Dating Apps Are to Dating What Porn is to Sex

Let’s be honest—dating apps have ruined dating. They have provided cover for men and women to disengage from social interaction with one another. They have reduced dating to a game of right and left swipes. They have contorted dating into nothing more than a transactional experience that trades in physical appearance and, to a lesser extent, financial resources. Dating apps are nothing more than a non-nutritious poor substitute to real dating, in the same way that pornography is a substitute to real sex.

The appeal of dating apps is obvious. They promise a nearly infinite supply of options that can all be accessed from the convenience of a portable phone. In the same way you might select a shirt, you enter your preferences for a mate, and the algorithm processes your “order” and sends you the most suitable options. No need to approach a stranger, engage in live conversation, or face the awkwardness and pain of rejection. As everyone knows, though, they don’t work like this in reality.

Just as sex is messy, so is dating. Just as pornography sidesteps the complexities and emotional challenges of sex, so do dating apps negate the intrinsic challenges of dating. Sex with an online porn actor isn’t really sex. Swiping through profiles isn’t real dating. At least with in-person prostitution, there is a live human being in the room. The most popular form of prostitution today is virtual, through the Only Fans platform, with women exchanging sexual favors for money.

Within the 18-45 year-old population of American women, 2% have Only Fans accounts. That means 2% of American women today are whores.

I will write more soon about the disastrous consequences of this explosion in female prostitution in contemporary America.

Dating apps appeal to the fearful and the lazy. Successful dating requires confidence and some degree of work, more so for men than for women. Removing these two requirements ensures that regardless of whatever semblance of dating remains, the interaction will focus only on superficial characteristics, primarily physical attractiveness. As women have become thoroughly indoctrinated in the cult of egalitarianism pushed by Marxist feminist ideology, they have sought out financial independence, decoupling themselves from the historic economic dependence on men. As a consequence, women now value physical attractiveness far more than they did in the past. This leads to excessive focus on looks when they review profiles online. You might say that they have begun behaving more like men and less like women. 

Women, though, are even more choosy than men. Due to a combination of hypergamy and delusional thinking that I explained in my recent article “I’m a 10!”, based on data from online dating app companies, most women using dating apps will not even consider a man who is not in the top two deciles of attractiveness. Women only swipe right on approximately 4% of profiles, while men swipe right on close to 50%. There are two major consequences to this, both bad.