According to a concerning trend piece on the current ‘dating apocalypse’ of twentysomethings, hookup culture has hit a critical mass of excess and indulgence, and the kids are not alright—they are, in fact, all fucked out with nobody to love. RIP going steady.


The piece comes courtesy of Vanity Fair via journo Nancy Jo Sales, whose work you likely know from her piece-turned-Sofia-Coppola movie, The Bling Ring. Only this foray focuses on twentysomethings in Manhattan’s financial district, sorority girls, and visiting interns who find themselves brushing up against the erection of the New York dating scene only to find a lot of options but semi-hard dicks, no good boyfriend material, and the emotional hangover that can only come from having too much casual sex. As usual, women suffer more. What is to be done?!

Here is a primer on the new normal as presented by Sales’ subjects:

There’s Always Something Better

Some Ivy League Wall Street guy named Alex you’d probably fuck reveals that sex options these days for guys like him is just like having a reservation at some restaurant only to find out there’s an opening at Per Se. Do you know what Per Se is? It’s a fancy expensive restaurant where the average table check is $850. He intimates:

“Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”


These Dudes Are Getting So Much Tail

100 girls a year! Somebody get this guy a Sir Fucks-a-Lot Hat.



The Girls Are Just Fuckholes

Girls he meets on Tinder are called “Tinderellas”—though there appears to be no rags to riches story for them, only his dick, which may or may not be hard enough (more on that later). And Alex and his fuck chums Dan and Marty who are also interviewed reel off the names of various conquests as if mimicking that one irritatingly catchy “Mambo No. 5” song—Brittany, Morgan, Amber. Oh, and that Russian chick. Or was she Ukrainian? Haaaah. 2busyfucking2remember.

Dudes Be Scammin’

But Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”


But Some Guys Are “Honorable” OK?

“Dude, that’s not cool,” Alex chides in his warm way. “I always make a point of disclosing I’m not looking for anything serious. I just wanna hang out, be friends, see what happens … If I were ever in a court of law I could point to the transcript.”


Here is the Zeitgeisty Part

Sex is so easy now, Sales notes, because of the Internet. Sex is like comparison shopping online. It’s super validating when someone thinks you’re hot on Tinder. It’s addictive. Nowadays you could find someone on your phone right now to fuck by midnight, says one guy. That’s just how it is, so they roll with it.


It’s “Good” for Women

Yes it is. The Freedom! The Casualness!

No it Isn’t Good for Women, You Moron

No it isn’t. It “devalues” women and “treats them like an option, not a priority,” says someone.


There’s Still a Double Standard, Dummies

#notallwomen are looking for boyfriends, though. Sales rightly argues:

Alex the Wall Streeter is overly optimistic when he assumes that every woman he sleeps with would “turn the tables” and date him seriously if she could. And yet, his assumption may be a sign of the more “sinister” thing he references, the big fish swimming underneath the ice: “For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “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.”


Well, What do the Women Say?

Men have “pussy affluenza,” says smartest person in the entire piece, Amy Watanabe, a 28-year-old owner of a Sake Bar Satsko. She tells Sales that some dudes bring multiple Tinder dates in a night, are assholes.


But Are People Really Fucking This Much?

Maybe? Remember that study about how Millennials aren’t actually getting laid that much, and certainly not more than Gen-Xers? Well, that could be “open to interpretation”—the study’s authors told Sales that the results were, in part, based on “projections.”


Project This

Sales also interviews a bevy of young women trying their hand at dating in New York. They dish on the dumb stuff guys text them to hookup—”Come sit on my face” or “I want you on all fours.” They sound wary and blasé about their sex lives, as if they see how terrible it is, but have to participate in it anyway, like a Black Friday sale. You know you’re getting stampeded, but you wanted that discount skirt! Sadly, none of them talk about the thrill of the sex, or at least, it doesn’t make the final cut for the story. It’s complicated, they say, because there’s an art to hooking up. One woman tells Sales:

“It’s such a game, and you have to always be doing everything right, and if not, you risk losing whoever you’re hooking up with,” says Fallon, the soft-spoken one. By “doing everything right” she means “not texting back too soon; never double texting; liking the right amount of his stuff,” on social media.


They parse the texts they receive from men based on the time of night and their content to determine what the guy is really looking for:

“If he texts you before midnight he actually likes you as a person. If it’s after midnight, it’s just for your body,” says Amanda. 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. “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. “It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.

No Orgasms, Soft Dicks

Turns out it’s because the sex they are having is actually not that great. A group of sorority women at the University of Delaware dish to Sales on the real experience of all this hooking up. None of them are actually getting off with these guys, and moreover, many of the dudes, bewilderingly, can’t get it up in spite of being twentysomething men ostensibly at peak dick power. Sales explains this “curious medical phenomenon” as something that’s been blamed on processed food or possibly lack of real intimacy that pervades hookup culture.


So Men Care About Intimacy Too, Right?!

Sort of. Some of them say they might like it. Eventually. Maybe. But that their lives are perfectly fine without it. Then again, they are the ones having tons of orgasms, so.


In Conclusion

Twentysomethings have always been horny, bad at dating. This is nothing new. Sure, swiping your way to endless poon is a new development, and it’s taking shape in different ways now via rapidly changing technologies. But dating during your twenties in, say, the 90s was not a cakewalk of deep connection and intimacy, either. There were hookups, confusion, catching feelings, broken hearts, and lots of vague understandings of what relationships were, or weren’t. Then everyone grew up and settled down a little. End scene. Some of them were more or less inclined to sleep around, but lots of people do that, eventually find it to be lacking, and look for something more meaningful. No one needs a computer to be promiscuous.


One problem with this piece, aside from it’s alarmist tone, is its sample size. What about twentysomethings who live outside the urban fuck frenzy or aren’t in notoriously party-hard sororities? Another issue is that it continues to frame every sexual interaction as existing, as a friend puts it, in the shadow of “the one”—as if all any of us is doing from moment one is trying to get locked down with one person and all that experimentation on the path there is kind of sad and pathetic.



Most of us are looking for a longterm mate, eventually, but what happens before that isn’t necessarily any more fraught than it ever was, and for all its pitfalls, we tend to look back on such times fondly, and as good learning experiences. Tinder and other apps might give all of us the illusion of access to global-sized possibilities for lust or love or heartache—the current generation has certainly been given an embarrassment of riches on the potential casual sex front. But the reality is like buying 16-year-old a Porsche—most of them won’t know what to do with that kind of horsepower, anyway.


At the end of the piece, Sales speaks with a musician in his late 20s who sounds slightly worse for the hookup wear. He laments a culture where he used to have make an effort to win someone over and now interacts with “girls who will send you pictures of their pussies without even knowing your last name.”

It’s “fucking weird,” he tells her.

Perhaps, but there’s also something fascinating about generational shifts that allow people to separate out sex and pleasure from relationships so much easier than before. Getting straight to fucking—if that’s what you want—has its own anxieties, sure, but there’s something also remarkable about being more free to explore such vague spaces when you’re young, which is arguably exactly what you should be doing before pairing off anyway.


The subjects of this piece certainly don’t represent everyone. But like everyone, they will get older, slow down a little, experience some values shifts, and their brains will actually mature more. For most of us, libidos (nor alcohol tolerance) can’t rage as hard as they do in your twenties forever.

Taking the pressure off relationships for young people is one of the better things we can do for them. If anything, it’s an advantage—nothing helps you figure out more when you do want to be with someone like having been with a lot of other people you don’t want to really be with first. Why turn that into a crisis or apocalypse? After all, didn’t we used to call it playing the field—having fun?