We are a generation, or at least a city, of well dressed gluttons. As I have found in my short time in Oxford, this greed extends far beyond food and drink and seeps into sexual appetite. In my first year I took home more people than I ought, not through meeting at a club or pub, but meeting on the most instant of dating apps. The app I used relied on instant connection: 24-hour expiring matches, distance-based connections, instant phone sex with strangers… it was truly a case of everything, everywhere, all at once. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There’s a fantastic line from Mad Men (seriously, if you haven’t watched that series- what are you doing??) in which the tormented and despicably handsome genius Don Draper says “I know you want everything you want as soon as you want it”. I always come back to this one, I think it’s the idea that if you’ve never had to have gone without something, how will you develop the skill to cultivate real desire or ambition? I suppose with our generation and society being particularly attracted to ‘fastest’ and ‘instant’ in every aspect of life, I wonder, have we lost a value in delayed gratification? Let alone forming a relationship enough to know the person.
Back to this app though. The app I am talking about saw a 52% increase in revenue and users in 2025 in the US alone; there clearly is an active, growing market for this kind of dating app, even more so than conventional dating apps like Hinge or Tinder. When I used it, I could be sexting up to 10 people simultaneously, and often still finding room for impatience with responses. Despite kink and fetishes being laid bare instantly, matches would often describe in the first sentence of talking to you which array of sex toys were their favourite, or that they wanted to be entirely tied up and dominated, or in a lot of cases, someone wanting lazy, late-night, half-asleep horny texting, the list goes on… The art and process of the long, delayed chase, the anticipation of the kill, was gone. Interestingly, if we go back to Mad Men, the voluptuous and sexualised icon of the show, Joan Holloway, even toyed with a playboy seducer, Roger, and claimed that the sneaking around and the chase was the best part of women for a man like him.
Funnily enough, I met someone on the app from Oxford who had a huge amount in common with me. Really, I mean a shocking amount; religion, upbringing, existential dread, blah blah blah. And when we first matched on the app we called for a full four to six hours (I forget how long now), sporadic great phone sex with long blights of virtual pillow talk. We described more and more curious and bizarre kinks or fetishes to explore, it was like greedily wanting again and again. Despite most of the interactions we had were fantasy based; I think they became much better when decorating said fantasies with non-sexual elements. How we could have had dinner before hypothetically hooking up (I think we had even spoken about specific and particular restaurants that would add to atmosphere), how we could have imaginarily met and how one of us could have seduced the other, how one of us could have worn a particularly good suit, and the other wearing a tantalisingly tight dress that would strain over their hips and tits… anyways. Would the phone sex or any hypothetical sex have been better if we hadn’t had the pillow talk, or explanations about our, at the time, very sorry lives? I don’t think so. This isn’t to say that one needs to know and form a huge relationship with someone before sleeping with them for the sex to be good; I think a lot of people think sex with someone who is a relative stranger can be sexier than someone they know well; it is to say that there needs to be a level of anticipation, patience, and atmosphere that can only come with a degree of time. You need to develop the want and ambition rather than ‘having’ immediately.
With a certain irony, I met someone incredibly similar to the person I was just talking about, like SCARILY; composition, height, style, taste, humour and voice were all identical (FUCK, maybe I should start listening to the people who tell me I have a type)- on the same app no less! It was an incredibly similar experience, everything was more tantalising and better knowing more about him and feeling a sense of needing to wait more for it all. The flirting and seducing was better when I had learned a little about him, you could craft your persuasion and charm better, it was more fun. Is this an elaborate way of saying perhaps we need to bring back the art of seduction more if we want better sex? Maybe. I’m not sure actually? Maybe the overconsumption of gluttonous, easy sex is destroying its quality.
I spoke to someone on the same app a while later. He was an American and I was curious about the ‘sexual scene’ over there. Despite him being conventionally INSANELY handsome, (I cannot understate this one, think of a more rugged Ben Barnes) he claimed that so many people were too exhausted to be going to a bar to meet people. He claimed that despite his high sex drive and ability to ‘get’ women, he didn’t have the energy, and would get a ‘happy ending’ massage up to ten times a month to deal with his sex drive, rather than meet a woman or man and take them home. He claimed that a lot of people were doing this too, and that people really just aren’t hooking up as much as they used to, because they are simply too burned out. It is an interesting take; that people use these instant apps, or don’t meet people in more organic ways, out of a level of tiredness? Is modern sexual hedonism just easy sexual consumerism?
Despite any argument for the explosion in ‘instant’ sex apps – ultimately I cannot ignore that we humans are often stupid, and do not value the space and feeling around something we want, whether it be art, food or sex, and we often want these things in the crudest and fastest ways possible rather than anticipating the full potential impact they could have on the person. Or maybe these apps just win at monetising the instant spark of hornyness. Would the demographic and make-up of how we access the hookup be very different without these apps existing, or is Don Draper right when it comes to sex – we all do “want what we want as soon as we want it”, and modern apps just make it easier to get.