Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening. Or not. Her friends smirk, not looking up. At a booth in the back, three handsome twentysomething guys in button-downs are having beers.
They are Dan, Alex, and Marty, budding investment bankers at the same financial firm, which recruited Alex and Marty straight from an Ivy League campus. Names and some identifying details have been changed for this story. 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. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs.
And yet a lack of an intimate knowledge of his potential sex partners never presents him with an obstacle to physical intimacy, Alex says. 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. If I were like, Hey, I just wanna bone, very few people would want to meet up with you ….
As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex. Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship. People used to meet their partners through proximity, through family and friends, but now Internet meeting is surpassing every other form.
Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by it was overtaking online dating. The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one. Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. OkCupid soon adopted the function. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.
