You suck at dating apps because you’re straight

The problem with dating apps is that they are gay technology being wildly misappropriated by heterosexuals. Of course they don’t work for you. They’re not for you.

I see you struggling and I feel for you. It’s not your fault. Big tech saw what dating apps were doing for the faggots and saw dollar signs, and you fell for it. I’m here to tell you that it’s okay. You were never meant to succeed. I’ll explain.

Fundamentally: the apps solve gay problems, and exacerbate straight ones.

It’s hard to tell who is and isn’t gay

For a brief wild moment in the early 2010s, in some parts of the country, it was possible to tell who was gay—it was the chick with the shaved head wearing flannel, or the guy with earrings wearing eyeliner. Before then, it was the 2000s, which were so homophobic that you got called metrosexual for using body wash as a man. And after then, all the gay aesthetics got colonized by heterosexuals, kinsey 1s, and people who felt kind of funny about their genders.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing—gay aesthetics fuck hard, and it would be cruel for homosexuals to gatekeep objectively cunty looks. If the world is against straight women in combat boots, then I am against the world. Nevertheless, the straight woman in combat boots isn’t interested in kissing me passionately in a sun-dappled garden, and probably not in my coiled fist up her snatch either.

So even if it’s not the 2000s (where smelling too pointedly of soap as a man could get you hatecrimed), you have a problem. At best, you are going to waste a lot of time chatting up cute butches with boyfriends. At worst, you will start to sound like the sort of person with opinions on female hypergamy; from there, jaw-retraction and wrist-thinning are certain to follow.

Real-life gay spaces don’t always solve this

The problem with dedicated queer spaces and events is that they select for the sort of person who goes to queer events. Often, this means selecting for people whose most interesting personality trait is that they are gay. This is an affectation appropriate for the young homosexual who only just noticed this morning that it is both desirable and permitted to touch private parts with an individual of the same sex, but it becomes increasingly unseemly with age.

You may think—surely there are more rarefied homosexual watering holes and meeting places? And there are, but these spaces tend to carcinize. Gay people are more similar to each other than straight people are, and this produces monocultures. Yes, the queer communist bookstore has queers in it, but it also has communists. What if I want to date women who are not communists? What if I want a politically indifferent lesbian? What if I happen to be in the mood for libertarian pussy today?

And worst of all: at a certain point in progressive circles, it became rather gauche to be an ally. Passé to be straight; even offensive, unacceptable. If you’re really such an ally, why aren’t you muff diving?

This was, without exaggeration, worse than 9/11.

It is absolutely essential that every woman at the lesbian bar be genuinely enthusiastic about pussy, and not weakly hyping herself up for it because she has the vague sense that it’s good for her health, like low-fat probiotic yogurt or a zero-sugar kale smoothie. Let us all these women culturally queer; secular, you might say, as the Jew who avoids pork out of habit, but hasn’t been inside a synagogue since her bat mitzvah twenty years ago. They might fuck you, but they will do it with the attitude of grim duty undertaken by a trenchbound infantryman in 1917, and go home to their families in a shell-shocked stupor.

Apps solve all of this beautifully

There is simply no reason to hang out on a gay dating app if you don’t want to date or fuck other gay people. You aren’t getting a sense of queer community from a fuckin’ app, that’s for sure, and it is exceedingly difficult to purchase communist literature on them. Maybe you’re doing it out of some perverse sense of confused performativity, but if you are, it’s easy for me to filter you out. On gay apps, it is simply not that difficult to find someone to fuck or date if you’re not a coward.

For men, it’s honestly fine even if you are a coward. I was never a practicing gay male, but I once downloaded Grindr out of idle curiosity, and within five minutes I had three offers from eager gentlemen in my vicinity to get my cock sucked. If I’d actually had the time to as much as upload a profile picture, probably some of them would have realized that my cock was Very Small Indeed and changed their minds, but only some.

Yes, even for women

Well, well, well, Mister Tough Dyke, but those are men. They’re sluts, we all know this. Let’s see you succeed at this little maneuver with a female.

You may have heard of the “useless lesbian” stereotype, where pairs of mutually interested gay women end up stuck in a local minima where neither knows how to make a move on the other.

I have never understood this phenomenon. I have an uncharitable suspicion that these women are simply not gay enough. Surely if you were truly motivated by pussy, you would be able to open your telephone application and send another woman a message like “I find you attractive, let’s spend some time together in public, and perhaps later I will insert something into your vagina if you chance to find that agreeable.”

This is frankly all that is really required to pick up women on the apps. This was the extent of my dating strategy on Tinder (which I never bothered to venture off of, because I didn’t need to):

1. Message women I match with something specific and easy to respond to (“I like your cat, how stupid is he?”)

2. After ten or so messages, suggest meeting up

3. She spontaneously materializes in my house with all her stuff and starts rearranging my furniture

Lesbian Tinder, at least in the late 2010s, was something of a wonderland. Forget fish in a barrel, this was big-breasted dolphins in tin cups.

Meanwhile, the heterosexuals were suffering. And they still are.

Straight dating is asymmetric warfare

Being gay solves the problem of symmetric incentives. Remember, gay people are more similar to each other than straight people are. This means that gay men are, on average, as horny as other gay men [CITATION NEEDED], and lesbian women are about as interested as other lesbian women in moving into each other’s houses and adopting a cat together. (Aside: I believe this is what drives the anomalously high lesbian divorce rate. For lesbians, getting married is kind of the equivalent of third base.)

Meanwhile, men and women are mostly the same—but there are differences on the margins, and those differences stack up to create lopsided monstrous social dynamics that ruin everything for everyone.

Men do not need to be three times as horny as women to create an equilibrium where every straight woman on a dating app is batting away hundreds of poorly differentiated penis interaction requests, unable to distinguish which penises she might conceivably be interested in, ultimately shutting down entirely and leaving the app in helpless disgust. They only need to be a little hornier.

Say men are only a little more likely to engage in “short term mating behavior” (i.e. horndog fuckboy bullshit) than women are. All of the horndog men pair up with the horndog women—and then pair up again, and again, etc. They all bathe in each other’s bodily fluids and have a grand old time.

But say there is just one extra horndog man who, for whatever reason, got left out—the unlucky runt of the litter. This man is now unoccupied and unattended, and will wreak jolly hell on the remaining pool of women. Most of them will want nothing to do with him—requiring him to change his strategy, and pretend to be be something other than a horndog. He may get lucky, and he and the unfortunate lady will have an ultimately unsatisfying time with each other, at best. He will move on to the next one, and she will get a little more jaded. The next match she gets, she will suspect of horndog fuckboy bullshit—she may ignore the message, or leave the app entirely. The pool of women to be terrorized by the unattended horndog has shrunk, increasing the probability that any given woman may encounter him in his quest for pussy.

Now all the non-horndog men who really did just want a drink and a chat and maybe to kiss passionately in a sun-dappled garden have to try harder to reach any women at all. In fact, cruelly, they have to adopt horndog fuckboy strategies—sending lots of poorly differentiated messages to maybe get a single response. Now, to the average woman, all horndog and non-horndog men look exactly the same—because they are behaving the same.

This dynamic is present in real life, of course, but apps accelerate and intensify it. Solving discoverability makes gay dating much better, and straight dating much worse.

It’s all very sad.

Anyway, these days I’m pregnant and straight married, so this is all behind me. I don’t really know what gay people are up to these days; they confiscated my card and I don’t get invited to the meetings anymore.

However, I’m also a dirty polyamorist, so I have some insight into straight dating apps, and my diagnosis is that you guys are doing it wrong. Skill issue, as the children say. Next time: I will reveal my secrets and solve all dating problems forever. (Spoiler: your problem is that you are not being nearly off-putting enough.)