But so far, no one has come close to translating the cultural relevance of Grindr—the wildly successful location-based hook-up app for gay men—to the hetero population. Even Grindr itself, which launched its own straight app called Blendr in 2011, has failed to recreate the magic for straits.
The conventional wisdom is that women are to blame. Straight ladies just don’t have the appetite for one-night stands, we’re told. Or they fear the physical risks of heading to bed with a stranger they’ve met only online. Or they have too many willing sex partners in the real world to bother with fielding virtual ones. For whatever reason, women just aren’t signing up. When I logged onto Blendr in the middle of Los Angeles this morning, I found about one female user for every 20 men.
And yet, in college dormitories and crowded bars across the country, men and women are managing to arrange casual sexual encounters with one another, no dinner reservations necessary. So here’s another possibility for why you won’t find many women on hook-up apps: You don’t find many women behind them, either. Blendr is the brainchild of Grindr’s Joel Simkhai. Bang With Friends is the product of three anonymous California dudes. Even Brenda, the lesbian hook-up app, was developed by a man (he’s also responsible for the male-oriented Grindr clone Bender).
Nevermind that if hook-ups in crowded bars mostly happen when women allow them to then we’re not comparing a network in which men’s demand for sex is being tested. Put men in control of whether or not sex happens and you’ll see many, many times more hook-ups.
Hess hypothesizes not that there are differences in sex drive or in the psychology driving lust, but that representation in the STEM fields must be the culprit:
The male dominance of hook-up apps is an extension of the gender split in the programming world at large, where women make up just 18 percent of computer science grads and 19 percent of career programmers. At many prominent firms, their representation dwindles to the single digits. A very select few make their way to the top. That’s a problem for virtual hook-up pioneers, who would be smart to heavily favor the female perspective in order to recruit enough women to level the playing field. After Blendr’s 2011 release, Ann Friedman outlined a few ways developers could actually make hook-up apps more appealing to hetero women, like putting the messaging power solely in the hands of female users, or allowing women to publicly endorse their male friends—not to rep their prowess in bed, but to vouch for their capability to treat women like people.
Yet television and the internet – and many channels and “apps” on both platforms were created by men. And women enjoy these services as much as if not more than men. This is obviously just a nonsensical argument desperately being made in order to protect one of the wobbly chair legs of feminist theory.
Pornography, prostitution, personal ads, street approaches, the use of various social media sites: men are the horny ones, and women are the regulators of sexual intercourse.
In the realm of social networking websites, men are more keen for the hook up than women. In a survey conducted by the Oxygen Media Research, 20% of men and only 6% of women use Facebook to hook up.
Grindr exists and serves as the model to Blendr and Bender, and not the other way around, because male sexual drive and, perhaps more importantly, the demand for random NSA sex is so high.
Hess cites an article by Ann Friedman who suggests ways to cater a NSA hook-up site to the tastes and predilections of women. I’ll let you all read it, but it doesn’t seem much different than any other online dating website. One quick sentence helps sum up her argument which includes allowing only women to search for available men. In designing a hypothetical app called “GrindHer”, Friedman writes:
Bonus: No need for weird penis photos as indicators of sexual interest. We all know what we’re here for.
That kind of sums it up right there. Why isn’t a dick pic something that women on GrindHer would be interested in? A woman showing her vagina on the site to men would find her inbox immediately filled (yeah). So these feminist app developers are essentially complaining that there isn’t a hetero Grindr but then they are creating something that isn’t at all like Grindr.
The trick is that women will get to limit the access men have to sex. Thus, men’s demand will still outstrip women’s demand. The fewer number of women who use such an app will be satiated; they’ll have a guy whenever they want to hook up with one. But the point is that there will be many more “inefficiencies” – men left holding their hard-ons – compared to a site driven completely by men’s sexual demand. We’re back to square one.
Yeah, it must be how the apps are *programmed* and *designed*.
What a joke, to be honest. Is Hess even straight? She doesn’t really look like it.
It’s hard to believe the lengths these people will go to try and justify the belief that women are as interested in sex as men when they’re clearly not. Female solipsism in action.
Even FtM transsexuals will admit that taking testosterone made them hornier.
Seriously? Does this woman even live in the real world? Women aren’t using these apps because men designed them. Women have no idea who designed them. There is simply almost zero demand for such a product. An attractive woman exists in the hetero version of Grindr all the time. Every penis she sees is here for the taking. They don’t need an iPhone app to get booty. Lawd a’mighty.
Blank slate. The blank slate is real. Women and men are equal and the same in every regard except when they find it beneficial to point out differences. The articles are comical because they start from teh faulty assumption that mena nd women have the same sex drive.
Anyone wonder what the rate of hook up is for the Brenda vs. Grindr? It should solve some of the mystery for Slate’s dopey reporter activists.
@ C.R. — this is trivially, painfully obvious.
1) Anti-slut defense: women’s fallback position is “it was spontaneous, it just…happened!”
which simultaneously allows them to hamsterbate that “they’re a *good* girl” and feed their childlike sense of wonder and exploration of the wide, wonderful world, and their sexuality at the same time.
2) It is a computer *app* explicitly *for* the purpose of hooking up. This ruins both the spontaneity and ambiguity, as well as the potential for flirting and flaking, provided by texting. Even a younger girl sexting her breasts has the rationale “I’m *enticing* him, I hope he chooses *me* the special snowflake!” — but using this app reduces the thrill of the chase to a mundane assignation much more in tune with a prostitute.
Full disclosure: Employed as a computer geek and old enough to be these people’s father. And they think human nature is going to fundamentally change because of a different API…even the wet crepe-paper thin veneer of deniability is blown away by this app. Sheesh.
That article reads like an Onion parody of what a feminist would write. It’s so self-evidently absurd that I don’t think Amanda Hess even believes her own gruel, she was just stuck for something to fill up space.
Naturally, she also just assumes there is nothing different about the predilections of gay men and that they are no more promiscuous than anybody else. When of course everybody knows they are WAY more promiscuous than any other population, and remained so even when it was killing loads of them.
Finally, notice how Hess doesn’t present us with what a “female” hookup app would look like. Because what on earth ELSE would it look like? Maybe it’s like the shake-weights on SouthPark and it would tell you how beautiful you are and how much you hate those other women at work before it hooks you up.
Call it penisinterest and put recipes on the app.
There is really no such thing as ‘sounds like Onion parody’ anymore because the libs regularly say things that are beyond absurdity — and they believe them in earnest and their institutions force us to also believe them in earnest.
@peterike, @PA — Somebody-or-other once noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” I hope for Amanda Hess’ sake that whoever-it-was was female, since only then might Hess be willing to think about how the quip applies to her and her chums.
On the other hand, being a doctrinaire blank-slatist seems to be rewarding and fun. While thinking is hard.
The commenters above nailed all the relevant reasons this article is hogwash. Why are buffoons like Hess still being published in ostensibly major media outlets? What a la la land we all live through right now. I don’t expect this to last.
And yeah, Hess looks like an androgyne. Weird unisex borg experiment gone awry. You want to know what kinds of people religiously mouth the equalist script, just look for the monsters in your midst.
The MSM and all its degenerate subsidiaries are nothing less than full-scale psy ops war to brainwash the swine masses. That is their mission now, and they execute ruthlessly. What did Dalrymple say about the Commies? Oh yeah, the trick to convincing a population to swallow your lies whole is to humiliate them, to force them to read your chutzpah and to silence them from objecting. Reading crap like Slate is an act of self-humiliation. Sic semper tyrannis.
I also had a you can’t be serious moment just reading this post. Probably it’s just another article intended to promote women in STEM, this time they decided to try the sex sells angle, “see guys? Fund more STEM scholarships and give us preferences and you could get laid!” Lame. It reminds me of that other article Slate had about wanting more software jobs to go to women and they implied it was natural because women used technology like the phone and Facebook more than men to arrange their social lives. And these articles are mostly written not by female engineers, but by liberal artsy Sex and the City types who’ve never written a line of code in their lives.
Here’s a new blog: Occam’s Razor
http://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/
It has multiple bloggers and will include topics: HBD, politics, history and economics, immigration, etc.
We are still working on blogroll. If we do not have you added, please add us, leave comment or email, and we’ll add you.
Thanks.
“That article reads like an Onion parody of what a feminist would write. ”
I had the same reactions. They have long since become comical caricatures of themselves. It would be funny if so many people didn’t continue to feel that they have to listen to them and humor them.
the lengths these people will go to try and justify the belief that women are as interested in sex as men when
They are, … that interested in sex.
Women’s sex drive is, believe it or not, equally powerful.
“Women’s sex drive is, believe it or not, equally powerful.”
The more correct formulation perhaps should be: if a woman’s sex drive were as uncomplicated as a man’s.
If women don’t use things made by men, then how come they aren’t all living in grass huts with no electricity or plumbing?
As for the app, obviously women won’t use it as they would have no need of it. Its not like women walk through life thinking, “Gee, I wish I could find a guy for some no-strings sex, but there just don’t seem to be any men interested in it! If only there were an app for that.. *sigh*”
“Women’s sex drive is, believe it or not, equally powerful.”
More precisely, women’s sex drive is equally powerful but more discriminatory and slower to heat up than men’s sex drive. A woman’s body will shake with pleasure, but only with the right man. In contrast, a man can experience incredible pleasure with many women concurrently, and be almost instantly ready for the act.
The funny thing is that the author claims that women would be as interested in hookups as men if they app were different… but if men and women are drawn in by different kinds of apps, doesn’t that still make them different?
@ well
Yeah, that’s a good point. If men and women really are the same, then they should both get just as much use out of the same types of apps.
I wonder if Amanda is smart enough to see that she just contradicted her whole blank slate belief system with the premise of her article. Probably not.
Yeah, that’s why so few women use Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and Pinterest, since those apps were all developed by men. What a dummy she is.
Men live for sex. They do all the other shit they do so they can get sex. Women live for what sex can get them. Not that they aren’t capable of enjoying sex (god knows they are). But the point of life for most of them is what sex gives them access to — money, children, houses, food, compliant helpmate-men, etc.
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Paleo, yeah and that’s why women will never rule the world. Pretty girls won’t date a guy cause he’s short and not very good looking? He quits his job, locks himself away in some crummy basement and lives like a broke-ass for years so he can practice the guitar for 15 hours a day. For the girls he’s out of sight, out of mind, and they’re back to chasing after their rogues. But then one night he rolls into the bar with his band and in 30 minutes everyone in the place is on their feet screaming. You want to really go somewhere with your life, something has to drive you. Women have the luxury of looking at it as work life balance, men have to be all in.
“The articles are comical because they start from teh faulty assumption that mena nd women have the same sex drive.”
That’s right, and because they don’t understand the different nature of what attracts us, of what gets our juices flowing.
@well
“The funny thing is that the author claims that women would be as interested in hookups as men if they app were different… but if men and women are drawn in by different kinds of apps, doesn’t that still make them different?”
They have a fail-safe answer for these sorts of obvious contradictions – “The Patriarchy causes that!”
“Women’s sex drive is, believe it or not, equally powerful.”
No, you’re wrong. Perhaps you simply didn’t take the time to think of how you worded your statement.
A woman’s physiological_ reaction_ to_ sexual stimulation and culmination can be just as powerful as that of a man’s (and she has the ability to orgasm multiple times to his one in a relatively short space of time), but her “sex drive” is not as powerful as that of a man’s. In fact, her sex drive is likely to be felt most acutely at ovulation, yet even during that time of the month, you don’t see millions of women so unable to contain that drive that they’ll take it upon themselves to drop what they’re doing, unable to concentrate on anything else, and go in search of satiation, no matter the inconvenience, no matter any expense (monetarily or otherwise). We don’t even have to worry about pregnancy any longer, yet not even that urges us into the streets, the bars, or any place men congregate.
@ amac78
“Somebody-or-other once noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. ”
…
Maybe you’re thinking of Thomas Sowell, who once said:
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
I’m against using the word “equal” when it comes to discussing sex differences [in libido]. It’s a weasel word that lets in all the undesirable people who are happy to twist the meaning of equal towards their goal of promoting the fiction that men and women are the same-la-la-la-can’t-hear-you.
The sex drives of men and women aren’t equal at all. They are very different, which is why expecting men and women to behave the same way when it comes to sex is not just stupid, it’s harmful.
What jumped out at me most in that Hess nonsense was the statement that
“The conventional wisdom is that women are to blame”
Who “blames” women for not being interested in hook-up apps? I’d probably prefer it if more women were interested in casual sex but I don’t think it ignoble that they aren’t. It’s only feminists who would see something blame worthy in women’s predilections not being identical to those of men, and that’s because they’re closet cock worshippers who regard each and every identifiably female trait as inferior to the male equivalent. When they demand equality between men and women they’re using the word equality in the most literal sense. The only way two things can every be exactly equal is if they’re the same. Their dream world is one in which everyone has successfully graduated to manhood and the existence of such a thing as woman is just a faded memory.
Equal is a problematic word, yes. It is typically used politically and incorrectly, in a sense of the same; but consider it to mean, of similar force.
My point is understood to mean that women like to be rubbed up against. They like it a lot, and more. The wisdom of the desert in morning.
Their sex drive is contained within their limits as the weaker sex.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dolo that is a damning description, and sad.
The toll that feminism takes on women is tragic, terrible. Permanent, irrevocable.
Handing over the evolutionary prerogative to women, via sexual selection, is the end game; though it makes for good entertainment.
That miserable man Nietzsche said men should study war and nothing more. Frank Herbert foresaw similar problems, in his league of women voters.
if i can go off topic here, Herbert’s self reported iq was 190. which is in the realm of the highest in the world.
he grew up in Puget Sound with the Indians and communists; bizarre background; his parents were alcoholics.
he drove like a madman, and once jumped a canyon in his car with kids; it was his best and only option.
Related from XX at slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/01/new_study_says_heterosexual_men_are_more_depressed_than_gay_men_it_s_time.html
Let’s see – Men who can get sex pretty much whenever they want without much effort are less depressed than men who can’t. Because straights are more repressed, or something.
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