Here's Tinder's (hilarious meltdown of a) response before I give my own full thoughts on it: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/9135191/tinder-twitter-vanity-fair


The really interesting thing for me about these sort of articles is, as I said in brief below the summary, is that there's this entire universe that exists parallel to the one I inhabit and it exists basically as dark matter to my light/regular matter. Millions of people are wallowing in this "dating apocalypse" and yet I've lived through the exact same time period (with a large group of friends spread across the globe) and never had any real interaction with any of the issues described in the article.

I feel like the term "psychosexual obesity" that was used in the article is incredibly apt to describe the problem with all of these people. When you're trying to "rack up Tinderellas" what are you even doing? Saying you've slept with 100 women you don't know and who don't know you is far more pathological than it is impressive. It doesn't even mean anything outside of telling people that you've done it and it's doubly meaningless if they aren't impressed by it.

And on the other end of it the women all sound so pathetically vacuous about everything. "90 percent of guys are fuckboys and I want the 10 percent but also sometimes I just wanna fuck but like tinder makes me feel bad but I use it 20 hours a day" is something an idiotic child would think and say. But then I look at the ages of all the women and they are children. Not young enough that their lack of self-respect and common sense is excusable but still, too young to be expected to have a lot of life experience.

I guess I don't really have a summary for these thoughts. Basically I feel like everyone having these issues is either a scumbag or an idiot and that this isn't actually a vicious cycle at all since it's such an easy problem to get out of. But lumping all my cynical judgment into a single sentence feels...judgmental and cynical.