Let’s Talk about Sex

New York is the “Sex and the City” City. It’s the city of high heels and glamorous dresses, of meeting tall, dark strangers at gallery openings and then meeting them again on Friday nights in up-and-coming bars for Cosmopolitans, Martinis and more. 

As timeless as it may be, “Sex and the City” was shot twenty years ago, in a long-forgotten time before What’s App replaced conversations and dating moved from aperitivos to apps.

Even though I (like everyone else 😉) don’t use it very actively, I also have a Tinder account. When I first arrived in New York, everyone told me that dating here was really tough for girls because there are apparently a lot more single girls than single men in the city. With this in the back of my mind and not being a huge fan on online dating anyway, I didn’t use apps much in my first year in New York. But recently I have logged on a bit more and… wasn’t overly impressed by what I saw. There seem to be very clear and predictable patterns of what pictures most men upload: one at a party, one outdoors hiking or running, one in a suit, one with a child (and a disclaimer in the text that it’s not theirs) and increasingly one with their mother. But apart from that I also noticed another pattern: that of posting pretty hideous and 100% unattractive pictures:

I don’t think one needs to have professional photos taken or dress up especially, but is it too much to ask to upload a photo in which you don't have ketch-up dripping from your face? And are girls supposed to find this attractive and be excited about meeting these people? I'm not sure I'm a fan of this new online dating trend...

The other day I was looking through my hard drive and found the show “Girls”, which supposedly was the “new” version of “Sex and the City” designed for a younger generation of Millenials. I liked that the show was trying to be real with a main character, who was clumsy, not particularly successful, struggled with mental health issues and was very comfortable in a body that was not perfect, but real. What I at first didn’t notice, but what in retrospect really annoys me about the show is that when the characters have sex, they have it within minutes of meeting someone and seconds of kissing them. The usual sequence seems to be two minutes of small talk, two quick kisses, panties off, flies open and off you go. Nothing wrong with that kind of sex per se, but is that really how people, who have just met, have sex these days? Do we want to give young girls the impression that sex is something so transactional that it takes place within seconds of meeting someone? Are we doing girls any favours by promoting that idea and is it creating the right mindset for boys starting to date? I’m really not sure...

So, watching “Girls” scared me a bit and made me wonder whether I’d somehow missed another dating trend. Had the times really changed so radically since I was last dating (whenever that was)…?

But what – even more than odd Tinder profiles and rushed girls in Sitcoms - made me wonder whether I hadn’t only missed a dating trend, but an entire train was a dialogue in a book I’d read. In this dialogue, the main character hears from a friend about all the plastic surgery she had had and was planning to have. The friend talks about having had her nose done, a boob job, some botox… the “usual” stuff, and then goes on to talk about getting her vagina tightened and remodelled to remain desirable for her husband. Vagina tightening as a concept I’ve heard about, but the concept of having a vagina remodelled and “designed” to ensure best fit with the penis of the partner was entirely new and – quite frankly – really scary to me.

What has become of the (Dating) World since I last set foot in it? And do I really want to go out into this weird and twisted place? Suddenly the idea of becoming an old, drunk, crazy cat lady really sounds quite appealing (and that even though I'm allergic to cats)!