I felt bad about Jude I realized as I brushed my teeth.
This didn’t make any sense. Why should I feel bad about him? After all, one was supposed to operate on Tinder without feelings, meaning one could assume the other person didn’t have feelings either, so it didn’t matter.
On the other hand, Jude had told me a whole bunch of stuff about his life and I was slightly worried for him. I knew I’d never see him again, but nonetheless, I wanted good things to happen to him because he was nice to me when he could have been a complete asshole.
And this, I realized, was the problem. I’d had a good experience on Tinder.
Valley of the Man Negs
So what was up with Jude’s man negging I wondered.
I called my friend Sam. Sam, who was twenty-five, would tell me the truth.
“S’up,” he said.
“Sam,” I said. “Jude the Tinder date told me all this really terrible stuff about men.” I gave him a quick recap. “You’ve been on Tinder,” I added somewhat accusingly. “Is all of this true?”
“Ugh. Do you really want to go there?”
Thirty minutes later, Sam was pacing my apartment, clutching his man bun. “If there’s one thing other men know, it’s this: Men are stupid. They’re run by their little heads. And there’s a reason men call it their little head. Men consciously know that their penises should not be in charge. But they are.”
“But why?”
“Because that’s how it is when you’re a guy today. You don’t have a choice. You have hard-core pornography shoved under your face by the time you’re twelve whether you want to see it or not. Same with Tinder. Even if you don’t want to, you become addicted. If you’re a guy like me, Tinder is designed to feed into the worst part of your psyche. The part that secretly wants to judge a beauty pageant.”
“Really?”
“And that’s why these guys can’t stop swiping,” he continued. “It’s all about the numbers. Guys swipe left on every photo just to see what they can get. Plus, it’s largely anonymous until you give your pictures life by saying something. And if the girl says something back, it’s like she’s already agreed to have sex with you. And so you just keep swiping. It turns you into a dog. A dog!” Sam gnashed his teeth. “When I think of my sisters . . .”
I thought back to what Marion had said about just wanting a guy to be “a basic human being.”
“So you’re saying all men on Tinder are assholes?”
“Not all men,” Sam said. “Not me. But most men.”
“What percentage?”
Sam shrugged guiltily. “Ninety percent?”
Was Tinder an app for people who hated themselves, I wondered? Was that why the men were so negative about each other? Tinder made them hate themselves and that made them automatically hate other men as well?
I’m Invisible
That evening, Sassy came into the city from the Village to meet up at what was supposedly a popular singles bar located in a hotel on Park Avenue. As I entered, I was taken aback. The bar was filled with attractive, age-appropriate men.
I joined Sassy at the bar. One guy in particular caught our eye: a handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair. Sassy and I decided to try to get the guy’s attention the old-fashioned way: by catching his eye.
Fuck. We couldn’t even catch the eye of the female bartender.
“Either we are old, or we’ve become invisible,” I said, longing for a glass of white wine. “I know we’re old,” I groaned. “But we used to have some pull irl.”
Sassy’s friend Christie walked in. Christie was in her early forties, but like so many women in New York she looked about ten or fifteen years younger. She had dewy, perfect skin and lovely teeth.
Perhaps Christie, who was a never-married single, could put it together for us.
I said, “Christie, you’re beautiful, you’re young, and you’re perfect. Is it us”—I gestured to Sassy and me—“or is it true that men no longer look at women in a bar?”
We’re Commodities Now