch of lewd photos and thought: “There isn’t a straight man alive who wouldn’t consider giving up his left hand to have this experience with women. I could make a billion dollars making straight Grindr.”

And thus Tinder was born. Blah blah blah lust and greed sullying the purity of romantic and sexual love; a direction I could go, but instead we’re going to talk about the ways that playing to male preferences in the short term can easily ruin their entire lives, even when it was men’s idea.

Dating apps aggressively reflect male preferences, sexuality neutral. They’re long on photos, short on text. They filter primarily on location, which has some usefulness, but is most useful if the question is “who’s geographically close enough to me that walking to my place for sex is a realistic option” .

Men love flipping through photos of people they’re attracted to - that alone drove much of the traffic to Facebook’s precursor, Hot or Not. This app is built to give men a sexual scrolling experience as soothingly magnetic as any social media site while providing enough mystery to feel less degenerate than porn (the better for large doses and intermittent rewards).

For women, it’s grim. Yes, they get matches much more often than men do (largely because these extremely male-centric UI decisions lure vastly more male users than women; what economist could have predicted this problem with a heterosexual dating app). They don’t enjoy using these apps, not nearly to the degree or as often as men do. For most women, sifting through men feels dehumanizing, and sorting on pictures feels painfully limited (the male equivalent might be having to swipe based on photos of a woman’s favorite outfit, laid out on her bed. Vaguely boring and frustrating to have to make important decisions with so little information about the things you care about).

This isn’t just because of blackpill stuff about how men aren’t hot to women - that topic has been covered to death, yes women find men physically hot but no it doesn’t always work in such a way that static photos capture, so men are impossibly screwed by efforts to appeal to women with photos alone. There’s also the fact that men suck at taking pictures, because the market for photos of people is overwhelmingly men as buyers and women as suppliers, with the demand being for sexually attractive photos of women. Looking at photos of men is like driving a Nissan truck: it couldn’t be clearer that it is not your specialty and significantly worse than other products that your entire factory line was designed for.

You might think that dating apps are bad for men because they lead to men experiencing significant rejection - even the way my post is framed up until this point sort of implies as much. That framework, like much about dating apps, gets the whole picture subtly, insidiously wrong in a way that leaves people who take them at face value much worse off. You know who takes things at face value most often? You’re not going to believe this,

No, the greatest deprivation created by dating apps is specifically denying women and men the opportunity for women to keep men around in a general capacity. (If this idea makes you freak out about the friend zone, I’m almost impressed with you because young people seem to do so little socializing that no one complains about the friend zone anymore. Pat yourself on the back for having friends if you’ve managed to develop a resentment complex around the friend zone).

Most women develop attraction to men via proximity and time. Force a woman to choose if she wants the option to sleep with a man the second she meets him, and she will default to no in almost every single case. For many men, this means that any men who enjoy the attention of women who are open to sleeping with them at first glance are the only men women authentically want. Respectfully, you’re thinking like a guy, and if you believe that men and women are extremely different, I’m going to need you to trust that women develop affection for men differently than men do for women, such that you’ll ruin your life trying to figure out why women don’t desire you in the exact same way that you desire them.

Dating apps deprive men of the option to live in a neutral zone. Dating via friends is clutch, and is in fact how I met my wife (EURY STOP WRITING ABOUT HETEROSEXUAL DATING YOU’RE LITERALLY A WOMAN WITH A WIFE yes and as such I can see that the menfolk need desperate help which I am all too happy to attempt to offer to the few who can brave the slings and arrows of my dreadful prose).

One of the worst things you can do if you date women is to push them into a choice of yes or no as early as possible. You are simply too much of a risk on too many axes to get something other than a no unless you look like Chris Hemsworth, and even that wouldn’t get you yeses from 100% of the women you might ask out (hot men can still be shitty in about a thousand ways, and women often aren’t willing to take risks even for hotness. Again. They are not men). You might think that your goal should be to look like Chris Hemsworth, or alternatively to despair that you don’t look like Chris Hemsworth and go sulkily into that good night, but that’s you thinking like a guy and assuming that how women feel has to match how you feel. Frankly, that’s what got you into this mess: by trusting tech men who told you that you could game heterosexual dating by giving you an interface that pinged all your dopamine sensors while curiously robbing you of a lot of opportunities to find and develop a fulfilling relationship.

Men want immediate gratification, particularly in sex, and they’re buried in a world that is all too eager to deliver facsimiles of it to them. It feels quaint to complain about pornography - there’s a more nuanced conversation to have there, if I could be arsed - but pornography in its current form is undeniably a replacement of the best version of the real thing (sex with a real live woman that you think is hot who thinks you are hot) with something that is good enough but worse (watching someone else have sex with a woman who probably looks like she’s having more fun than any woman you’ve ever banged).

Dating apps aren’t an exception, and they are specifically worse in that the ways that they prevent your happiness are a lot less legible than porn, and hang all of the disappointment you experience on you, rather than on the structure of the system you’re using. Dating apps bathe men in immediate gratification - pretty faces, maybe some matches and messages, the promise of sex accessible from your phone. When this app experience fails to consistently deliver sex, or even matches, dates, or a good relationship, the app structure implies that if you were only hotter - specifically hotter, because you know these women are filtering on your face - you would be having as much success as [insert semi-imaginary Chris Hemsworth-looking pussy slayer who orders women from Tinder like Uber Eats].

The major product provided by a dating app is the illusion of participating in dating at all - some time swiping through faces, and congratulations, you are “dating”, you Tried, you do not need to do anything scarier or riskier or less fun than this.

It’s not good for men to get exactly what they want when it comes to the basics of dating, sex, and arousal, because immediate gratification is not the muscle that built Rome or conquered the ancient world. What men need sometimes, perhaps even often, comes at the expense of what they might immediately want. Dating apps and porn are banal sins, if they are sins at all, but they deprive men themselves of a more fulfilling life.

It’s worth trying to sacrifice some of what you want in order to get more of what you need. Delete the apps and say hi to girls in public sometimes. Hang out with women - invite them to events, group hangs, introduce friends to friends if you are blessed with multiples. Cultivate opportunities for women to acclimate to your presence in a low stakes environment, rather than trying to leap from strangers to fuckbuddies in the course of one date and two online conversations.