Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Last week, as you may have heard, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon Noem was revealed to be harboring a fetish for wearing cartoonishly large prosthetic breasts and paying adult performers on the Internet to indulge him in crossdressing. Bryon enjoys the experience of “bimbofication,” a kink in which, yes, one transforms into a bimbo: giant breasts, tight clothes and the mentality of an air-headed woman who loves to be sexy and sexualized.

I don’t find the concept of this man having a bimbofication fetish to be all that surprising. It embodies why I titled this newsletter Many Such Cases to begin with — all those niche and bizarre little instances of sexuality creeping up into the mainstream are in fact far more common and perhaps even mundane than some may anticipate. A conservative, masculine-seeming man in a high-stakes, ultra-visible position has risked his family’s reputation in pursuit of a strange kink? Truly, many such cases.

You may recall an effort in the late 2010s and early 2020s to embrace and “reclaim” the term bimbo. I myself wrote about it several times, interviewing women who had undergone several surgical enhancements to their faces and bodies in order to achieve a Barbie look. Seven years ago, I interviewed Alicia Amira, an independent adult performer who today refers to herself as the “founder of the bimbo movement.” I asked her what it meant to be a bimbo in 2019, and how the label had changed. She responded the following:

“I’ve worked hard to help push people’s understanding and awareness of the immediate ridicule, exclusion and stigma women suffer when they choose to dress hyper-feminine and look like a bimbo. Because a woman who looks like a bimbo is often judged for having poor judgment, lack of intelligence, declining morals, etc.

But a bimbo isn’t a dumb blonde ‘airhead.’ She isn’t just a sex object. She isn’t oblivious to what’s going on in society. And she most certainly isn’t a victim of a fantasy created by men. A bimbo is an intelligent, creative, fun, confident woman who is taking ownership of her own sexuality and refuses to be judged by her looks. It’s an ancient way of thinking that people (generally speaking) still are judging women who dress sexy, wear lots of makeup and look hyper-feminine.

@chrissychlapeckawho is the gen-z bimbo? here’s ur answer 💖 luv y’all xoxo #bimbo #ihatecapitalism #ily

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This specific framing of bimbo identity made its way to TikTok, further popularized by women like Chrissy Chlapecka, who grew to prominence for her embrace of blonde hair, tiny pink outfits and talking about leftist politics in a suspiciously soft, high-pitched voice.

“The modern-day bimbo is a fresh approach to intersectional feminism. There is, actually, careful thought behind bimbology, and it could be a way to reach true liberation,” VICE wrote of bimbofication and Chlapecka in 2022. And as my own interview with women like Amira highlights, there was a time when I thought the same could be true, too — that a genuine argument for women’s liberation could be made in our embrace and ownership of hyper-feminine aesthetics.

It takes one look at Bryon Noem to show that dream never quite came to fruition.

Amira, in the several years since I was last in communication with her, has continued her bimbofication project in the extreme. Her breasts are now at 2100cc’s, her lips inflated to match. On her X account, where she promotes her OnlyFans, there are several clips of her posed like a sex doll, arms fixed at a 90 degree angle. She routinely refers to herself as a plastic toy designed to fulfill men’s desires.

Well and truly, I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with her enjoyment in and profit from that dynamic on an individual level. I believe her now just as I did in 2019 in her assertion that this is about her own sexual pleasure. That is fine! But it is not “empowerment” for women in any broad sense. It may be personally liberating for her in an explicitly sexual context, freeing herself from past shame or expectations around her own desires. That is still something different from cultural liberation.

The thing is, not everything a woman does is required to be liberating and empowering, particularly as it applies to her own sexual and personal life. It isn’t any one person’s responsibility to consider how their private actions and desires might reflect upon society writ large. It is worth considering how your private actions and desires might themselves be reflections of society writ large, but that is about as much as we can expect. The phrase “the personal is political” has been inverted to describe the sense that our own personal lives are something of political importance, rather than politics impacting our own personal lives. For someone like Bryon Noem, perhaps is personal life is indeed of political importance. Among the rest of us, though, who are not married to administrative ghouls, that’s not quite the story. There is nevertheless a pressure, though, to conduce our lives accordingly. A woman can’t just be a bimbo, she has to justify it. She has to explain why it’s actually really good for her and women writ large. But that is, almost in its definition, not what being a bimbo is about.

@iammaddisonfoxTrying to explain to people why i want to look like a blow up doll #barbiefication #dollification #bimboficationtiktok #bimbofication

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What defines someone’s own sexual pleasure, moreover, can sometimes be inextricably linked with someone else’s sexual pleasure, too. Such is often the case for the bimbo. A woman who likes to pretend she is a plastic sex doll, I must imagine, likely delights in the idea that her partner is enjoying the concept, too. And again, in the context of one’s individual, private life, there is nothing wrong with that. There might even be a beauty in collapsing oneself momentarily into the desires of another. But just the same, it doesn’t have to be wrapped in a package of feminist empowerment for the sake of public palatability. Not everything needs to be subject to this form of political scrutiny.

Still, many cling to the narrative. After the Noem scandal, self-identified bimbos spoke with reporters about the lifestyle, generating headlines from New York Post such as “‘Bimbos’ hit back at insults as wild Bryon Noem reveal brings kink to light: ‘People assume I’m not smart.’”

And seeing this dynamic unfold again, years after the last bimbo trend cycle, all I can think is, you tried this before. It doesn’t quite seem to have worked. That Bryon Noem even has this fetish is evidence of that. As much as people may want to argue that embracing the bimbo aesthetic is empowering and that it actually has nothing to do with being vapid and unintelligent, the sexual reality of bimboism will always be objectifying. That’s the point. That’s why Bryon Noem is into it — because it allows him to feel like a sex object.

For the women who embrace bimboism either as fetish or just as aesthetic, I am not suggesting at all that they change or feel differently about themselves. Those who take pleasure in the look, sexually or not, should indeed remain personally “empowered” to do so. I am, moreover, not the arbiter of personal empowerment! That is, I think, my broader point. Our claims of personal empowerment are always tied up in a cultural political context, and there is something inherently disempowering in that dynamic. If you want to be a bimbo because it’s fun or sexy or kinky or a creative outlet, you should do it because you want to do it. You don’t have to crouch it in terms of intellectualism and ethical approval. God knows Bryon Noem wasn’t.

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It’s too easy to look upon the world and despair. And by “the world,” I might as well mean “the Internet.” And by “the Internet,” I might as well mean “X, formerly known as Twitter.”

Here you will be told a vision of society so cruel, abject, perverse, superficial, unthinking that you genuinely wonder if coexistence with other people is possible. This often relates to the realm of sexuality, wherein people lay bare their most depraved views with a moxy that might really make you contemplate ending things.

Well, that’s exactly what they want from you.

Surely, some new reason for thinking this way emerges almost daily. I am now a bit late on this, but I am nevertheless still thinking about how the Olympics were one such source of this misery, particularly around ice skating gold medalist Alyssa Liu. From the moment she hit the rink, complete freaks and losers saw an opportunity to transform the narrative of a happy and talented young woman into one of voyeuristic depravity. As she posed holding her gold, making a silly face, one person wrote “So we’re just not supposed to call this goonbait?” Their suggestion is that Liu is intentionally trying to appease the chronic masturbators, that she wants them all to jack off to her and is indulging them accordingly.

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Despite the theoretical purpose of looksmaxxing, men like Clavicular are not in pursuit of sex. He does seem to be having it, or at least getting into bedrooms with women where an attempt can be made before he’s thwarted by his routine amphetamine usage and whatever cocktail of cortisol-reducing, testosterone-raising, fat-dissolving chemicals he’s ordered this week. And just to get to the point of sex being a distinct, immediate possibility would be enough. Less than that would be enough, Clavicular has said himself.

Clavicular is a young man of 20 years who has received a lot of attention this month. He spent his teen years on various forums devoted to improving his looks, amassing 14-hour screen times in a period of his development that should have been spent skipping basketball practice in order to flirt with girls in gas station parking lots. In these forums he was exposed to the usual cruelty and scrutiny of teen boys with the added terror of digital anonymity, and then later was given the idea and information how to order hormones, steroids and “fat dissolvers” offline and inject them himself. After years of this, it all appears to have worked. He’s handsome. Handsome enough that after posting on TikTok and starting a livestream, he’s managed to become famous by Internet standards.

He did all of this because beauty makes life easier. He did it because it gave him Sexual Market Value (SMV). But he did not do this for sex — that’s a crucial distinction. In fact, sex seems to be something he’d be willing to trade away if it meant he could continue to be beautiful.

“Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility,” Joe Berstein wrote in his profile of Clavicular for The New York Times over the weekend. “Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which ‘is going to gain me nothing.’”

“‘It’s a big time saver,’ he said.”

And so again none of this — the mogging, the jawlines, the livestreaming, the cloutbombing, the flamboyant nihilism — is in pursuit of sex. That matters because it would make far more sense that way. It would be more legible. It is, after all, what looksmaxxing is allegedly supposed to be about. Inceldom utilizes a taxonomy, where everyone can be ranked and ordered according to their ability to attract a member of the opposite sex. Looksmaxxing is the method of rising those ranks, of changing one’s appearance in order to reach a higher place in this taxonomy to theoretically be able to have sex with more attractive people. There are other valuable, tangible benefits of being hot, obviously, but this is the foundation. It is why these other benefits even exist, to begin with.

When Clavicular talks about sex, he does so as if it’s a chore. He readily admits that he takes as little time with it as possible — he has no interest in “impressing” a woman in bed, and he has other, more important things to do. Yet he does at least still claim to do it, even if begrudgingly. I’ll give him that. On his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, he said sex usually takes him about a minute, and agreed when Friedland suggested he’d be better off just masturbating. All of this is again to say that none of this is about sex for Clavicular. None of this broader moment, really, is about Clavicular himself, either. The realities of Clavicular’s life are superfluous. He’s fucking with us. Even so, he has become the latest patron saint of the psychosexual cultural moment, one that continues to say that sex is boring, sex is secondary, sex is less important than embracing this empty cult of virality.

Here, though, there is still some sex to it all. Sexual market value is something that this universe of people cares about. What we are seeing with the looksmaxxers is both a new language and new structuring of intrasexual competition. The more you can mog someone (or outshine them, dominate them, etc), the better your place in the SMV. You can mog someone in looks, yes, but also in money, in clout, in height. It all continues to play out in the sexual marketplace, as Clavicular frequently reiterates. The purpose is not to actually have sex with women, but to signal to other men that sex with women is achievable.

Clavicular is right that there is value in the knowledge that he could have sex with a woman, and that sometimes the psychic satisfaction of that feels more rewarding than the act itself. It’s a dynamic that allows you to hold onto the pleasure of both desiring and being desired without either being ruptured. But it’s telling that he says that sex will gain him nothing. It suggests that he believes everything else he does, the stunts and the livestreams, serve to gain him something better. Money? Fame? A brief moment of embodying the zeitgeist? All of the above. Each, moreover, can be ranked and taxonomized in this same system of looks. Status is no longer an ineffable composite of relationships + charm + access, but a distinct number attached to how many views you get on your livestreams.

All of this, then, is a way for young men to structure their life and its aims according to something that at least feels concrete. To go to college, to try and earn an honest living, to find a wife and have a kids and leave some type of modest but respectable legacy — that no longer feels tangible enough. That doesn’t make enough sense. There is no coherent meaning to pull from the narratives of living that we have relied upon, and so men like Clavicular have returned to something far more basic and animalistic, yet through an entirely digitally-mediated filter. The only goal is to be the alpha in the room, so long as the room is constantly being recorded.

Looksmaxxing is the obvious medium of achieving status in this framework. We’re in an era of looking and being looked at. Images are cheap. You’ve got to be something special in order to keep anyone’s attention. And when the criteria for aesthetic specialness is dictated by the screen — not the big one, but the perpetual presence of several small ones — the looks themselves are going to warp. They might be beautiful still but something will feel off, uncanny. The signs of rot underneath will glimmer beneath the skin.

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It is a type of beauty that feels frail and fleeting. It will come and pass not because it is too precious for this world but because there is no real meat on the bone. A lack of sexual viability has been a feature of contemporary beauty for years, but rarely has it been so obvious. What is the message that Clavicular and this set of looksmaxxers have to offer? Beauty can perhaps be something that is forced, yes, and with it can come attention. You can smoke meth to stay skinny and inject yourself with off-label hormones and maybe you’ll get famous enough to gamble for hours every day on your computer while a few dozen thousand people also watch on their computer. If you’re really lucky, you might get to walk in New York Fashion Week, get profiled in the New York Times and sit down on the most popular podcasts. That’s not nothing. But the message is also that all of that is secondary, maybe even meaningless, to the nebulous social hierarchy of the Internet that these young men have tried desperately to make concrete. There is no future. Mog or get mogged.

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Before I get started: Before I get started: thank you to everyone who offered their well wishes for my father. I don’t really have a ton of updates, but he remains in a rehabilitative hospital and is improving daily. I am so appreciative of everyone who has messaged me, and all the grace I’ve been given as a writer here. I know it’s “just” a newsletter, but I take the work here and this audience seriously.

Also:

launched a Substack today. I’ll be helping curate longform features from the archives, pictorials and new fiction and nonfiction alike. I really hope you’ll subscribe! For starters, we have this gorgeous gonzo reportage by on the AVN conference.

The Playboy Reader

A Woman Enters the Gooniverse

The clerk at the check-in desk of the Virgin Hotel in Las Vegas, site of the 2026 Adult Video News Expo and Awards, has the glassy, scattered affect of a man so elated to be in the room, he can’t follow the trail of a single thought, such as, this couple needs their room key. His eyes dart from mine, to my husband, Jon’s, to the veritable parade of body…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Playboy and Allie Rowbottom

Surely you’re aware that Valentine’s Day is four days away. I love Valentine’s Day. Yes, sure, it is a commercialization and commodification of love, but the price is a box of chocolates. We’ll manage! You can extract all the fun out of it, or you can embrace it for the kitschy tradition it is. Valentine’s Day or otherwise, I’m going to go for the latter. Be miserable about love some other day.

It really doesn’t require much depth or grand gestures. Valentine’s Day has its formulas, and they are meant to be followed. Buy a bouquet of flowers. Cut a heart out of a piece of pink construction paper. Have sex. It’s not all that complicated.

But something to question is how a holiday designed to sell us on love is responding to an increasingly single, sexless culture. That element is less fun.

Intimacy brand Slick’s shared their recent report The Sex Recession: Intimacy and Its Decline with me, and it is a rather thoughtful compilation and analysis of the data myself and others have been citing on the problem. “Across multiple longitudinal studies, reported sexual activity has decreased steadily over the past 15–20 years,” the report reads, citing data from the General Social Survey. “This decline is most pronounced among adults under 40, with younger cohorts reporting fewer sexual encounters per year than previous generations at the same age. The trend predates the pandemic and does not rebound afterward.”

They propose a rather pragmatic perspective forward: “The sex recession is not inevitable. It is structural. And structures can be rebuilt.”

Now, obviously, a singular lube brand isn’t going to reconstruct the foundations of society required to get people to fuck again. But I’m on board with them trying.

There are other brands, though, who are responding to the sex recession a bit differently. This moment represents not an opportunity to fix what ails us but to lean in and profit from the disconnect.

According to new data from Mintel:

39% of all singles are women not dating, compared 25% who are men not dating

13% of single women not dating feel pressure to be in a relationship, compared to 21% of single men not dating

59% of single women not dating in 2025 self-described as independent, compared to 44% of single men not dating

In other words, there is a massive population of single women who have no interest in the romantic narrative. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a different narrative they might be willing to buy into. Mintel’s data is geared toward consumer research and market intelligence, informing brands on consumer behaviors: “Brands should represent various experiences in communications and product development, tailoring offerings for those living alone or with roommates,” their 2025 Singles and Socializing report reads. “Offer single-friendly pricing options for traditionally ‘couples’ experiences, such as solo travel packages or subscription dining passes and table-for-one offerings, to address the ‘singles tax.’”

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that. Even people in relationships want opportunities to do things alone! There is a way to market to single people that isn’t entirely cynical, just as there is a way to sell a commercialized version of love on Valentine’s Day. But if you take a look around the way the holiday is being navigated by many brands, there is indeed a good deal of cynicism present.

Not to engage in the perpetual culture war fodder that Target somehow provides, but let’s use some of their merchandise as an example. This year, “Galentine’s Day” is featured nearly as prominently as Valentine’s Day, promoting it as a seperate holiday the day prior for single women to enjoy with their friends. And once again, nothing wrong with that as a concept! I want to wear pink and eat candy with my friends!

I am, however, suspicious of the selection of merchandise with phrases like “Dump Him” and “Emotionally Unavailable” on them. This sort of thing isn’t new at all — this type of bratty girl power independence was popular in the aughts among teenagers — but I nevertheless find it tackier now that it’s being promoted to adult women. Maybe that is a whole different issue in itself: marketing to teen girls is now the same thing as marketing to adult women, and vice versa. In fact, the “Dump Him” sweater is part of Target’s Wild Fable line, which I believe is technically a juniors brand but has been reorganized into a more general women’s section.

The attitudes and expectations we have of each demographic are now similarly shared, too. In this increasingly single society, more of us are stuck in a perpetual state of arrested development in which we treat the opposite gender as if we’re still only a year or two into puberty.

To be clear, going around in a sweater that says “I love my boyfriend” or “Pick Me” would also be deeply embarrassing. For a lot of women, this current wave of anti-man discourse is more broadly and respectably about centering themselves and their friends over men. The “Dump Him” sweater, meanwhile, does not achieve these aims. With this sort of merchandise, you’re still branding yourself around men — just the fact that you don’t like them.

You don’t have to enjoy Valentine’s Day. You don’t have to participate at all. But signalling your aversion through conspicuous consumption at Target, of all places, brings us no closer to happiness. This isn’t some type of empowering normalization. It’s just a cheap shot at making our social apathy profitable.

Target isn’t selling “Dump Her” t-shirts, probably because men are not the market for Valentine’s Day unless they are buying something for someone else. The concept is still nevertheless being marketed to men elsewhere, namely through guys like Andrew Tate and other members of the Manosphere.

In other words, you can engage with this antagonism endlessly for free (well, monetarily speaking) online. So why are you going to give a corporation $30 on a cheap plastic sweater to do the same? Wouldn’t you rather just buy yourself the damn box of chocolates?

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I’m sorry that I’ve been away for the last month. Half of it was procrastination, and the other half was warranted. I don’t like to talk about my personal life much online, and so I largely won’t, but my father had a massive stroke before Christmas. We still don’t know what the outcome will be, long term. We might not really know for several months. This, paired with the usual business of the holidays themselves, had made writing and engaging in the usual New Years trend forecasting feel like an impossibility. But I’ve reached a point where I’m interested in writing again and being present where I can.

In some ways, stepping back a bit from this instinct to predict the culture before it happens and to take some part in shaping it myself has lent a new perspective. Maybe I’ve learned more from just observing. What I have found this year is that many people are displaying a profound sense of boredom. We’re bored with the Internet. We’re bored with the discourse. We’re especially bored with AI. But what seems different this year is that this boredom does not translate to apathy. It’s not a boredom that we’re letting ride out. Instead, I see more and more people looking for ways to shirk that boredom somewhere, somehow else.

I see 2026 as the year when people actually take the effort to live a life more offline in good faith, and from a place of genuine desire to do so. It isn’t just some niche trend like the “Luddite teens” who opt for flip phones or the return of book clubs, though it’s these things, too. It’s a subtle change, the vague sense that the novelty has worn thin. That joke isn’t funny anymore. This sweater is last season. I’m tired of this show, and I’m ready to change the channel.

A vibe shift, if you will.

I wrote a quick essay for Playboy hinting at all this and what it might mean for sex this year. Ever the optimist I am, I like to believe that this is a year sex will become fun and weird (good weird) again. What happens when we keep our phones sitting on the charger and take some time to actually look at each other again? Free from the gaze of the digital dating panopticon? Rediscovering the meaning of privacy?

It’s not like we’re going to be completely offline, though, and I don’t think many of us would really want to be. It’s rather about seeing our phones and online lives for the utilities that they are instead of our de-facto source of entertainment and interaction. I don’t know, is that naive? It might be. But I’d rather be naive than think we’re going to spend even more time this year on gooning and AI slop. It’s just not that interesting anymore. I don’t care if it’s easier than ever for a guy to catfish someone into thinking he’s a sexy gamer e-girl. I don’t care if this image is real or fake. I’m just going to log off and look at what I know is real in front of me.

I picked Georges Bataille’s Erotism off my shelf the other day, a book I’d probably say I’d read if pressed when I’ve really only skimmed. Yet I was struck immediately by the very first line of the introduction: “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”

!

Eroticism is not defined merely by its proximity to the sensual or sexual. It is instead defined by an affirmation of existence and humanity beyond ourselves. The erotic is that which suggests there is something greater, embodied in the sensual or sexual.

For years I have been attempting to describe what it is about our sexual culture that has felt so anti-erotic. In this one line of Bataille, I now feel closer to defining it. The anti-erotic is that which suggests nothing but itself. — no intimacy, no transcendence, arguably not even real pleasure.

“Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children,” notes Bataille. He clarifies that the “fundamental meaning” of reproduction is nevertheless linked to the erotic, in that it deals with the fact that we are “discontinuous beings” able to create more “discontinuous beings’ who, by their nature, are very much a continuation of ourselves. Erotism positions the erotic as a way of grappling with this dichotomy: “the concern is to substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity,” a method of feeling that there is something that lasts against the knowledge that we will one day die.

Now to bring us back to reality. Much of our sexual culture today, especially that which we see online, is a representation of “simple sexual activity.” It’s sexuality placed under a hydraulic press to the point that there is nothing useful or recognizable of it. And I wonder if what feels so stark and repulsive about it is that on some subconscious level it reminds us of death in the anxious way Bataille describes, telling us that we are only discontinuous beings and in death that discontinuity remains. The anti-erotic, in fact, embraces this reality. The men of gooner communities on Twitter or Reddit who encourage each other to accept porn addiction, isolation and depravity are an example of this. The emptiness of it all is the point. I do not doubt that those who engage in all this are looking for some sort of meaning of their own, but it is a crude aberration. It functions as a distraction in the absence of meaning.

The erotic, on the other hand, functions as a spiritual salve against this. It is a reminder in the form of sexuality that some form of interlinkedness beyond ourselves persists.

In other news, I am still figuring out what to make of the popularity of Heated Rivalry. I watched one episode, and I don’t really feel all that inclined to watch another. I didn’t hate it, it’s just that, for all the gay sex it features, I was still kind of bored! For anyone who isn’t aware (probably my mom — hi mom!) Heated Rivalry is a new HBO show based on a series of books about two rival professional hockey players who develop a very physical secret romance. They are extremely, almost exclusively, popular with women. The show is for women. Yet it is about very gay sex. So why is that? “I think that what women are presented in romance is not always something that interests them in that way,” says the show’s creator. “I think that women are also, in real life and in culture, endlessly exposed to sexual violence… So you’re watching something happen between two men, and there is no fear of violence. There is no fear of things turning into stuff that women have to deal with too much in real life, and don’t want to deal with in their fantasies.”

Well, sorry, but that fucking sucks! It sucks to think that women are so afraid of sexual violence that they can’t even be involved in their own sexual fantasies. And I really, really, don’t blame them at all for thinking that way. I’m not going to argue that there is anything harmful about Heated Rivalry, after all, it’s just a smutty TV show that women are enjoying. But I’m not sure there is necessarily anything beneficial about it, either. Overall, it feels like a very “safe” compartment for women to place their sexuality. But is it actually erotic? That’s an essay for next week.

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Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Today marks the third anniversary of the launch of this newsletter. It has genuinely changed my life, and I am continuously grateful for this platform and the readers who have found me on it. It’s never lost on me how lucky I am to be here, doing this. It’s my north star.

To honor all that, I am, of course, offering a 50 percent sale on paid subscriptions. Those of you who sign up during this sale will get to hold onto this rate forever. If you are at all interested in supporting my work, in pursuing these difficult questions about sexuality and culture and gender relations, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber. Thank you for being here, regardless.

I figure now is as good a time as any to do the sort of long-winded musing that brought me here. Recently I was thinking of how common it is to discuss women who have “let themselves go” and are no longer interested in sexually appealing to men, including their spouse. There’s already a lot to problematize about this framing, namely the labor of sexual appeal and whether being sexually appealing is even an option. Always, sex appeal is presented as something we choose, and are moreover obligated to choose. And in many ways I don’t think this is an inherently false framing. As a young woman, I am conscious of my decision to be sexually appealing and to amplify that appeal through certain behaviors and aesthetic choices, like doing my makeup or wearing form fitting clothing. But there is also an extent to which being sexually appealing is not a choice: many women know they are just as likely to be catcalled in sweatpants and unwashed hair as they are when they’re dressed for a night out. All around, though, it’s women who are asked to interrogate their relationship with desirability. But neither men nor women alike are being asked to interrogate their relationship with desiring.

Desiring in the 21st century has only really been assessed through one acute window. Who we desire and who we don’t is a political matter. To not be sexually attracted to people of a marginalized identity, for example, is considered by some to contribute to their marginalization. Meanwhile, to be exclusively attracted to someone of a marginalized identity (when not of a marginalized identity, oneself) makes one a “chaser,” which is also further marginalizing. This isn’t to get into the weeds of what these desires themselves represent, but to highlight an example of one of the primary contexts through which the act of desiring is frequently discussed. Desiring is categorized and abstracted, much in the way of a porn category. The individual, be it the one desiring or the one desired, is superfluous.

One of the most famous works on the sexual politics of the 21st century deals with this dynamic. In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan wrote “The question​… is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.”

I suppose I bring all this up in order to get it out of the way. I am not suggesting that men are under any political obligation to be attracted to women who have, willfully or otherwise, stepped outside of the norms of sex appeal through age, effort or style. But I do think that if we are to question why someone is no longer desirable, we must also question why we are no longer experiencing desire. And perhaps while there is no political obligation for desire, a more personal obligation to one another remains.

There is an extent to which I do believe married couples owe a mutual desire to one another. This requires some effort and intentionality, yes, but above all it requires understanding. We should try to be appealing to our spouses in whatever ways we are capable of, but we should also try to find our spouses appealing even as we change and grow and age. This is, by my view, part of what the commitment of marriage begs of us.

As I write all this, I can’t help but pause and think, well, who the hell am I even talking to? I am lucky to have readers of all demographics here, including those who are long married, but a good deal of you are likely so distant from even the possibility of marriage that my discussion of these later-in-life nuances may seem irrelevant. It’s not.

We are far more concerned with being desirable than desiring. Much of contemporary life is now shaped around quelling desire, or at least selling us the idea of such a possibility. GLP-1s, the miracle drug of the last decade, are in many use cases strictly about quieting desire. Our phones provide a continuous medium through which desire can be diverted and sublimated. The gender war offers an escape from desire by making it politically unpalatable.

Desire requires — and sorry to always be repeating myself here — a vulnerability with both oneself and others that many of us have discarded. Desire requires us to be willing to give, to suffer, to be willing to allow someone else be the recipient of the good feelings that we crave because this itself is supposed to feel good. Maybe the problem is that in our current culture of maximum dopamine, maximum independence, maximum cult-of-the-self it no longer really does feel good. So then if I cannot convince people that desire is a rewarding emotion in that sense, I must instead try to position desire as a human obligation. Desire is something we owe to one another, even when it is thankless. To give up on desire is to abandon the social contract.

Last night I was reading French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s 2001 book Platform which, like all his books, deals with apathy and western decline and jaded sexuality. In this particular novel, though, sex takes distinct dominance. In one paragraph, the protagonist summarizes what I’d say is fundamentally the thesis of this entire newsletter:

“Sexual liberation in the west is over… They’ve completely lost the sense of giving,” he says of westerners. “Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren’t up to porn standards, but for some reason they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It is impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness… we have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that, we are obsessed with health and hygiene. These are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love.”

And this was nearly 25 years ago! That acute consciousness of our individual existence that Houellebecq describes has only magnified under the digital lens. So, too, has that sense that we are “for some reason” no longer attracted to the body of the other. The constant examination of why someone is no longer attractive gets at this precisely. It’s not us that’s the problem, it’s everyone else. As the gender war continues, this reality becomes all the more apparent. We are constantly being offered new reasons why we should not like each other that are abstract from our daily lives — because Scott Galloway is too focused on masculinity, because one woman who graduated from Wharton thinks men don’t make adequate partners in the “business” of life, whatever other news stories you might have read recently. And no doubt, men and women alike have some things we need to be working on. We do have problems, real ones, that require improvement. But this continuous criticism of each other and the perceived lack of desirability does not address what may be the fundamental issue driving it all: that we as individuals no longer wish to be entities who desire.

We must orient ourselves again as people who desire, not just people who are desirable. Desire itself is the obligation. Can we return to that? Can we reacquaint ourselves with the discomfort of abandon, with the possibility of weakness for the sake of a life of deeper meaning and social good? I’ll always think we can.

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As you might have seen me share, the latest issue of Playboy on which I served as Senior Editor and wrote several stories is out now. You can find it at Barnes and Noble, or Casa and Iconic Magazine if you’re in NYC. In it, I have a profile of (which she said might be her favorite piece of writing on her!) as well as a feature on the infamous Bop House. Hopefully, those stories will be online soon, but it’s been one of my greatest privileges to create these stories for print.

Here’s what else I’ve been thinking about lately, though.

Why Everything and Nothing is Embarrassing

Last week, I attended a panel hosted by the dating app Hinge on the state of Gen Z dating. The panel built upon the app’s recent release of their second "D.A.T.E. Report,” or Data, Advice, Trends and Expertise, and emphasized the central theme of “the communication gap.” According to their data and analysis, Gen Z in particular is craving deeper, more intimate communication, yet is even more hesitant than Millennials to initiate it.

Wrapped up in all this is a lot of interesting anecdotes on gender and vulnerability — there’s a discrepancy, for example, between women’s perception of men’s desire for deep conversation and men’s actual desire for it. Overall, men are more interested in meaningful conversation than women expect. But at the same time, men are more likely to report fears of being “cringe” in asking these questions, and more likely to abstain from doing so.

Despite all this anxiety over vulnerability, one theme that was repeated by some on the panel was that Gen Z is broadly experiencing vulnerability fatigue, as though they’ve been so vulnerable for so long that they’ve become exhausted by it and given up. One of the specific terms used was actually “vulnerability hangover.” That’s telling — we’ve drunk too much from the well of vulnerability and now we’re sitting in the discomfort of the aftermath. On the surface, this contrasts with what I also wrote just last week, that we’re experiencing a crisis of vulnerability wherein no one is willing to be vulnerable. If we scratch a bit deeper, though, I think it’s all one in the same.

We have a completely polarized relationship with embarrassment. On the one hand, we’ve built a culture that seeks to “normalize” all of our worst behaviors — over spending, bed rotting, doom scrolling, whatever. We’re not embarrassed when we annoy our neighbors on the train while watching TikToks out loud, or that we haven’t cooked a meal at home all week. At the same time, our personal lives and our sense of self is riddled with fear of embarrassment. There is continuous suspicion of other people’s intentions and neuroticism over our own. One telling anecdote from the Hinge report is that half of Gen Z says that social media has made them more hesitant to be emotionally open.

What all of this suggests to me is that embarrassment and vulnerability have been turned entirely inward. They are not emotions that result from outside experiences but feelings that are born inward. We have been liberated by the forms of shame that would require us to value our social ties or a greater good but have been chained to this lesser embarrassment of the self. Social media, for all its framing as social, is often really just a mirror. We’re hesitant to be emotionally open because it would require constant confrontation with our own image. And that, too, is a natural occurrence, an instinctive revulsion. We’re not supposed to be thinking about ourselves this much!

During the panel, psychotherapist and certified sex coach Shadeen Francis said something that struck me: a lot of us feel like the worst thing that can happen to us is having a feeling. “Our feelings are not a danger to us,” she said. Embarrassment, too, is not a danger to us. But it is a signal of something valuable. We shouldn’t be afraid of experiencing embarrassment where it actually counts: treating other people well, seeking connection, striving for something better. We shouldn’t be afraid of the embarrassment of true vulnerability. This growing culture that encourages us to live like we’re the only person with consciousness, though? Embarrassment is a utility against it.

Yes, “May I Meet You” Is a Perfectly Good Pick-up Line

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Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Shame does not feel good. It’s understandable we’d want to avoid it. We have entire social systems and norms in place to do so. Even so, shame has served as a productive tool, a hermeneutic element of being human. We learn a lot from shame. But in recent years, shame has instead been replaced with something far more trivial. Shame has been traded for embarrassment.

The entire arc of contemporary sex, dating and relationships is centered on one central objective: avoid embarrassment at all costs.

The latest discourse on whether having a boyfriend is “embarrassing” distills this well. The function of a relationship, in this context, is not companionship but only an extension of how you are viewed by the outside world. And if that outside world deems it embarrassing, well, then, it’s clearly not worth your time. The outside world in question, it’s worth noting, is not your immediate friends or family — it is the Internet, the other, the abstract that is forming the terms of this embarrassment in the first place. If your actual loved ones found reason to see your relationship as embarrassing, that would be worth considering. But that isn’t the conversation here. Instead, it’s flatly that having a boyfriend no longer aligns a woman with the current culturally acceptable narrative.

There is some merit to the original “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” article that proposed the question. As author Chanté Joseph wrote, much of this so-called embarrassment is actually just a refrain from posting about one’s personal life online. Some play it coy, by posting faceless photos of a man’s body across from them at a restaurant or other images that suggest a partner is present, but his identity will remain a mystery. Some, seemingly in fear that someone will try to sabotage their relationship, post photos where the man’s face is entirely blurred. Others, like myself, rarely post about their man at all.

All three of these behaviors stem, I think, from a similar place of desiring boundaries between our digital and personal lives. It’s often appropriate to not want everyone in your business. To reframe the original question of the article, having a boyfriend isn’t embarrassing, but maybe posting about him is.

The majority of where this conversation originates is not quite so straightforward, though. This is not some reckoning in how much of ourselves we give to the Internet. Instead, it is further neuroticism over who we are online and romantically, with the gender war as the arbiter.

“On the Delusional Diaries podcast, fronted by two New York-based influencers, Halley and Jaz, they discuss whether having a boyfriend is ‘lame’ now,” explained Joseph. “‘Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?’ read a top comment. ‘Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,’ read another with thousands of likes. In essence, ‘having a boyfriend typically takes hits on a woman’s aura,’ as one commenter claimed.”

@ivafunIt’s embarrassing? TUH DONT GOTTA TELL ME TWICE #vogue #embarrasingboyfriend #boyfriendproblems it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend Vogue

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Here we have reached the ideal nexus of the gender war and the digital dating panopticon: it is not just that women do not like men, but that they do not want to be seen online liking men by other women. To be clear, this is something the manosphere has been doing for ages. Among both MGTOW forums and followers of Nick Fuentes, shaming men who “betray” the cause by having relationships with women is a common occurrence. These types of guys are moreover part of the reason why having a boyfriend has become embarrassing — they’re both loud and bad enough to make all men undesirable by association.

But this itself is what has always concerned me about the anti-men, anti-dating attitude among young women: it’s just the inverse of what we hear from the groypers. The threat these attitudes present to women versus what they present to men are obviously not the same (women are far more likely to experience violence from misogyny than men are from misandry), but some of the results yielded are the same. Either way, the discourse is trying to make an incel out of you.

I think a lot of this goes deeper than the basic online gender war conversation, though. All of this stems back to a crisis of vulnerability. Whether it’s the Tea app or “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook groups or a growing ideology of puritanical misogyny among young men or the rising numbers of people opting out of sex and dating entirely, the message is that intimacy is a threat to your ego. The only way to protect it is to absorb an attitude of defensiveness, wherein fear is your guiding principle.

It isn’t that men have broadly become embarrassing by association. Instead, we’re just more afraid of being embarrassed. We’re afraid of being someone who desires love and sex and connection and companionship. We’re afraid of acknowledging ourselves as having emotional needs that require another person for fulfillment. We’re afraid of other people seeing this need within us.

Slavoj Žižek spoke about this several years back in discussing our fear of “falling” in love. “I think today we are I think that today we are simply more and more afraid of these ‘event’ encounters you encounters, something which is totally contingent but the result of it, if you accept it, is an event that your entire life changes,” he says, describing the sort of meet-cute encounters that we might romantically describe as love at first sight. “This is why I think that this avoiding falling in love is the same phenomenon as a standard joke that I use in almost all my books, how we want today the thing without the bet aspect of it, without the price we have to pay for it. We want sugar without calories. We want beer without alcohol. It’s the same thing in sexuality: we want brief, safe sex sexual encounters without the fall, without this fatal attachment… life is just a play of appearances, don’t take it too seriously, maintain a proper distance, don’t get too attached to early objects — it fits perfectly, this superficial consumerist attitude.”

That’s the tradeoff here: everything good and true and real comes with risk. Embarrassment is that risk. Vulnerability is that trade. What I don’t think Žižek saw when he first discussed this, though, is how over time these risks have made us not want the thing at all. The sugar-free candy and alcohol-free beer reflect not a desire for sugar and beer without the consequences but a lack of desire at all. People aren’t having brief, risk-free safe sex: they just aren’t having sex. The only real desire that remains is that of avoidance. The “want” is to avoid embarrassment.

The saddest part of all this, of course, is that love inherently requires embarrassment. It requires a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, a fall we may not quickly rise back up from. It requires allowing someone else to look within our whole selves. It requires a willingness to fracture our sense of self and reckon with the cracks. As anyone who has been in love knows, that exchange is worth it. More than worth it. It’s a new fulfillment of its own. But something has shifted to where we’re not just afraid of the embarrassment of love, but the embarrassment of how other people might see us if we even begin to approach that risk. Is it that we’re being viewed and assessed and dissected now online? Is it that we’re thinking of ourselves too much? Are we looking at other people’s lives online with more scrutiny, and worrying everyone else is doing the same?

A lot of this gender war nonsense is just a side effect of this overwhelming cycle. We weren’t supposed to be seeing this much of each other, of random people and their views and inner monologues. It’s a cycle that, just like the gender war, wants us to choose these abstract narratives over our own personal lives. Isn’t that embarrassing?

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Cuffing season begins before your Halloween hangover has even worn off on November 1st. Every store is already covered in tinsel, and most of the dating apps have begun to remind you that you will be alone this holiday season if you don’t act now.

It’s not just the dating apps: even DoorDash has its own cuffing season campaign this year, with a report saying that 94 percent of single respondents surveyed plan to participate in the act of cuffing, accompanied by a spike in weekend orders for toothbrushes and clean sheets.

I’m not shy about my affinity for holidays and annual rituals, even when they’re basically just an opportunity to sell us something. Who cares if Valentine’s Day was invented by candy companies? I like candy! And so if companies want to use this transition into winter as an impetus to put love on the brain, that should be fine.

Cuffing season is, after all, a natural occurrence, maybe even a biological response to our shifting desires and expectations as cold creeps in. We want someone to keep us company in a season so centered on connection. We want someone literally to keep us warm.

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It’s as though we’re all tuned in to this emotional weather system. In the winter, we feel a call to couple up. In the summer, an easy-breezy fling beckons. And like the commercial candy campaigns, all that is fine — until something like “embracing the seasons” starts to feel like an emotional pressure system we’re no longer navigating on our own terms.

With that pressure, of course, comes anxiety. It makes all of this feel less like a fun reason to cozy up with someone for Christmas and more of an existential dread over whether you’ll be alone forever. And so if you do decide to “participate” by looking for dates, the desperation is already dripping off of you. You’re not doing this because you want to, you’re doing it because you feel obligated — not just biologically, but culturally.

For the last several years, though, this anxiety over the season has been paired with fatigue. The concept of “dating app fatigue” has been dissected to death, especially by me. Even as tons of new apps try to re-work the dynamics that brought the fatigue on in the first place, from swiping to messaging to never actually meeting IRL, there remains a general sense of, why bother? All this together, in a time of year where we should be enjoying ourselves and the company of others, strikes me as a particularly nasty example of the general malaise that defines this current moment. We’ve taken all the fun out of it.

But this is supposed to be fun. And I think, actually, having fun is still possible — with some careful reframing. One strength of cuffing season is that it asks us to be in touch with our instincts. It itself is a reflection of them. It’s obvious, though, that not all of us quite know how to do that. We not only don’t know what we want, we’re moreover unable to interrogate the uncertainty of it. Part of why so many people are experiencing dating app fatigue, I think, is because they so often expect us to frame up and box our desires without much introspection into what they are, leaving us disappointed with the results. Cuffing season has often been treated the same: you’re told to settle in and settle down, without much introspection on whether that is your own instinct or one that’s been pushed upon you.

I’ve always been an advocate of people finding love, sex, connection — whatever it is they actually want — but the critical component is that it’s on their own terms. It’s easy to see how much of the cuffing season rhetoric is a distortion of that, encouraging you to pursue not what you yourself want but what is currently convenient.

Feeld is one of the many dating apps engaging with the cuffing season campaign cycle, but, somewhat predictably, their messaging differs from others in the space. Rather than emphasizing this one season of connection, they’ve been underscoring this period as one of many fluctuations in the aforementioned emotional weather system. And maybe if we’re actually a bit more attuned to our desires or even just the fact that we’re unsure of them, navigating these fluctuations becomes a bit less exhausting.

I’ve been critical of Feeld in the past, just as I have every dating app. I’d prefer a world with less technological intervention in the course of our personal lives, but what I’d prefer even more than that is a world where people are capable of pursuing connection and fulfillment (whatever that might mean for them!) and actually getting it.

In a time when we’re circling around discourse about whether having a boyfriend is “embarrassing,” there’s something respectable in both a full-throated acknowledgement of one’s desires and confidence in one’s ambiguity surrounding them. Maybe they’re using it because they want to add to their polycule, maybe they’re using it because they want monogamy, maybe they’re just using it because they want to peg someone this weekend. At very least, they are concrete in wanting something. A lot of us have become so jaded that we can’t quite say the same.

Whether you’re on an app like Feeld or any other, whether you’re actively calling it cuffing season or not, there is something about this time of year that calls upon us to connect. However we do that, let it be on our own terms.

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Happy Halloween. It’s probably a bit of a loss to publish on a Friday afternoon in general, nevermind one that’s also a holiday. But I was inspired today! So, here I am. I love this holiday. I am overwhelmed by the holiday. I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to wear tonight on this holiday. Anyway…

The problem with nostalgia is that it makes an unreliable narrator out of you. Was Halloween always like this? Did it always feel this way? Or is that feeling of disappointment the natural shift of no longer being a child? Are your memories of how it all was before even correct?

The past is incandescent; the present is LED. Nothing feels as warm, as inviting, as natural as it did “before.” Halloween has become a prominent focal point for this, as have holidays writ large. I feel it myself, wondering why the excitement for a season I’ve always loved isn’t rising to what it used to be. I buy what few decorations I can justify storing in my apartment, play spooky movies in the background, even do Halloween-y paint-by-numbers crafts. I am still enjoying myself, to be sure, but something about it just isn’t the same.

Part of this feeling surely just is me: I’m older, and Halloween isn’t targeted toward me anymore. Of course the kid stuff isn’t as fun for me now that I’m not a kid and also don’t have any of my own yet. But that isn’t exactly what’s going on: everywhere are opportunities for me, a childless adult, to engage in the record-breaking $13.1 billion Halloween economy, from elaborate parties to endless TJMaxx merchandise hitting the shelves in early August to curated horror movies on every streaming platform. And lately, it has felt more and more that Halloween has little to do with children, at all.

The Disney Adult Effect

There are obviously many events that are still geared to children alone. Trick or treating (don’t even get me started on trunk or treating) is still exclusively for them. As they should be! But still, there are spaces — like Disney — that are targeted toward children on paper yet finding plenty of money from adults without them.

I actually went to Disney World in October, surrounded by children and adults alike. Little did I feel that the experience was in any way spoiled by the much-maligned “Disney Adult,” i.e. usually childless adults who spend much of their time and money on the juvenile fantasy universe of Disney. I’ve always had sympathy for the Disney Adult — its an expansive ecosystem of rich narrative and myth, centered in a beautiful, walkable physical space. It is an accessible world of meaning at a time when people are searching for it.

My sense, though, is that Halloween is being given the same treatment. We’re adopting something for kids because we similarly crave meaning and revelry and tradition. What works about Disney is that it is a rigidly, carefully designed thing, from its merchandise to its films to its parks. There is no element of it that hasn’t been intentionally crafted from the top down. Halloween, for better or worse, does not have this. And so instead, Halloween-inclined adults look for this structure elsewhere — and they’ve found it in horror.

The Commercial Horror Element

Please allow me to sound like Joyce Carol Oates for a minute.

Horror is now the fastest rising film genre, with its market share having doubled between 2013 and 2023. One of the top-selling franchises at Spirit Halloween this year is the Terrifier trilogy. These movies feature Art the Clown, a sadistic supernatural killer who continuously finds new and unique ways to torture and slaughter his victims. In one, he breaks and tears a young woman’s limbs, removes her scalp and cuts out chunks of flesh for her back before dousing her open wounds in bleach and salt, all while she’s still alive. In another, he sodomizes a man with a chainsaw. I only know these details by reading about them and having watched select clips — even as someone whose favorite genre is horror, these movies are far too much for me to witness at feature length. And yet, all this extreme gore has made Art the Clown not only a cult horror icon but a mainstream figure in Halloween.

Sure, you might have been seeing kids dressed as Michael Myers for decades now, maybe even the occasional Jigsaw from the Saw franchise. In all likelihood, kids who are engaging with these characters on Halloween haven’t even seen the movies themselves. Terrifier is nevertheless something of a different beast — what began as an ultra low-budget indie gross-out has become an international phenomenon. Terrifier 3 beat out Joker 2 its opening week, and is moreover the first unrated film to hit the top of the North American box office. Its popularity represents a new shift in American appetites for shock. There’s been a century-plus of horror movies that appalled their audiences upon release that often now feel quaint in their scares. Maybe it is just the natural progression of fear that we’d have to see someone hung up by their ankles and split in half in order to get our kicks. Whatever, it’s fine.

The bigger issue here is that it doesn’t quite feel that there’s a balance between this extreme adult version of Halloween and a version that is a bit more kid friendly. Because again, Halloween is not all that much for kids anymore, probably because there aren’t even that many kids in general, anymore. In their absence, though, we’re all still looking for ways to hold on to some semblance of community and tradition to mark the passage of time. Without the actual ties that hold community and tradition together, though, our only outlet is the commercialized version available to us in stores. As Justin Lee wrote in his essay “The Death of Halloween” in the Catholic publication First Things, “Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence.”

Now I don’t wish to attach quite so much meaning to it all. When I asked my readers yesterday via the subscriber chat what their feelings of Halloween were this year, many said it is better than ever.

“Not sure if it’s just my neighborhood but I feel like Halloween is WAY bigger than when I was a kid,” wrote Liam. “Not to be all ‘back in my day’ (I’m 26), but I seriously only ever remember getting dressed up on October 31st, maybe the 29th or 30th ONLY if Halloween fell on the weekend and I wanted to wear my costume to school.

I’ve noticed a lot more events leading up to the actual holiday where parents are bringing their kids in costume to ‘trick or treat’ block parties days before. Is this a Millennial thing? I can’t imagine my Gen X parents doing this for me and my siblings as kids - and they loved Halloween, block party, decor, big candy bars and all!”

Still just as many were less optimistic. But one reader, BD, put it well: “I rarely trust people’s negative feelings towards holidays since they so often seem to be a mirror for their own lives. If they think the magic is gone then they’ve lost it themselves. If they think it’s commercial then they’ve stopped putting in effort and started buying it.”

And Of Course, The Costumes

Costumes are still fun. There’s only so much gross-out terror the majority of us are capable of accomplishing through makeup, and so even the scariest of costumes still tends to lean camp. I was listening to a recent episode of Stavvy’s World (lol) where he and guest Ryan Sickler were discussing whether Halloween costumes have always been so sexy, and whether that is a bastardization of the holiday. I do not actually think costumes have gotten any sluttier in the last twenty years, at least. The lingerie-esque cat or nurse or angel costume has been on the shelves for as long as I remember. The market for these types of costumes is undoubtedly bigger in its selection, but I’m not sure it is any wider of a phenomenon or any more explicit than it’s been in recent memory.

But the costume world is more memeified. Dressing up as something that is only legible through a picture on Twitter is a meme unto itself. “I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean you’re…” has trended for the last several years, with (I guess mainly gay?) people ironically outdoing each other for how niche and online their costume can be. Sorry to be a downer about everything, but it is yet another example of how deeply many of us live for our phones. The costume has no purpose other than a post on your Instagram story. It’s not as though a non-meme costume escapes this, either: if it weren’t for the opportunity to show off our participation, plenty of people would probably just as soon stay in. And I’m no different! I will be posting my costume on social media tonight!

On a semi-tangential note, Grindr was kind enough to share some data on gay Halloween with me. According to their data, 61 percent of 1,100 respondents expect to have sex tonight. 41 percent would like their date to keep their costume on in the act. Meanwhile, 82 percent said they’ve been aroused by the thrill of a scare.

So, again, Halloween is certainly more adult. But, at very least, some of us are making the best of it.

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When Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, I imagine there was excitement to the concept. To be a cyborg was to be liberated from the boundaries that separate human from nature, human from animal, human from machine. There’s a lot more to it — Haraway has said she feels that “very few people are taking what I consider all of its parts” in their embrace of her essay. I, too, will not be taking all of its parts. Her essay is less about the intertwining of human and machine as it is a work of feminist theory, but nevertheless the two aren’t separate. We can imagine, particularly from the viewpoint of 1985, a future in which the intertwining of human and machine led to further feminist emancipation. I’m not sure if in 2025 that viewpoint remains the same.

We have all been made cyborg, particularly from a sexual standpoint. For much of the population, our sexualities are inextricably linked to our phones, even if only in part. Whether it be through using dating apps to meet people, watching pornography, or using social media to display a specific vision of ourselves, our phones are a reproductive organ. Many of us do not understand our sexuality or its functions without our phones as mediators.

The weekend before last, I saw Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet, an interactive live performance at Performance Space NYC. In a large black box theater, the audience seated throughout the space, we were each asked to pull out our phones and open Instagram in order to participate. With some careful coordination, we all watched the same series of Instagram stories on our own screens as Mindy narrated the legacy of the Internet as a sexual engine from its origin. The phone was an extension of the performance but moreover an extension of ourselves and our bodies. The setting made this feel novel, almost foreign. On a day-to-day level, though, our use of our phones as an extension of the body has practically become instinct.

But the phone as reproductive organ isn’t actually all that reproductive. For many people, it is more of an impediment in real-world sex than it is a facilitator. The phone becomes not just an additional sex organ, but a replacement for the ones we’re no longer able to use to their full extent.

With our phones substituting much of the symbols of our bodies as sexually active, we have turned to artificial signifiers, instead. Kim Kardashian’s Skims’ brand has exemplified this on several occasions, from a bra with the built-in appearance of always-erect nipples to her latest merkin thong. This new underwear pairs an ultra-skimpy string thong with a curly faux bush to mimic the appearance of a full pubic bush, in a variety of skin and hair shades. “With this iconic new panty, your carpet can be whatever color you want it to be,” the listing for the already sold-out product reads. Surely it is just a limited-run gimmick, but Skims has become one of the biggest intimates brands in the business: when they release a product, some reality of consumer desire is on display.

What both of these garments say is that the body has grown so distinct from its status as a body that it must utilize artifice to suggest it. It’s a body that yearns to depict itself as human and lustful and of sexual maturity but is incapable of doing so. It is in many ways, a sexual cyborg: Inert and impotent, yet visually reminiscent of something real and erotically capable.

What’d odd, of course, is that most of us are theoretically capable of still displaying these signs in their natural form. Perhaps the Skims merkin is for the woman who has already lasered away all her pubic hair to the point where it never grows back. In any case, these items represent a want that is not naturally being fulfilled, a bodily void intended to be momentarily repaired.

For men, the constant advertising of Viagra alternatives on every guy-centric podcast represents a similar transformation. Blue Chew and similar products suggest that young men are experiencing increasing difficulty in performing sexually, or at very least are experience increasing anxiety toward it. In some cases, the problem may be one in the same: young men are anxious about being unable to get hard or last in bed, and the anxiety itself leads to the unwanted effect. Either way, the message is clear: the sexual body is not functioning as it should, and requires augmentation to fix it. Said augmentation can be purchased with a quick swipe of your fingers across the screen and a double-tap of a button, without ever having to leave home or turning off Stavvy’s World in your AirPods. Again, your phone is an extension of your reproductive organs, if not one if its own.

Last week, Harper’s published a deep dive by Daniel Kolitz on gooning, the practice and culture of ritualistic porn and masturbation addiction that I have routinely written about here. It is a frightening and sharply reported essay, one that has introduced the nauseating depths of techno/pornosexuality to the intellectual mainstream. “If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them,” he wrote, in what I think accurately summarizes the fatalism at much of the practice’s core. “‘Ruin your mind,’ ‘go deeper,’ ‘give up on life’: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries.”

In reporting the story, Kolitz created a questionnaire for gooners that, to his surprise, they eagerly answered. “What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history,” he wrote.

While it might take these sorts of essays to parse out the details of pornosexuality to the average audience, this point by Kolitz reveals that our own distance from it is not that far. Some of that distance, we can hope, will remain: most of us, even probably many of the gooners, do not delight in the fantasy of our own demise.

But even so, these stories accentuate that the ultra-fringe porn addict whose dick might as well be plugged into his computer is not nearly as fringe as you’d hope. The depravity has no limit; the depravity is the point. But while stories like this might make you look upon your own relationship with technosexuality with relief, it is almost a deflection. Even if we are not consciously thinking of ruining our lives of giving up on life, the signs that much of our culture has distanced itself from our organic symbols of vitality are already there in the form of direct-to-consumer merkins and Gen Z Cialis subscriptions. The sexual cyborg isn’t the person who fucks a robot. It’s not the person who is exclusively aroused by AI pornography. It is you and your phone.

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Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

A year ago, I asked a question that felt both obvious and unspoken at the time: do men and women even like each other anymore? It wasn’t the answer itself that was surprising — no, of course they don’t — but rather that this answer had already become an unquestioned part of culture. This animosity between men and women had reached a level to where the fundamental reality that we’re supposed to like each other was no longer a given.

But it still feels like we’re all due for a reminder, here: in order to make any of this work, we have to try to like each other.

There a lot of realms of life where this dynamic is not required. You don’t have to like your coworkers. Politicians do not have to like the representatives of foreign countries with whom they hope to make international agreements. The woman who slices pepper jack cheese at the Stop and Shop doesn’t have to like her customers in order to get the task done. In all these scenarios, though, everyone involved does at least have to be cordial (well, usually). And even then, it would be a whole lot easier if some liking were involved.

This is something we seem to have done away with, romantically. Men and women are not even cordial! The distaste has run so deep that many of us are hardly capable of simply being nice. So maybe, let’s try to start there.

I hate so always circle back to these elementary school platitudes, but it is this type of basic decorum that is missing from the gender war conversation. Treat others how you wish to be treated. Consider how another person might be feeling. Do we all need a reminder of the “T.H.I.N.K” acronym? That before we speak we should consider whether what we have to say is true, helpful, inspiring, necessary or kind?

Of course, one problem with this is that the gender war itself has distorted what we might consider true and necessary, and moreover that these falsehoods take precedent over the requirement to be kind. Every interaction is an opportunity for righteous indignation; rather than pursue dating for our own sake, the opposite sex is a target for broader political hostility. And thus rather than treating other people as, well, other people, we treat them instead as an ideological enemy.

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Both sides here bristle at the idea of being nice, but the motivations differ. For men, there is a specific belief that being nice to women “gets them nowhere.” I recall in the panel I participated in at the University of Chicago over the winter, fellow panelist Clay Travis tried to argue that none of the young women in the audience would be willing to date a guy making six figures as a plumber. I replied that many of these women likely would, at least at some point in their lives, if this hypothetical plumber were nice to them. This idea that women today think they’re “too good” to date someone in the trades is a ego-protecting fantasy. While there are undoubtedly some women with this mentality, the vast majority would be happy to partner up with someone without a college education who makes a solid income. Men in trades like this who are getting rejected aren’t doing so because of their jobs. There is something else going on — perhaps a deficit in kindness. This hypothetical plumber navigates the dating world with the belief that women don’t like him because women are superficial bitches, and he treats them as such. He gets rejected by them accordingly. Then he continues on in this mental cycle that he is being rejected because of his job, rather than the truth that he simply does not treat women well. And on it goes.

The specific detail of career here could be replaced with most any other trait. The plumber element is somewhat irrelevant — there is nothing inherent to being a plumber that makes this a particular problem for them. All my respect to the plumbers out there. But there is a significant set of men, plumbers or otherwise, who have internalized the narrative of “nice guys finish last” to the point of cruelty.

I’ve been spending far less time on Twitter/X lately, by some grace of God. I popped on over there today to see a photo of a young couple going viral. The girl is a conventional tan and blonde beauty, while the guy was heavier set. She has her arm around him, he has his hand on her inner thigh. “What the fuck am I doing wrong?” the original poster asked, as though he’s so much more worthy of an attractive woman than the man in the photo. There could be any number of reasons why this couple is together, ranging from “he has a lot of money” to “love at first sight.” I have absolutely no fucking clue who these people are or the nature of their relationship. But to answer the original poster’s question, in all likelihood, the answer is: you’re not being nice to women. And I don’t mean being a pushover, or spoiling her with nice dates and presents, or letting her walk all over you. I mean treating her with basic respect. You know, like a human being. When I commented as much, I was practically met with ridicule. Several men commented with cry-laughing emojis.

No, women do not like what other men might perceive to be as a “nice guy” who doesn’t stand up for himself. Women do not like guys who think of themselves as “nice guys” but are actually exclusively wielding their so-called kindness for sex and then become hostile to women when they don’t receive it. But women do like men who are genuinely, authentically, without ulterior motive, nice to women in general. Men who balk at the idea that women might like men who are kind to them are not actually nice to women. This is why they don’t believe it to be true — because they have never been nice enough for it to work. Because they do not actually like women.

This is again what separates the problem of gender relations today from that of the past. Pick up artists, as I mentioned in my original essay on these themes, did and sometimes still do like women. They are also a set of people who did not often advocate for being nice to women. Many argued something of the opposite, encouraging men to “neg” or lightly insult women as a flirting tactic. Looking at this, one might again be tempted to believe that women do not like men who are nice to them. But when you are a man who actually likes women and wants to enjoy their company, these jabs come off as flirtation rather than strictly an insult.

To many online men today, being nice to women is preposterous. It’s laughable. They don’t want to believe it to be true because it would require a fundamental shift in not only how they view women but how they view themselves. Never would I say that being nice is the only thing required to make a man attractive to a woman. Ambition, good looks, money, charisma — these all help, too. It would be preposterous to think that niceness alone is all that it takes in the ineffable swirl of emotion that makes up attraction. But niceness is, in the romantic arena and most others in our lives, the foundation. And it is that specifically that we’ve forgotten.

Now where does women’s kindness come into this? My grasp on this is less firm. On an immediate level, there are many men for whom a woman’s niceness is entirely secondary: even if she is unkind to him, his attraction to her will not wane. For others, however, the attraction is directly linked to niceness, even confused by it: people often mistake flirtation for what is ultimately just a polite or thoughtful interaction. Many women moreover feel as though they’ve been trained to be nice to their own detriment, favoring the feelings of men and everyone else over their own wellbeing. But as with men, I think women are experiencing a macro dislike of the opposite sex that has become normalized to the point of being unquestioned. The viral essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men,” published in the New York Times over the summer about the widespread heterofatalism women are experiencing, reveals this right in its name. The trouble with liking men is that it is framed as trouble, at all. While the unkindness here might be framed more philosophically, it is nevertheless not nice to position men as wholly unpleasant to have an attraction toward.

This frustration and sense of “trouble” is often justified (and believe it or not, so is men’s frustration toward women sometimes, too). Online, though, this shared apathy routinely bubbles into a more full-throated aggression. But the big problem with it is that it doesn’t get us anywhere. Most of us aren’t actually meant to divest from men entirely. Most of us should still want and desire them, and vice-versa. Both sides have instead absorbed this idea that their antagonism is a political act, a challenge to the tyranny across the battle lines.

There was a time that this whole heterosexuality thing was working. There were decades in which women had financial, legal, bodily, sexual autonomy from men and still people managed to date and have sex and get married. What’s stopping us from doing that again? I don’t know that it will be so simple as trying to be nice to each other again. At least it’s somewhere to start.

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I’d also like to take this opportunity to once again thank my paid subscribers who make this writing possible. I go to these dating app parties for you! If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, I’d love for you to consider upgrading. I’m offering a quick 25 percent off sale to further entice you.

Candace Bushnell doesn’t think it’s all worth it for women anymore. We’re only attracted to ten percent of men, she told me one strikingly dewy April evening, and if we can’t have that then we might as well just be alone. Bushnell probably does not realize she’s touting off a commonly repeated claim of incel forums, but it’s not as though she has sympathy for them. In fact, she thinks porn is probably what’s making men so bad these days, a claim itself often repeated by radical feminists. We happened to be at Onieals, the restaurant used as the setting for Sex and the City’s own Scout bar owned by Miranda’s (ex) husband. I wasn’t expecting to meet her that night. I’d been invited to the press launch party for When We First, a combined matchmaking service and dating app. It was the third dating app related event I’d been invited to that week, and the third I’d attend. I figured this last one would be casual, a mixer of sorts. “Let me introduce you to Candance,” one of the PR women said moments after the first cosmo made it to my hands.

In practically the same breath, she hits me with another take, one that dominates the other side of the Gender War spectrum: maybe the problem is actually porn, she says, and that men have been allowed to become lazy through the easy sexual fulfillment it offers. And then, before she’s whisked off to talk to the next guest, she finds a middle ground. Perhaps it’s all always been this bad. Perhaps men have always offered women so little, they have always been a bad trade when the alternative is just to continue on our own. The difference is that, like those consciousness-raising circles that emerged in the 1960s, we’ve developed new words and ways of identifying what’s wrong with it all — through social media.

The night before I met Marco. Marco has never had to use a dating app. He’s 6’4, let’s start with that. He is fit, but, you know, not too fit. He’s muscle-y enough to see the general size of his biceps through his suede button down without it looking like he’d be weird about what he ate when you went out to dinner. He’s German, lives in Amsterdam but was born in Curacao. If he doesn’t come from money, he probably has some now.

On an early spring week that oscillated between winter cold and summer humidity, thirteen and a half years after the launch of Tinder, Marco introduced his dating app, Breeze, to the New York City market. His was one of three announcing itself to the city that week, each scrambling to tap into the same desperation each also claimed to solve. The PR teams they’d hired all reached out to me separately, unaware of the rest. Each had a different hook — here’s an app that claims to prevent ghosting, here’s one that doesn’t have a chat function, here’s another that incorporates matchmakers. Each, however, all banked on the exact same premise: Something is fractured in contemporary romance. Let us be the cure.

I met with Marco first that week at Public Display of Affection, a restaurant selected by his PR team for its name. I arrived late, blaming (but not lying) my tardiness on an impromptu visit from my landlord in response to a leaky ceiling. In my Uber over, I contemplated the German stereotype of militaristic timeliness with each red light. Upon further reflection, I realized that I’d only been made aware of the stereotype via TikTok, where one particular creator banks on a series about what it’s like to date a German. He even looks a bit like Marco.

The real Marco was, of course, perfectly polite and understanding of my delay. Over meatballs and garlic bread and one glass of red wine in Prospect Heights, I had the app explained to me. I’d done some light initial research, but not much. A dating app is a dating app is a dating app. The main arc of my understanding of the app is that rather than having users spend time getting to know each other by messaging, the app arranges a set date, time and location for matched pairs to meet at partner restaurants. The bill is paid ahead of time, by both parties, equally.

My immediate response to this was, “well, that’s actually kind of smart,” and also, “no fucking thank you.” The idea of splitting the bill is obviously respectable in theory, but something I could not imagine myself (were I dating) or most other young women actually wanting to do. It makes sense for Europe, where the people going Dutch are literally Dutch, but here in New York? It felt like a tough sell. Should it, though? In New York, women often out-earn men at a time when we moreover outnumber them. Across the country, college enrollment among women has surged well beyond that of men. A New York Times headline that week read: “It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind.”

It’s perhaps with some of these dynamics in mind that, according to Marco, women have been quick to buy in to Breeze’s arrangement.

But Breeze’s novel approach does not end at its requirement for going Dutch. Breeze features no chat function whatsoever, no possibility for “getting to know each other” before actually getting to know each other by meeting in person. That’s not all there is to it, either, though. There is a third element that separates Breeze from the pack that the app has yet to promote, and probably never will. Marco only barely mentioned it offhand. Nowhere does the app ask you to list your political affiliation.

“New York is known as one of the most romantic spaces and it’s also the most transactional,” a man wearing several rings sighs. We’re at the launch party for After, an app whose biggest claim is that they prevent ghosting. The party is being held at The Ripped Bodice, a “romantic” bookstore where women can buy stickers that say “The man of my dreams exists in a book” or “monster smut” and baseball hats detailing their favorite romance novel tropes.

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Even prior to yesterday afternoon, I felt as though all I saw when I opened my phone was horror, division, anxiety, and hatred. And then, Charlie Kirk was killed.

I wasn't really sure how much about this I wanted to say myself. I was no fan of Charlie Kirk. Still, it is my personal belief — an aspect of my spiritual foundation, I suppose — that I think all people are worthy of our redemption and prayer for hope and change. To me, much of what Kirk espoused was corrosive to the soul, but so too is celebrating his death. All around, we’re bombarded with toxicity in large part because a set of tech companies have ran the numbers and found that it keeps us online longer.

This is not, obviously, the first time that somebody has been killed for their political beliefs in a public manner. It won't be the last, either. But what I do think separates this particular death and also speaks to the broader cultural environment that we have existed in over the last several years is how oversaturated it can feel, how exposed we are to the division of it all. It feels as though we are being pushed to divide and separate at every moment, not just online but within our own personal lives.

I’ve mentioned the repetition of the phrase “catching the last chopper out of ‘Nam,” and how it has come to represent what many see as the romantic future of young people. That is ultimately the only context I hear it used these days. Those of us lucky enough to have found love, to be in steady and committed relationships (especially ones formed separate from dating apps) are considered to have escaped something. We got out of all this — the gendered hostility, the suspicion, the surveillance, the loneliness — by the seat of our pants. And while I’ve found the sentiment that the phrase reflects useful in assessing our current attitude towards sex and relationships, it suggests a pessimism by which I don’t abide. This can’t be it, right? Surely it doesn’t end here.

Before Kirk’s death, I’d been circling around some conversations online about what the future of relationships for men and women might be along a political spectrum. An NBC Poll published earlier this week that the political division among young men and women has worsened further. This divide doesn’t merely cover policy issues like trade or border security, but the very values by which we organize our lives. While young men and women alike seem to agree that money is a top priority, there is a deep disparity in the value given to having children or getting married. Male Trump voters under 29 ranked having children as number one in their personal definition of success, while female Harris voters ranked it second to last out of thirteen choices. There is a deep incompatibility at play.

Some suspect that it is women who will undergo a corrective, first becoming more moderate and eventually taking on a perspective more aligned with the conservative beliefs of young men. Others, the opposite. Some (myself included) that a meeting in the middle is the ideal horizon. Within this conversation online, though, there was specific focus given to the state of “terminally online” men and women. The belief there is that terminally online women will continue to head left, terminally online men will continue to the right, and the men and women who have chosen to be offline will find harmony.

Of course, there’s some optimism there. It’s in line with many of other things I've said as a writer, encouraging people to get offline, whatever that means. However, I think we must nevertheless address what it means to be “terminally online” today.

In the past, it meant something like engaging heavily with 4Chan or being a moderator of niche subreddits. Maybe it meant you devoted most of your time to online video games. The point was that there was something fringe about it, some sort of specific and uncommon knowledge gained by thousands of hours spent online that made engaging in mainstream conversations a challenge.

That is no longer the case. There are few distinct differences between a “terminally online” young person and what we’d consider the “average” young person. If you are a young woman with a TikTok account used on a daily basis, even if you don’t post from it, you are likely to be “terminally online.”

Beyond the death of our attention spans and the wasting of our time, the consequence of this terminally online-ness is that it constantly exposes us to a set of beliefs that do not make us any happier.

Charlie Kirk death is itself an example of this — of how fringe beliefs, both on the left and the right, have become mainstream and hit this boiling point. There are endless lenses through which this could be dissected, but my current focus is one: How does this impact men and women and our ability to relate to each other and to find love and happiness?

The fringe beliefs at play are situated within the Gender War, and delivered through a mainstream method of exposure. That young woman on TikTok need only swipe a few times before finding a video encouraging her to give up on dating and sex, encouraging her to that you to believe that all men are misogynistic. You're constantly being exposed to horror stories about men, and with it, an attitude of suspicion is bred.

If we look at the end point of that particular area of ideology and its goals, we’re not finding women striving to form separatist communes of care and support exclusive from men. We’re not finding solutions or alternatives or much in the way of a lived community. Instead we only find the encouragement to be more online, to be more isolated, to be separate not merely from bad men but from each other. The same tech system of radicalization that has incentivized division along political lines is pushing division along gendered ones.

And how does that actually make a woman happier or more liberated? It itself is a new form of restriction, of confinement, of oppression. But when we look toward the other end of the Gender War, we see the same. The goal is not to push men to a better state of happiness, to liberate them from the various forms of oppression that men experience, be it class based or whatever else. It is to further isolate and restrict in order to keep you engaged with an algorithm. And of course, it all becomes a self-feeding cycle: of course women don’t want to date men who increasingly seem to hate them! And vice versa!

And so I have to question, is this all really a “last chopper out of Nam” moment? Were those of us who are in happy, loving relationships the last ones out? Again, I'm an optimist. I don’t want to think so. Maybe we all do just have to get offline, but this week has demonstrated that there is a lived, offline component to this political moment. The consequences are real, and they're material, and they’re affecting our day to day lives, online or off.

It is still, nevertheless, my fundamental belief that our capacity to relate to each other as men and women has not diminished beyond return. I am concerned about what this particular moment for us means and what has yet to come. Maybe the NBC poll of next year will look even worse. The phrase itself is suggestive of hostility, destruction and warfare — things many seem to be calling for in the wake of Kirk’s death. But what remains is the fact that letting this gender and political hostility shape our pursuit of love and connection remains a choice. Engaging with this digital corrosion remains a choice. The Gender War wants you to think you’re being drafted. You do not have to serve this.

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A good deal of you likely know me as somewhat of an anti-phone writer. This is something I’ve always rolled with, because, well, it’s nice that a single person knows me as any sort of writer at all. Whatever got you here is fine by me. I’ve always seen myself as a sex and culture writer, with phones representing one particular intersection of the two alongside film or celebrity gossip or fashion or whatever else. Of course, what has become apparent over the last decade is that phones are a much more prominent intersection than these other arenas. In many ways, phones are now the avenue through which we experience all of this — not only film or celebrity gossip or fashion, but all of sex and culture are now mediated in our day-to-day by our phones.

As such, I have always emphasized that reality in my work. My most-read work on Substack speaks to that topic. I’ve been asked on various podcasts to discuss it. And so, here I am as an anti-phone writer. But that label isn’t entirely accurate: I’m on my damn phone. I love a lot of things my phone provides. I don’t know that I’d be the writer I am or have the audience I have without my phone. Referring to it as just a “phone” is itself reductive, too. If I am anti-”phone,” we are obviously not talking about landlines or flip phones or even specifically a device that allows for texts and calls. I am maybe more specifically referring to an iPhone, but even that isn’t quite accurate. “Phone” has instead, in my mind and clearly in the broader cultural context, come to refer to something that is both an all-encompassing object and not even an object at all. It is a universe of networks and apps and interfaces backed by the world’s most powerful and wealthy corporations who employ our brightest minds to make their products 1 percent more addictive. It is a device loaded with opportunities to burn your day away with ease, and it is also a device through which many of us could not possibly otherwise navigate day-to-day life or socialization. And for all the good phones do offer, the bottom line is that they do not at all need me to come to their defense. Meta and Apple and several of the other companies with the highest market cap in the world already have that covered.

It seems I have to clarify all this as part of my stance every time I am asked to discuss it. No, I’m not just talking about an item that allows you to call your grandmother several thousand miles away, or the thing that lets you keep up with your friends from college in a group chat, or even the unlimited library of information it connects you with. I’m talking about the fact that your brain would prefer you be look at AI generated ragebait slop on Instagram Reels than hold eye contact with a loved-one. And you know that’s what I mean.

Now, with all that said: phones are so obviously not the only problem plaguing us right now. I also do not support legislation that regulates the individual’s usage of phones. I’m not really sure I even support the idea of a national ban on phones in schools. I *absolutely* support the idea that schools should be empowered to ban smartphone usage during the school day, and that children’s learning outcomes would be better if they did.

There are plenty of people I respect that feel differently about phone usage and the extent to which it’s a problem, including Taylor Lorenz, who kicked off much of this discourse this month. Most of us who are engaging in this debate with any sort of nuance at all essentially all have the same stance, even if we frame it differently. Katherine Dee, for example, wrote on her Substack last week that the whole anti-smartphone thing is a grift, and I actually completely agree with much of what she said:

“The classroom phone debate is a red herring.

Nobody actually thinks kids should be scrolling TikTok or worse—Pornhub during class. Nobody thinks poor black and brown kids are using their smartphones as “word processors” in class either. Be so fucking for real.

Phone bans in schools are good policy. Fuck, bring back computer labs and teach technology skills in contained environments. Personally, I didn’t learn jack shit in school because I was toggling between mobile games on my iPhone and MMORPGs. And while we’re banning phones in school? Let’s expand that ban to sidewalks and normalize desktop computers in computer rooms again.

… the latest suite of “think of the children” policies create the infrastructure for much broader censorship. The problem isn’t the phone bans themselves—it’s how they’re being used as part of a larger authoritarian project that most people can’t see coming, in large part because of the media conversation.

Again, it’s like we’re all largely on the same page! And yet, it’s been flattened into a black and white issue. You can’t say “phones are probably bad” without it implying that you want Trump himself to come and nab your iPhone from your fingers.

Many want to call this whole conversation around phones a moral panic, and maybe for those who do actually want some sort of federal ban on them, that label is accurate. But the term “moral panic” has itself been reduced to the point of meaninglessness — anything that someone generally doesn’t agree with or doesn’t think is as big of a deal is now subject to the label.

The Salem Witch Trials were a moral panic. The idea that Marilyn Manson caused the Columbine shooting was a moral panic. There have indeed been moral panics that mirror some of the same themes we’re seeing with phones, such as the comic book moral panic or that of violent video games. Even so, concerns about phones and the assertion that children in particular would benefit from using them less is not a moral panic. It might tick some of the requisite moral panic boxes, like fear surrounding new technologies and impacts on children. Those who are calling for a federal ban on phones may well be elevating this all to a moral panic. But criticizing phones and their dominance in our lives does not a moral panic make.

Yes, I am concerned about authoritarian censorship and the ways phone bans could be used to facilitate it. I’m also concerned about the authoritarian role the tech corporations who want us on our phones are already perpetuating. I am concerned that phones are contributing to (not exclusively causing!) the decline of sex and our increased isolation. I am concerned about the ways many of us, from a younger and younger age, are wired to look to our phones above all else. I am concerned about the fact that criticizing this reality is being swept up as a “moral panic,” that suggesting we reconsider our relationships with our phones aligns you with a yet to be realized fascist future.

People with more money than God are already fighting to keep you on your phone. Why do you feel so compelled to help them?

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Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

I didn’t intend to take a “break,” nor did I enjoy any sense of relaxation or ease one typically associates with a “break,” but nevertheless I have been absent for much of the last month. How very European of me! We are working to wrap the forthcoming issue of PLAYBOY (due out in November, and available to pre-order here), and that has been much of my focus lately. I am thrilled about what we’ve put together. From me, you can expect a profile of a certain controversial online sexual figure, as well as a feature about my afternoon at the infamous Bop House. And likely more! I actually really need to be working on those right now.

But there’s a lot I could discuss this week!

The general theme of our sexual culture this summer has broadly been desperate pleading disguised as apathy. From the various “Tea” apps to AI boyfriends to how people are presenting themselves on their dating profiles, there’s a shared sense of “Why the hell do I bother with trying to find a real partner at all?”

One particular example of how this manifests on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble etc is an increase in women with pictures of themselves in clown paint on their profiles. Among their usual selfies, group friend pictures and other photos that they’ve selected to demonstrate their best selves, many women have chosen to also include a photo of themselves wearing literal clown makeup. A young man using the apps sent me a DM on X to discuss this, and sent me over 40 examples of women he’s encountered doing this.

Notably, most of the women are portraying themselves as sexy clowns. They’re not doing full Bozo cosplays — more so a coquette Pierrot. Some are clearly in a Halloween costume, while others appear to be wearing clown makeup for no real reason at all. Often, it’s only really the eye makeup that enters it into clown territory, but nevertheless, the signifier of “clown” is present.

What are these women trying to say about themselves? First is likely the suggestion that they are creative, alternative people. They are women who experiment with their appearance and aren’t afraid of the gaze that might accompany that experimentation. It suggests they are people who shirk the mainstream, using the clown to represent their liminal or marginal position in the culture. On a dating app, this helps promote that they are likely looking for a certain type of partner, one who aligns with this identity. But I think that the clown makeup also suggests something specific to their attitude toward dating: can a girl who makes herself into a clown really take any of this too seriously?

These women are making themselves clowns before the indignities of the dating world does it for them. By showing themselves as clowns, they’re saying that they won’t let themselves be embarrassed. For some, this itself may be a show of vulnerability — they already feel silly for being here, for subjecting themselves to the possibility for disappointment. And so by being a clown, they’re protected from further shame.

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Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

It was only a matter of time before the voyeuristic swirl of social media and the flattening of the romantic market via dating apps combined in an app like Tea. Over the last few days, Tea, a “dating safety for women” app, has hit the number one slot in the Apple App Store. It allows its users (only women) to post names and pictures of various men in their circles, highlighting their “red flags.” Some women post men as warnings to others of a man’s behavior — ranging from transmitting STIs to ghosting, literal crimes to liking other girl’s photos on Instagram. Most, however, simply post a picture of a guy they’ve matched with on Tinder or are otherwise talking to, asking for any “tea” or gossip about him.

This sort of paranoid, antagonistic attitude isn’t new. “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups have been flourishing for years, as have viral stories like West Elm Caleb and Harry Sisson’s snapchat scandal. We’re living in the midst of a digital dating panopticon, and some of us are more than happy to perpetuate a sexual surveillance state at our own expense. The Tea app now makes it easier than ever.

Many women especially, I think, are approaching dating with defensiveness and hostility. As I mentioned at the time of the Sisson story, the goal in dating is not to form a connection or even have fun, but to avoid the possibility of embarrassment. For women, the embarrassment to avoid is that of dating a man who is dating other women, or sleeping with a guy who doesn’t text you back. For men, the embarrassment to avoid is being posted on apps like Tea, or otherwise becoming fodder for more viral Internet drama. In both cases, this fear of embarrassment leads to retreat. Why date at all when the stakes are perceived to be so high?

Some fear of embarrassment, or even fear in general, is warranted. What’s most insidious about Tea is that it banks on this without differentiation. Men who hit women are posted alongside guys who went through a shitty breakup with their high school girlfriend a decade ago, or guys who have yet to even be accused of having any “red flags.” Here again, a blanket antagonism is being fostered, one that could potentially obfuscate the boundaries of actual bad behavior. We as women are not any safer for it.

But where did this hostility itself originate? The New York Times Magazine story this week, “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” circles around some possibilities. The essay focused on one woman’s own unsatisfying dating life in the context of the rise in heteropessimism, or the general negative attitude some straight women have toward the prospect of forming relationships with men. It’s gotten so bad, she wrote, that heteropessimism has now given way to heterofatalism — what’s the point in trying at all?

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As with why women would be interested in Tea, I’m sympathetic to the appeal of heteropessimism. Some men — a lot of men! — are avoidant, emotionally unavailable, immature and generally inconsiderate. They are not worthy partners, and they waste women’s time. There are men who abuse women, who hate women, who cheat on them habitually, who manipulate them, who steal their youth. There are men who kill women.

And even among women who do marry men that aren’t completely evil, there are plenty of guys who just kind of suck. They leave all the childcare and domestic work to their wives, they forget birthdays, they expect the woman to forgo her own aspirations for little in return. The bargain of heterosexuality, in all too many cases, does not add up. But it is not a universal truth.

Still, I can’t help but feel that we’re all encouraged to think so. We are all pushed to believe it is guaranteed to happen to us. Certainly, the Tea app would profit from these suspicions.

As the author herself points out, heterofatalism stems from a contemporary inability to try to relate to one another as men and women: “One thing heterofatalism reflects is a persistent lack of faith that those we desire will be able to recognize us as commensurately human,” she writes. “I wonder how much, fearing what we expect and expecting what we fear, we summon the ‘old-fashioned man-woman stuff’ that keeps coming around. A woman comes, a man withdraws; this embodiment needn’t necessarily become pregnant with larger meaning, but it often does. I end up wondering if it is my own fault somehow when the heterosexual dynamic cannot seem to transcend its own tropes, subvert its own symbolism, play out an entirely unpredictable scene.” It seems, though, that so much of this tension stems from our inability to hold several truths at once, that maybe there is some baked in “man-woman stuff” we aren’t ready to abandon, that maybe what we require is some faith in each other. This faith is explicitly what the current state of gender relations wants us to abandon. We’re sabotaging ourselves and others. And for what? To buy a premium subscription to an app?

I can’t help but circle it around to the Coldplay kiss-cam affair of last week, something I originally didn’t even want to talk about at all. It didn’t strike me as worth talking much about from the start: two people I don’t know at a Coldplay concert of all places having a corporate workplace affair… it’s mundane to the point of parody. It’s practically a lyric in a Weird Al song. Of course, the entertainment element here is obvious: it’s pure schadenfreude, watching those two scramble to avoid being seen. If they’d just acted normal, none of this would have happened. It’s the sort of clip that should be compiled into a YouTube video titled “Biggest JumboTron FAILS” and then forgotten about forever. With how big and fast-moving the Internet is, you’d think it’d be worth maybe a quick laugh before everyone moved on. Instead it’s been crystallized into the exact type of moment the digital dating panopticon wants you to be afraid of, an international news story where every detail of your life is scrutinized, exposed and deconstructed. You’re not afraid of being the ones caught on camera, you’re afraid of being their other halves.

There’s always going to be some risk of that. Is that worth the possibility of love and happiness and human connection? What should bother us most about heteropessimism is that I even have to ask.

There’s a pressure in talking about sex to make it about something else. I do it myself in my own work — when I write about sex, I often highlight that my broader emphasis is on loneliness and human connection. Sex, in that context, is just one vector toward a certain end. That’s not untrue. The problem of sexlessness isn’t really about intercourse. It’s about a lack of energy, a lack of communing, a listlessness and vacuity that pervades our day-to-day. It’s not about sex, except for the way that everything is about sex.

This avoidant framing, one that shirks sex at the core of the matter, is central to Jia Tolentino’s recent New Yorker essay “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” Here, Tolentino dissects two books: Louise Perry’s 2022 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Carter Sherman’s The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, released in June.

I was invited to speak on a panel for the latter book at McNally Jackson last week alongside Sherman, writer Samantha Cole and sex educator Justine Ang Fonte. There, we had a lively discussion about Gen Z sexlessness, with the conversation exploring fear around the #MeToo movement, porn and porn censorship, and the political divide between young men and women. Sherman’s book is an exceptional survey of Gen Z sexlessness and sexual attitudes, though she and I ultimately might differ on our position of whether this sexlessness is really a problem at all. Tolentino’s review highlights this framing, too, though I think Tolentino’s somewhat misinterprets Sherman’s own stance on the matter.

“I am not personally inclined to wring my hands about what young people are doing with their genitals,” writes Tolentino in her essay. “There’s some locker-room shaming in the Zoomer sex panic, and some suspiciously coded pro-natalism, and also a displaced longing… Still, it seems fine that Gen Z is having less sex, and fine also that, when they do have it, they are doing so in more arcane arrangements.”

There’s a common blasé attitude that Tolentino shares here with so many others in the conversation around sexlessness. Who cares? What does it matter? I’m not personally all that inclined to wring my hands about what young people are “doing with their genitals,” either. I’d never be so reductive. No, I’m a bit more inclined to wring my hands over whether any of us — young adults or elderly — are having sex. I’m inclined to wring my hands over whether it’s fulfilling, whether it’s as much as we would have had in decades prior, whether we’re living with any sort of drive or lust toward the future or pleasure or a moment of vivacity. But at the end of it all, I am still here to wring my hands over sex.

Of course, Tolentino does offer some acknowledgement that something deeper may lay within this whole conversation. It’s fine that young people aren’t having sex, “as long, of course, as this is what Gen Z actually wants,” she says. “But what do they want? Or, put another way, why do we fuck in the first place? Part of the Gen Z sex recession is a relationship recession: Sherman writes that partnered people have more sex than single people, and young people are more likely to be single than those who have come before them. The real problem at the heart of this matter is less about sex and more about loneliness.”

Like most social crises, manufactured or otherwise, we’re inclined to frame it all around the youths. It’s an established obsession, one traced by Mark Greif in his 2006 essay “Afternoon of the Sex Children.” This essay is cited by both Sherman and Tolentino. Here, Greif identifies the fascination as emerging from postwar America, a swirl of century-old fantasies crashing against a new language of “freedom,” Nabokov’s Lolita, Lewis Carroll’s Alice meets Britney Spears, MTV and campus sex magazines. Greif does make the crucial distinction that we are talking largely about legal adults, people somewhere between 18 and their early 20s, but it is so often their short distance to childhood that draws attention. At the time of his writing, though, young people were still having sex, at least within the cultural imagination. He points to spring break and Girls Gone Wild as evidence, using analogies that today’s youth would probably find foreign:

“If I do something rotten on a blind date, I never need to see the only witness again,” he writes. “A child does something rotten, and his date is sitting next to him in homeroom. The adult world sends down its sexual norms, which cannot blossom in a closed institution (though alarmists say they originate there), but which the children tuck away to fulfill just as soon as they can. Children are the beneficiaries of a culture that declares in all its television, jokes, talk, and advertising that if sex isn’t the most significant thing in existence, it is the one element never missing from any activity that is fun. They are watchers, silent, with open eyes, and they grow in the blue light. So much for the decadent reality of childhood.”

There are no longer anonymous blind dates. The culture has declared sex not only insignificant but not fun, instead something threatening and dangerous to be best observed from the distance of an iPhone screen. At least his comment about the blue light remains true.

Both Tolentino and Greif suggest that the sexlessness conversation is one founded in jealousy of youth. “Envy of one’s sexual successors is now a recurrent feature of our portion of modernity,” writes Greif. In reality, the era of looking upon the teens and early twenty-somethings of the moment with any real desire to be them now has passed. Nobody wishes they had spent their childhood on an iPad. Nobody wishes their early understandings of sex were shaped by whichever PornHub thumbnail they happened to click on first. Nobody wishes their dating prospects were dictated by the algorithms of an app. You’ll repeatedly hear people refer to those who have avoided these fates as having “caught the last chopper out of ‘Nam.” We don’t view youth today as an envious experience. We view it with the same anxiety as the fall of Saigon.

The part of Greif’s essay that both Tolentino and Sherman focus upon most is his delineation of liberation versus liberalization:

“Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you, free in cost and freely your possession, and removes the iron weight of social interdiction. Even in the great phase of full human liberation which extended from the 1960s to the present day, however, what has passed as liberation has often been liberalization. (Marcuse used this distinction.) Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free.

One of the critical aspects of culture that Greif believed highlighted our culture of sexual liberalization rather than sexual liberation was that people were no longer free not to have sex, to be asexual or to ignore sexuality without consequence. The overwhelming dominance of sexuality as a commodified good, he thought, did not allow for this abstaining. In the twenty years since, though, I’d argue that sexual dormancy has become compulsory in new forms. We are free to be asexual if that is what we want, but we now have a culture that encourages sexlessness whether we want it or not.

Once again, sex is vacant. Both Perry and Sherman recall a time in the recent path that sex was a given, perhaps too much so. There was Girls Gone Wild and fear-mongering essays in the style of this one here about hookup culture and the pressures young women were facing to have casual sex. It probably is good for us all that this time has come and gone. But this constant circling around the past, the insistence that some things are better now than they were before and that isolation and apathy are acceptable trades for that reality, brings us back to our fundamental avoidance of the core of the matter. We are still making sex someone else’s issue.

As we were accepting questions in the end, one person asked, “Isn’t it all sort of a good thing that Gen Z is having less sex? Isn’t sex an inherently traumatic and dangerous act, and it’s better that people are avoiding that?”

At the time, I’d felt I’d spoken enough. I could have jumped out of my seat to answer. I probably could have just responded with a simple “no.” I preferred not to dominate the mic. Still, this remark has stuck with me the most out of the entire conversation. “Inherently traumatic.” That’s a telling choice of words. It’s a choice that positions itself as one of authority and one of victimization at the same time — a type of authority of its own.

Is sex inherently traumatic and dangerous? Of course not. But also… of course it is. So is any other foundational part of the human experience. Love, friendship and family all come with the potential, maybe even the guarantee, of some sense of loss and devastation. Nobody gets through life unscathed. Nobody should want to.

So much of the discourse around sexlessness is centered in a certain type of risk. Gen Z isn’t having sex because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and increased fear of the repercussions of an unwanted pregnancy, for example. But even with historic setbacks such as this, efforts to mitigate some of the potential for trauma and danger in sex have nevertheless been the winning strengths of sexual liberation, sex positivity and sex education. More people are able to have sex with reduced risk of pregnancy or STIs. More people are able to have sex with reduced risk of social shame. Even so, some “risk” remains: the risk of having a bad time, the risk of something going wrong, the risk of embarrassing oneself.

My guess, however, is that contemporary sexlessness — the kind that pervades us regardless of generation — has far more to do with the risks of the latter. Why has sexual liberation failed to deal with these risks, or perhaps even inflated them? Why have they become an even bigger mental threat?

It would again be so easy to identify this unwillingness to deal with the uncomfortable as part of a broader social trend. It is! We see it in how people are spending more time alone, how they’re not drinking, how they’re shirking the usual goalposts of adulthood. But it is still fundamentally about sex. What Greif and Tolentino do get right is that much of the dialogue around other generation’s sexlessness is some sort of subconscious deference. It’s far more convenient to worry about the sex life of some abstract other. But it is not, despite their claims, a matter of jealousy. It is a matter of evasion. It isn’t that Gen Z has a sex problem, it’s that we all do — whether we want to make it about loneliness or politics or whatever else is more digestible than making it about sex itself. Consider my hands wrung.

June got away from me. I went to a wedding in Oaxaca, followed by a quick visit to Mexico City with friends. I always think I’m going to write while I’m travelling — that never happens. But I do usually come away with some good ideas, some of which may well develop into something here.

On the horizon, I’ll be speaking at McNally Jackson Seaport on July 8th on the topic of “Why Is Gen Z Having Less Sex?” Carter Sherman, author of the new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, will lead the panel comprised of myself and fellow writers Sam Cole and Amy Rose Spiegel, as well as sex educator and professor Justine Ang Fonte. Tickets are $5, and available here. have some more thoughts on the book (you should buy it!) and some of the conversation it’s generated I’ll be sharing later this week or next. But for now, I’ve had a few other short matters on the mind.

On Materialists, Ambitious Single Women and the Math of Love

I’m not sure that most people look at dating as a math problem, at least not consciously. They’re not swiping through the apps assigning a composite score to each potential partner based on looks, personality, career and slotting that person in to their assigned position on a numerically sorted roster.

This concept, however, is the conceit of Materialists, a recent A24 movie about a matchmaker whose career setting up successful women with eligible bachelors has jaded her to the mysteries of romance. In her line of work, it’s all about calculations — partner X’s job and degree plus partner Y’s family background and height equals happy relationship on paper. In her own life, she comes to face a choice: pursue the love that doesn’t make sense on the spreadsheets or go for the rich man who’d make even thinking about spreadsheets a thing of the past. It’s a rom-com. You know which one she picks.

Whether the film is all that good or even all that accurate is sort of beside the point. I’m just happy for a new rom-com with a semi-fresh concept. I enjoyed it!

Seperate from Materialists, I’ve been seeing a good deal of discussion lately suggesting that all of today’s dating problems are connected to the somewhat new reality that women no longer have any requirement to financially rely on men. There are obvious issues with labelling this the source of all the problems, or really even calling it a problem at all. I’m bored by the thought of trying to entertain the argument that it’s bad that us girls can now have bank accounts and credit cards and the jobs required to put money toward them. But Materialists itself relies on this new reality, too. Without all these women of means looking for men to be paired with, there’d be no market for a matchmaker like the one Johnson plays. And in real life, there is indeed a huge market. I must get an email a day promoting some new matchmaker or service for which the primary audience is women with money who can’t find the right guy.

There’s a pervasive idea that ambitious, educated and well-off women are intimidating to men. This idea is pretty easily refutable — has written about this phenomenon and surveyed people extensively, finding that even high-earning right-wing men don’t really care that much about their partner making more money than them. Just last week, she published an article detailing an experiment in which she created fake dating app profiles and measured which received the most likes from men based on career. She concluded that:

“Generally, men have a slight preference for a higher-status job, even for women in their twenties. The preference for higher-status job generally holds true regardless of the age of the men swiping. This effect is also magnified if the men in question are upper middle class or upper class. A high-status job is more likely to boost a woman’s attractiveness among a cohort who already finds her attractive, and is less likely to make a difference if she otherwise isn’t getting a lot of right swipes.”

Nevertheless, there remains some sort of disparity here. Online, at least, it appears there is an epidemic of women who have everything going for them but can’t seem to find a boyfriend. Some say they’ve never once had a boyfriend at all. Is it that they just can’t find a guy who likes them? Or, more likely, are they struggling to find a man who meets their standards? This is one of the trickier binds of contemporary dating: women in many cities now out-earn their male counterparts, beating them out on education, too. It’s normal that they’d want a man who is more successful than they are, or at least meets them where they’re at. But what is emotionally normal may not be materially realistic. In this bind, many women would prefer to be alone than settle for less than what they think they deserve.

Materialists is, in many ways, about this specific bind. Johnson’s character skirts it in some ways, finding that the man who works best on paper doesn’t emotionally fulfill her. For a time, she chooses the route of many other women today, prioritizing her independence. In the end, though — spoiler alert — she chooses love, plain and simple, the kind that doesn’t make sense financially but makes sense in the heart. As a romantic myself, I prefer this type of narrative. Even so, I’m aware that it is itself a narrative, the kind many of us have been familiar with since the first time we watched a Disney movie.

Maybe this itself is the core of what is dividing dating today: an abundance of competing narratives. We’re searching for a life that allows us to prioritize ourselves, our careers, our bank accounts and the idea of a perfect true love all at once. And if we do the math on that, it probably won’t add up.

Further Dating App Decline

Dating app Bumble announced on Wednesday that it would be laying off 30 percent of its global workforce, or 240 roles. At its peak in 2021, the company was valued at $15 billion, down to $500 million now. Obviously, that’s not great for them. But does it signal something broader about the future of dating apps writ large? I’m not so sure.

The decline of Bumble may parallel the decline in MySpace, or even just a trendy bar falling out of favor. What’s popular and successful shifts, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to utility. Tinder has solidified itself as the “everything” dating app, the first name people turn to in their quest for online dating. Hinge, meanwhile, is perceived as the one you pursue when you’re ready to take things a little more seriously. A dozen or so new apps seem to be cropping up each month, each attempting to fill in some other niche gap or solve a particular problem presented by the dominant apps — I’m working on a bigger essay about this now. With all this, where does it leave Bumble? Who is it for? Originally, Bumble was marketed as a women-forward app, where we had to make the first move. By dropping this requirement, they lost some of the identity that separated them from the rest of the pack.

Yet even still, some of that women-forward identity remains. And while movies like Materialists, my recent New York Magazine story on dating coaches and the matchmaker revival all highlight women’s willingness to “invest” in their romantic futures, a subscription to a traditional dating app isn’t typically part of that investment. Men continue to be the gender most likely to spend money on the apps.

In any case, I’d love to hear from some current Bumble users of any gender about their experience. What’s it like on there? Are you paying to use it? Comments are open!

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Love Island Seems Exhausting

I respect reality television as a medium, but I often find that it moves too quickly for me to really get a firm grip on it. By the time I catch up on the interpersonal lore of a group, we’re already on to the next thing. This season of Love Island US, a popular dating show that essentially just involves putting hot people in a luxury villa on an island, has magnified this phenomenon. Rather than adhering to the usual weekly release schedule we expect from a TV show, Peacock has been airing new episodes of Love Island *daily* with the exception of Wednesdays. I figure there’d be plenty of material there for me to better dissect the state of our sexual culture, but by the time I catch up with the 20+ episodes (most of which are over an hour long!), the story would be over.

The speed of the medium does say something on its own, though. For television to keep up with short form content and the turnover of the Internet, it’s gotta move even faster. But of more concern to me is the cultural vacuum the show and its success in this format suggests we’re living in. People complain constantly about not having the time to juggle work, friendships, romance, fitness, cooking, cleaning, whatever — and yet a good chunk of them are managing to keep up with a new hour of Love Island every day. Again, I generally like reality television and completely understand why this show is entertaining (should I let people enjoy things?), but the pace of this just does not square with the narratives some of us spin about how we live our lives.

Can AI Relationships Be Better Than Real Ones?

I think you know my take on this one. I addressed the question in a column over at Playboy last week, and I’ve love for you to give it a read. By the way, I am absolutely loving working with Playboy this summer. I’ve been freelance for the last several years, but it is so fun to have coworkers to speak to again — even if just over Slack. Anywho, keep an eye out for more of me over there.

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After a bit of a break, I am back with another round of questions and topics for Advice for Our Sexual Culture. You can submit yours for the next installment here.

This week, I address the common claim that New York City is better for dating as a man than the Bay Area, digging in to whether our sexual culture really does differ by city and detailing a bit of what I love about New York. I answer the question of what’s on a hypothetical woman’s dating rubric, besides a guy who makes a lot of money, and what it takes to be the kind of partner who makes someone’s life easier by being in it. I also discuss a young woman’s sexual inexperience in an age gap relationship, and whether any of that is really cause for concern.

If you haven’t already, please consider sending in your own topics and concerns at the link above and becoming a paid subscriber to read on. Thank you all for being here.

Hi Magdalene. I was wondering when you think it's advisable to move for dating. As a straight guy in Silicon Valley, it's rough out here! I'm a (legit) San Francisco native who moved to San Jose for a tech job after college. I've only lived in the Bay Area my whole 28 years of existence, so I don't know how much my chronic singleness would be helped by moving somewhere "better" for dating.

I've thought about moving to New York or somewhere on the east coast, where the gender ratio between young men and women is mostly even. Anecdotally, I've heard men online saying their experience of dating on the West coast vs East is night and day (I take it with a grain of salt). A change of scenery in general would be nice, but TBH my top interest in moving is to get my first girlfriend.

Overall, I like the Bay Area. I LOVE the proximity I have to nature trails in the city. The weather here is nice. I'd probably be irritated by Trump supporters in other parts of the country. Perhaps most of all, I have my own status quo bias.

I'm mostly interested in moving into another city, but I could see myself living the cottagecore life. Though living in rural areas can also limit dating opportunities. Anyways, I'd like your $0.02 as a New Yorker. — “28 M, hella Bay Area (duh), straight, ethnically ambiguous”

Throughout Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller describes how sexual standards differ between Paris and cities of the United States. “I’ve never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender,” he says. There, whenever a woman develops some sort of physical abnormality — the loss of a limb, or the collapse of her nose from syphilis — she immediately becomes a prostitute. In America, a woman would rather starve to death than rely on the novelty of such a plight. In Paris, these sorts of disfigurements seem to be “regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”

Anyway, yes, you should move to New York.

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