Tinder

The Tinder twitter feed’s overwrought, whiny, self-important meltdown over the Vanity Fair article is amusing, but it’s no defense of the piece itself, which is mostly lazy and content-free. It’s not much more than a collection of quotes designed and arranged as perfect clickbait to shock and titillate the kind of people looking to get unseemingly worked up by moral panics and jeremiads about how Kids These Days are doing everything wrong and it’s going to destroy the world. A considerably more interesting, and enlightening, approach would be to try to make sense of the rise of technologies like Tinder in light of empirical findings from research on generational sexual behavior; which strongly indicate millenials are having less sex, with fewer partners, than the previous two generational cohorts.