Comments

1
When in doubt, make an app.
2
So, given the heteronormative standard, is there box for guys to select "all females"?
3
God I fucking hate that stupid euphamism: "hook-up."

It means anything from anal gangbang orgies to a kiss.

A term with a thousand meanings has no meaning at all.
4
Hey. Here's an idea....If you want to hook up with someone, GO FUCKING TALK TO THEM. Be flirtatious. See if they flirt back. It's not rocket science.
5
Yes, every time we walk out the door, people will be evaluating us as potential sexual partners. But you know why that's not (very) offensive? Because said evaluators are discreet about it. They're not taking out the awkwardness; they're taking out the class.

People should have to opt in to Bang with Friends, to specifically give their permission for their images to be used in this way. Not opt out. Opt in.
6
This isn't going to work either.

Let's leave aside the big question of whether men want sex - or quasi anonymous NSA sex - more than women.

On average, men have much lower standards for a sexual hook-up than women. Just glancing through my FB friends, I would be willing to have NSA sex with about 95-97% of my female friends. Assuming 95% of "female friends of Horton" don't feel the same way, you still have the original problem of a few men having sexual access to a lot of women and the rest of the saps finding scarcity.

7
Men tend to assume that female friends they are physically attracted to are also somewhat into them, but when you ask the females, they typically harbor no attraction at all, and so assume that the male also harbors no attraction. This app will likely just be filled with dudes and sex workers.

To all the ladies out there: your male friends, if given the chance, will most likely bang you. They are willing to also be your friends, but they would gladly have sex with you if you opened that gate.

It is very heavy duty wiring, but not hooked up in the most elegant way.
8
Haha, thanks for proving my point Mr. Horton!
9
I can't speak for the website, but Vice magazine itself has some of the best investigative reporting in the hemisphere and touches on a lot of subjects Stranger either ignores or dismisses. It's no more heteronormative than anything I read in this birdcage liner.
10
A potential hitch. I went on there and simply selected everyone on there I was attracted enough to to sleep with. I'm not actually going to sleep with any of them at the moment.
11
and you wonder why my cortisol levels are so high.
12
How long before people check out if their siblings are there, just so they know?
13
alternately, you could send a mutual friend of the guy you might like to hook up with (whatever that means) to bring him a handwritten note saying " Do you like me, circle yes or no" to him, and then play it off like your friend pulled a trick on you if he circles no!
14
It won't work, for the reason that Theodore Gorath said. Women still don't want to fuck most of their male friends.

Also, here's a secret about women: some of us know that if we ask, our single male friends are available. Even if they themselves don't want to hook up with us, they are extremely helpful in finding someone to sleep with us if we just want to fuck and don't want anything else at the moment.
15
The OKCupid ap is already Grindr for straights. Get with the times.
16
A few things.

A. Reading things like this and the comments about the whole "straight guys are super stressed" make me absolutely thrilled that I am no longer single.

B. I find it interesting that nobody has spoken up with the defense of, "But women like to have sex too!" and in more than once instance have actually very strongly insinuated that women don't like sex as much as men(I'm looking at you 6, 7, and 14).

And #4, you either don't know much about people or are being disingenuous. In your face rejection sucks. Coming up with witty one liners and trying to figure out ways to be interesting in the specific way that will allow you be appealing is, at best, very, very challenging and at worst, almost impossible.

Hell, I talk to people for a living and the idea of walking up and talking with someone I'm sexually interested in causes a physical panic reaction.

And also don't forget that the only routes out there to learn how to talk with people you are attracted to are so absolutely slimy that people are labeled a proto-rapist super creep just for thinking about them.
17
I wouldn't use this if you paid me. I'm sure someone will find something of value, but not this guy.
18
"Online pimp"? Yawn. This isn't Grindr for straights, this is thedirty levels of hair grease oozing through the touchscreen.
19
Here's how this will play out:

1. For the overwhelming majority of straight men who use this, absolutely nothing will change.

2. A lot of straight women will sign on out of sheer curiosity, and be horrified to find out how many of their male friends sincerely want to fuck them.

3. A subset of straight women will have a great time.
20
Amendment: by "have a great time" I mean "have unlimited opportunities for sex". How great it will be is another matter entirely.
21
@6 and 7 : I think you're oversimplifying.

Men can be picky too. And they are easily frightened by women who dare to ask them out, especially if they are a bit older.

Years ago, when I suddenly became separated, I tried to hook up, in an avowedly casual way, sucessively with two men I knew and came to fancy. They were about 5 years younger than me. One ran away screaming (he was still living with his parents at 30) and the second one was asked at the same time by another, younger woman, whom he prefered. Then I tried my viles on male friends 10-20 years older than me. Those were pretty happy to oblige. They were good lovers, too.

Saying to women that 90% of their male friends will want casual sex with them is not true, and can lead to unreasonable assumptions - and pretty bad deceptions.

Guys can assess situations too, and they are able to use their brain to consider that even for casual sex, someone is too much of a "danger" for them. Someone older, someone just recently separated, someone with kids, and suddenly they are a lot less eager...
22
@21, maybe next time you should try your wiles instead.
23
Yeah, that 95% - is that picturing a college/20's crowd? And there's a big difference between being attracted to a friend and actually having sex with them. There are a lot of reasons people don't act on attractions (probably one or the other not being willing to cheat on a current partner would be #1).
24
@21 - I plead guilty to oversimplifying.

Also, for all my bravado, in my single days, I also turned down a few NSA casual hook-ups because of the "danger" element. Generally, the danger factor was that I didn't really like the person and didn't want to be a prick about leading her on with being available for something other than a quick romp. Decent men can still be afraid of being called an asshole for not calling someone back after sleeping with them, even if the initial pretense was nothing other than for sex.

@16 - I don't think men like sex more than women. I do think, for reasons that may be some combination of physical/evolutionary/cultural men do seek far more NSA relationships than women. (source:craigslist casual encounters m4m & m4w v. w4m). The app at issue is titled "Bang with Friends." If it was named "Wanna go for coffee?" it would likely attract a more balanced sex ratio.
25
While I can appreciate what these guys are trying to do, if you aren't brave/confident enough to manage talking to your FRIENDS about sex and the fact that you find them attractive, you really aren't going to do yourself any favors by trying to hook up with them via an app. At best, you'll look like a jr-high-schooler passing "do you like me yes/no" notes in class. At worst, creep-tastic. Ditch the app, put on a clean shirt, down a couple beers if you need to and go talk to your goddamn friends.
26
@22 Thanks ! Honest mistake. Not native, and it seems I read too much Terry Pratchett for my sake. Vampires talk a lot about trying "feminine viles" in deep Uberwaldean accent in there...
27
Oh Jesus, this is so dumb. If you are my friend and I want to bang with you (is that how the verb works?) you would already know. Because I would have told you. And we would have banged with each other already, if you also wanted to.
28
@21 I see where you are coming from and I totally agree.

The "danger" element for guys is being asked to commit to someone they don't have an interest in and having to tell that person the truth.

source: @24
29
@24 Yep, I felt that the level of relationship truly expected by the woman is giving many headaches to men.

Do we, as a group, so often lie on what exactly we want, that guys are afraid to take us at our word when one of us - freshly out of a long reationship, who just seeks casual sex to prove to herself that she's still desirable - says : "would you be interested in casual sex" ?
30
@16: I'm not saying that women don't like sex as much as men. They do. It's just that women are choosier about who they have sex with than men are. There have been studies which showed that most men would have sex with their female friends if the opportunity arose and most women wouldn't have sex with their male friends if the opportunity arose. It's not a universal thing, but generally, men are much more willing to have casual sex than women are in general, and it's not just the "stranger danger" factor.
31
I don't find this sort of app threatening. Anyone I'm friends with on Facebook can already see all pf my pics, and if they want to wank to photos of me, they've probably already done so. I'm not going to use an app like this but I have no objection to it existing and people who want to using it. I don't expect it will take off, but who knows?
32
It seems like the makers of this app are trying to be tongue-in-cheek by using the word "bang" when referring to casual sex, not to mention their How It Works section (How to Bang as they put it) however, it comes off as very juvenile and this is why it will fail. It's like teenagers trying to find a way to "score".
33
@16 GhostDog, your comment made me sad and reminded me of an old friend, so if I am way off on my interpretation, please excuse the projection and just ignore me.

"the idea of walking up and talking with someone I'm sexually interested in causes a physical panic reaction."

"And also don't forget that the only routes out there to learn how to talk with people you are attracted to are so absolutely slimy..."

I have to wonder -- why is talking to people you want to have sex with/are attracted to so inherently different than talking to other people? Especially at the initial conversation stages? These people you like, you do realize they are still people and not just sex objects, yes? So try talking to them in a friendly way instead of worrying about witty one liners (which rarely work as well as sincere interest anyway). There is plenty of help out there to learn social networking skills, but since you interact with others at work just fine, I would guess that what you need is not a lesson in how to "talk to people" but rather an attitude/expectation adjustment. I'd recommend to just practice talking to people you find attractive as if they weren't people you want to have sex with but rather just people you would like to get to know. After all, what are you going to lose?
34
@29 As much as guys say they would like women to be more up front and to take initiative, for some guys that is very rare that when it does happen they doubt the woman and think there has to be more to it. But really this doubt comes from their own insecurities.
35
@34 - Oh, then that would explain why the older guys were much more receptive : they had a lot more experience with women and relationships ? I thought they were simply disregarding the weird directness of my approach because I was younger than them and a flattering conquest as such... How hard it is, not to think in stereotypes.

@16 I wonder : are women choosier than men, or are men more prone to boasting when evaluating the number of female friends they would be ready to have sex with ? If they were asked to actually go though with it, would they really ?
36
@29 - it has been a decade since I was single, but when I was single in my 20s none of the relationships that were purportedly casual at the beginning stayed that way. Even the married woman 12 years older than me who propositioned me in my early 20s under the pretense of NSA (and rocked my world for several months) freaked out on me when she learned I had a girlfriend.

In my experience, even if women say they are looking for NSA, the combination of having good sex with someone they like usually leads to feelings. The difference for me is that I am totally down for having just sex with someone I don't find particularly attractive and have nothing in common with, because it feels really good to have sex, and after a while, sex becomes a physical need rather than a "want." Not sure how universally "male" this is, but considering the phenominon of straight men getting NSA Blow Jobs from gay men, it sounds like I am not alone.

FWIW, I would be much more likely to believe in the potential for pure NSA with an older woman coming out of a divorce, than a single friend on FB. So....wanna grab coffee?
37
@35: I don't think it's experience. I do know that for me, personally, I've always been attracted to women my age and younger. I presume that's typical. Any more than a couple of years older than me and they're not on the list, although I think I may be atypical in *that*.

I have a couple of single women friends whom I would be love to have NSA sex with... if I could be guaranteed it would actually be NSA. But even though they are friends (not just facebook "friends"), and even though I have found them to be absolutely honest in the past and would believe them on 99% of topics, I wouldn't believe them if they claimed they were interested in NSA sex with me. Not because of experience, but because it sets off my "this is too good to be true" alarms, and because the grief if they change their minds is so much worse than the benefit of having sex once or a few times that even a small risk that they change their minds is not worth taking.

Now if one would actually like to have a relationship with the woman, the possibility that she might change her mind about only wanting NSA sex is not such a problem ;). I suspect your older gents would have been happy if you'd changed your mind and decided you wanted a relationship.
38
Mr. Horton:
How could you have been single but still have had a girlfriend?
Maybe your married lady-friend was freaked out by your grasp of words?
39
As an aside, if men weren't honestly interested in having NSA sex with a large fraction of female acquaintances, the prostitution industry wouldn't exist.
40
@38 - I used the term "single" to refer to "not married" rather than actually single. Your point is well taken.
41
"It won't work, for the reason that Theodore Gorath said. Women still don't want to fuck most of their male friends. " That's the bottom line. If you are friends with a woman, chances are she has already made the decision that she (a) doesn't want to fuck you, or (b) may find you sexually attractive but NEVER fuck you because fucking you would destroy at worst or imperil at best whatever benefits she gets out of being your friend and not your lover or (c) if she's the relationship type she may have already decided that however fuckworthy you are you aren't relationship material.

Look, there's a reason why some of the biggest laughs Chris Rock gets is when he does his "Friend Zone" routine. Yeah, I know, some friends later fuck and even get hitched. They are exceptions, not the rule.
42
@24: " ... If it was named "Wanna go for coffee?" ..."
First, you're Tim Horton, so stop shilling for business.

Second, (and I speak from personal experience in the years after my divorce when the last goddamn thing I wanted on this planet was romantic or sexual entanglement) the one thing guaranteed to convince a woman that you want into her pants is absolute firmness on the point of "this is just friendly, that's it". Send that message and the woman will interpret it as if you just handed her a list of hotels. I do not know what that is. I just know it to be so.
43
Are we too old for this app? :) Reading the comments, I'm getting the impression that we are mostly 30-somethings and above, with a few early 30s and late 20s... maybe this app would still succeed with the younger set, those who may not let their brains and their consequences get in the way of their lust yet. It may still work with the hookup generation.

As a secondary observation: Is Dan's readership getting old???
44
Research has shown that most men are a good deal less interested in NSA sex than the mainstream cultural stereotype of sex-crazed males would like us to believe. While there are certainly plenty of men who just want to hook up without any further obligations, or who will have sex with "anything that moves", provided it moves on the next morning, they're apparently in the minority by a larger margin than one would guess from cultural depictions of men.

The notion that most guys would like to have a steady regular sex partner is not so suprising - regular sex with someone who likes you and isn't (too) crazy is generally better than sporadic sex with randoms who may not like you that much, may be crazy, and generally require a lot more effort/convincing to have sex. And if you're one of these relationship-seekers, the prevailing assumption/pressure to be a nonstop pussyhound (I'm not sure how this relates to gay men) is likely to make you keep quiet about it, for fear of appearing less "manly".

Which is unfortunate for both men and women. Sex in this country is so pathologically fucked up.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/ending…
45
Didn't there used to be an app for this called "Friendster"?

This app isn't going to result in more practical jokes than sex.
46
@39 "...they had a lot more experience with women and relationships ?"
No, those older men were probably more receptive to your straightforwardness because they were more secure with themselves then the younger guys you approached.

"How hard it is, not to think in stereotypes."

If you don't want people to think in stereotypes please stop asking stereotype-based questions such as:

"are women choosier than men...."
"Do we, as a group, so often lie on what exactly we want..."
47
#19 is basically on target, but go further; any man with half a brain - *especially* a man with a girlfriend or wife - wouldn't be caught DEAD using this app. Why? Because there's a very good chance that most straight women will sign in and pick 'want to bang,' or whatever it is, for EVERY male friend they have, just to smoke out the pervs. Then they will reveal said strategy in a Facebook post, and possibly the names of the guys who chose them (if they're vindictive and gossipy), with the possible exception of the one guy they actually want to 'bang.' Girl wins, guys lose. Same story, different app.
48
@47: You need to find better female friends, dude.
49
@47 - Well, you may have a point. But I maintain that the risk of something like this happening is just too great for any reasonably cautious guy to do it to anyone EXCEPT someone he feels he really has a shot with - in which case he doesn't need the app at all!
50
@44 - so true. The "men are dogs" stereotype just doesn't jibe with life experience. There are always players of both sexes around, but most people are in relationships or married and men fall head over heels in love just as much as women, if not more.
51
@47: Either you have no girlfriend/wife, or you've got no female friends. Both is a possibility, I imagine.
52
@43: I can't comment on the age of Dan's readership generally, but I'm 21, and I've taken more advantage of "the hook-up culture" than most people my age have. My observances come partly from the fact that I HAVE had fuckbuddy deals with a couple of my male friends and have noticed how extraordinarily uncommon that is among people my age, mostly because most other girls my age don't even seem to consider such an arrangement. The guy friends I asked practically jumped at the chance. YMMV, but the study I read from Scientific American basically bears that out.
53
I'm pretty sure I've seen this scheme before.

OMG OPEN THIS EMAIL ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS THINKS YOU'RE HOT!

Just go to our site and tell us the name and email address of anyone you think it might have been, and we'll tell you if you were right!

So you go and put in the four or five people you think it might have been. Of course, ten minutes later, they all get "OMG OPEN THIS EMAIL" messages in their mailboxes, claiming that one of their friends (you) think they're hot, and the cycle begins again. Even if you do happen to guess the person who submitted your name, you have no way of knowing whether they were really interested or whether it was just a guess borne out of curiosity.
54
Sounds like a clone of Tinder - http://www.gotinder.com/
55
@52 - The study you mentioned is here? http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl…

And this, my friends, is why Bang with Friends won't work. If you are female your male friends will probably have sex with you. You don't need an app for that.

@44 - Of course there is a male desire to have emotionally satisfying sex with a steady partner. That doesn't exclude the competing desire to supplement that with NSA sex with friends and strangers. I assumed this was a shared trait among the genders, but reading this week's Savage Love on cuckolding, apparently lots of women really don't want that.
56
@46 I don't get you. How is one supposed to find out whether something one has heard is true, or a tired stereotype, without trying to get feedback on that very same thing ?
You seem to know so many things, you should know that asking about stuff is not positing it's true.

@44 Valid point.

@36 Oh, nice, why not, next time you're coming to France ?
57
Straight woman here. One attempt at a FWB relationship that resulted in absolutely horrible sex, and now I have zero interest in FWB or casual sex. Why? How about the fact that only 11% of women have an orgasm when having casual sex, I'm most likely not in that 11%, and that not one of the guys I've dated in the past few years has been mature enough to discuss STIs before initiating a make-out session? Also, lots of guys (although I'm sure none of you Savage Love fans) are condom-averse, including Mr. Terrible FWB. So given my choice of grabbing my vibrator and being guaranteed an orgasm or risking no-orgasm sex with a rando who doesn't want to wear a condom and will probably lie about his STI exposure, the vibrator wins every time. I think Dan is right on this one. Most women don't want NSA sex because we're more likely to get off with someone who cares about us and cares if we get off.
58
@57 Random hookup is not FWB relationship - although both are casual sex.

Call me a prude, but since I've become decided to have an ethical and responsible sex life (at around 35), I haven't had make-out sessions with guys without first having discussed : STI status and showed each other recent tests (and planned for another test) ; condoms ; my exigence of oral before vaginal - and having made sure we were on the same line on all that.

Women get to say no on sex, and get to say no on kisses too. You don't have to lower your expectations to match those of randos, especially if they are jerks.

Sure my way is not spontaneous, and it might look less "romantic", but having to wait a week or two skirms the assholes, and I find waiting a bit much hotter anyway.
59
@58, I'm hardly one to call anyone a prude, especially since I'm middle-aged and I've only had intercourse with two men.

I've decided that I'm a relationship person. I need trust to feel comfortable being naked with someone, and I don't trust anyone on the third date. Especially when they don't bring up STIs, I do, and I've never had a date provide test results. The awful FWB supposedly got tested but said the clinic only provided results if he had something, so he never did provide me with any proof (I've tested negative twice for everything).

My opinion is that for guys, bad sex beats no sex, and for me, no sex (or solo sex) is better than bad sex. Most (or at leas a lot) of the guys on the free dating sites are really looking for this Grindr type of hookup, but they don't want to be honest about it because they figure they've got a better shot if you actually meet them than if they tell you up front they are only looking for sex and women who don't want that refuse to ever meet with them in the first place.

I laugh because the two guys who basically accused me of being immature for waiting to have sex (and again, I'm middle aged), neither one had his own place. One had a job but no car and the other had a car but no job.

Right now I'm at the point where I'd prefer to wait a month, and I have no problem telling that. Would you rather wait a month and then have sex, or go back to contacting people and potentially waiting for months? Plus I agree with you that waiting is much hotter. The anticipation is the best part, even when you are actually having sex.
60
@59: If I meet a woman on a dating site (paid or unpaid) and she tells me she'd prefer to wait a month, what I'll hear, based on past experience, is "I am not and never will be interested in any sort of relationship with you, but I'll be polite to spare your pride." Because that's what women have meant when they've said this to me before and I've been naive enough to call them again. I'll certainly be polite back to her, but I won't call her again.
61
@59 There's certainly nothing wrong with feeling this way about casual sex. But I do have to agree with sissoucat that there is a huge difference between casual sex and random sex. I've done both. Random sex can be fun, but depending on the context does leave me feeling a little squicky. Casual sex, however has proven to be a valued part of my sex life. I have had friends that I've been able to have a sexual relationship with, without worrying about it turning into something serious, but also with the benefit of having sex with someone I cared about, who cared about me as well. So, just because it's casual does not mean it's without meaning or feelings.

@60 Guys that have talking to me on dating sites? You're lucky if I'm willing to meet you IN PERSON within a month, let alone have sex with you. It's a lot harder to recognize the pervs online. And if you try to get me to hang out with you within a few hours of our first messages? You'll probably lose any chance you might've had because I'll be wondering if you're a serial killer.
62
I was presuming a situation where the woman and I had originally made contact on a dating site and that had gone well, had done the coffee shop meet and it went well, and we're now on our first date which I had thought was going well. If she then starts talking about her policy of waiting a month, I'll interpret that as not really interested.

I was responding to 59's "Would you rather wait a month and then have sex, or go back to contacting people and potentially waiting for months?" which implies that she thinks that that's how men are going to perceive the options she's giving them, and trying, clumsily, to say that they won't perceive the situation that way. They'll be less optimistic about the first option or more optimistic about the second, and in any case it's not an either/or option.
63
Fair enough. I've come across several situations where I've had a good conversation with someone online, and they wanted to meet me that night. When I said that wasn't going to happen, they decided I must not be interested, or tried to pressure me. Good riddance, obviously. But I suppose I sort of interpreted your comment in 60 as, not so much being that sort of attitude, but having the possibility of becoming it. Sorry for the confusion.

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