Tag Archives: Dating

News

Grindr for heterosexuals: new Pure mobile app facilitates hooking up

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Young people looking for no-strings-attached sex who don’t want to go through the rigmarole of chit-chat online are looking forward to the launch of a new app next week.

Pure, which has been described as ‘bringing Seamless to the bedroom’, offers sex on-demand by simply asking users their gender and the gender of their preference, whether they can host and then shows them potential partners who answer ‘Okay’ or ‘No Way’.

Pending approval by Apple’s App Store, Pure’s intentionally soul-less and potentially dangerous approach to hook-ups has no profiles, no chat sessions before-hand and deletes unfulfilled requests after an hour.

Markedly different from more traditional internet dating sites such as Match.Com and OkCupid, Pure is also a departure from newer apps for anonymous sex hook-ups such as Tinder and Bang With Friends.

All these apps and sites require some kind of profile and online conversation to get to know the potential date better.

However, Pure, created by Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko removes all of that and simply provides two people who want to have sex based on their image online the ability to arrange a meet-up.

I see this story as the final conclusion of a trend I say when I was in my 20s where men and women were unable to evaluate the opposite sex for the responsibilities of marriage. Although young people said they wanted to get married, the way they did it was by choosing the best looking person available. There was no concept of courting, which is putting a person through their paces to see if they can actually do the job that marriage requires of them. I have literally been told by women that they can tell if a man is a good provider based on his appearance. If he is good looking then there is no need to investigate his academic credentials, his resume, his savings and so on. The tingles and peer approval, according to the criteria seen in the culture, are everything she needs to know his balance sheet. This app is the next phase of that, with pleasurable sex taking the place of slow, steady evaluation.

Now it is so bad that people actually want to have sex with people based on a photo. Honestly, this is so far from where I am and what my plans are that I think that it is pointless to even consider marriage at this point. The rules of this society are going to be made by people like the Bro-Choice man and the Duke University athlete hook-up woman. As women keep choosing men based on appearance, government is going to grow and grow to subsidize their behavior with free condoms, free breast enlargements, free abortions, free single mother welfare, and (for the feminists), free IVF. Why would I get involved with an enterprise like marriage where half the women are Sandra Fluke and the other half disagrees with Sandra Fluke, but is too cowardly to say anything about it for fear of “judging” and being seen as “divisive”. If no one is standing up for courtship and marriage, then why should I feel obligated to risk what I have? It seems like people are just not serious about real marriage. Bills, duties, obligations, intimacy, faithfulness.

There is never going to be evidence that shows that anonymous recreational sex is good for marriage or parenting. People can do it if they want to, but it doesn’t help anyone like me who really wants marriage and parenting done right. The truth is that premarital sex is bad for marriage and parenting. It reduces marital stability and quality. It puts children at risk for many dangerous thing, for example child neglect, child abuse and poverty.  If I lowered my standards and married someone in her 30s after she had lived a life of binge-drinking and hooking-up, it would put the quality of my marriage and children in jeopardy. I would not be able to trust such a woman like that with the responsibilities of wife and mother. I would be paying for a marriage and children, but not getting the kind of marriage and parenting that counts for God.

I don’t mind if a woman wants to go on the “photo-only hook-ups” path through her 20s and early 30s, but I’m not obligated to make those choices (WRONG choices) work out for her. Chivalry means picking a good woman who is struggling while doing good things, and helping her to do good things. Chivalry does not mean picking an immoral woman and trying to make her happy. That’s not chivalry, it’s stupidity. Marriage is not something you do with someone who chooses recreational premarital sex partners based on photographs. Period. Marriage is not compatible with that level of stupidity.

News

Should young people be dating before they are ready to get married?

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A thoughtful post on The College Conservative that I agree with, written by Bryana Johnson.

Excerpt:

I wonder sometimes if I am the only one who winces to hear a thirteen-year old speak with cavalier abandon of his or her “ex?”  Since when is it considered healthy and acceptable for underage people to be in “relationships?” Just what do parents and educators expect to be the result of the romantic conquests of these middle-school children and young high school students? The results I’ve witnessed personally are beyond disturbing; they are downright sinister, and have caused me to question whether or not those who claim to champion marital fidelity and family values are paying any attention at all to the standards we are passing to our children.

The trouble with underage dating is that it presents an entirely faulty view of what interaction with the opposite gender should be about. Rather than placing emphasis on building one strong relationship with one person at a stage of life when a marital commitment is feasible, dating encourages young people to pour their energies into consistently seducing other young people at a time when neither of them are capable of making any long-term commitments. Their “relationships” are destined to fail from the get-go because they are founded on unhealthy perceptions of love and not backed by any real necessity to stick it out.

The beauty of marriage, as it was intended to be, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to learn to work through incompatibilities and give of themselves. In the same way, the great ugliness of dating as it is practiced by our culture and portrayed by our media, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to be selfish by giving them an easy “out” when things don’t go according to their initial feelings. I believe it is fair to say that this form of dating is a training manual for divorce, because it encourages young people to grow accustomed to giving their hearts away and then taking them back.

Sadly, parents who should know better continue to display shocking naïveté regarding the absurd practices of driving their twelve year olds out on a “date,” or purchasing provocative clothing for their sixteen-year-olds, or sympathizing with their broken-hearted fourteen-year-olds by assuring them that they’ll “find someone better.” “They’re just having fun,” they’ll tell us, rolling their eyes at what they consider to be our tightly wound principles. I work a volunteer shift at Crisis Pregnancy Clinic where I witness every week the ruined lives and broken dreams that “fun” has left with our youth.

Another defense offered for the ridiculous habit of underage dating is that the kids are “just learning how to relate to the opposite sex.” It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out that what they’re really learning is how to recover quickly from a break-up and set their sights on another gorgeous and equally hormonal person. The culture of dating is a culture of hunger and unsatisfied eyes that are always looking around for affirmation via someone or something else.

But perhaps the most ludicrous and most willfully naïve assertion is that “relationships” between young teens are “not really about sex.” Just what do we think such relationships are about between people too young to be interested in any of the other things (family, stability, home-making, etc. ) that come out of  a romantic involvement with the opposite gender? Contrary to such half-baked assurances, it is all about sex for these young people. Whenever they forget that, the pop-culture is quick to remind them of it. In the media, girls are unfailingly presented as having value to boys only in proportion to their physique and their manner of flaunting it. Boys are presented as bestial and incapable of responsibility. Overwhelming, this is the primary message being offered to our kids by the movies, magazines, music artists, and commercials directed at their age group. It is inexcusably irrational for us to suppose that their relationships with one another are untainted by the stereotypes that surround them.

[…]While social conservatives may proclaim the virtues of pre-marital abstinence and fidelity, their actions don’t line up with their words. They behave as though they expect our young people to embrace or at least abide by the values we preach to them, all the while continuing to direct them in lifestyle choices that foster the opposite principles and attitudes.

I really like it when women are very very direct about boundaries. There’s something reassuring to about a woman who makes moral judgments and doesn’t care about whether it makes people like her less. She’s trying to help people make wiser decisions so that they don’t get hurt over and over and wreck their chances of having a stable marriage. I have to give her my respect for that. I’ve always subscribed to the duct tape theory of love. The more you bond and pull away, the less you can bond to someone you really care about. Teenage dating is breakup training. Boys shouldn’t be dating until they have proven that they can carry out their roles: protector, provider, moral and spiritual leader.

News

New study: college women binge drinking more often than college men

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Here’s an article about a recent Harvard study in U.S. News and World Report.

Excerpt:

Female college students exceed government-suggested limits on weekly alcohol consumption more often than male students do, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard University.

Men and women are starting on something of an uneven playing field. In 1990, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health, suggested that men drink a maximum of four drinks daily and 14 drinks weekly. The guidelines for women suggest that they max out at three drinks a day and seven drinks a week.

“Recommended drinking limits are lower for women than for men because research to date has found that women experience alcohol-related problems at lower levels of alcohol consumption than men,” says Bettina Hoeppner, a Harvard Medical School professor and coauthor of the study, published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Friday.

[…]”With women’s greater tendency to exceed weekly guidelines than men, there may be long-term implications for women in particular,” the study suggests. “Women are at a greater risk than men of engaging in drinking habits during college that are more likely to result in long-term harm.”

Hoeppner says that the weekly limits are designed to prevent future health problems due to excessive drinking, such as liver disease and breast cancer. Of students who had had at least one drink during the first year, 60 percent of men and 64 percent of women reported exceeding the weekly guidelines at least once.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control warned about the increasing number of women and girls who binge drink and said that it’s an “under-recognized problem.”

“It is alarming to see that binge drinking is so common among women and girls, and that women and girls are drinking so much when they do,” Robert Brewer, head of the CDC’s alcohol program, said in a statement.

The College Fix wrote about this article, and noted that the response from feminist blogs like Jezebel were dismissive.

Excerpt:

Reaction to the piece has emerged via a write up on the feminism website Jezebel that defended the girls’ decision to join, saying sororities “suck,” and that ”equal opportunity for women to succeed means equal opportunities to act like liver-shredding idiots.”

Jezebel writer Erin Gloria Ryan goes on to claim these girls are content with their decisions:

“When college women are free to do what they want, some of them are going to want to behave like college jackasses. They’re going to drink, swear, hook up sloppily and indiscriminately, barf in the streets, and generally act like boorish male characters in straight-to-DVD sex comedies. Oh, and one more thing: despite what an entire subgenre of concernmongering Little Girls Lost trend pieces on the phenomenon might have you think, they’re perfectly happy.”

Everything is going according to plan here, if you ask the feminists. In fact, this was their goal: equality.

What do you think is causing women to binge drink more than men? Is it some external force or is it something inside them that is driving it? When I talk to college-aged women about this, they usually don’t have a good answer for why they are doing it except because their friends are, and they feel obligated to participate.

In a previous post, I wrote about a study from the Institute of American Values that found that one of the reasons why women binge drink so much is to make them feel less responsible for hooking up with anonymous men at parties. After all, they reason, if they choose to drink themselves into a stupor then they aren’t responsible for what happens next. They can have stories to tell people about the superhot guys they hooked up with, but without feeling guilty about anything.