When Steve Jobs sold his functioning liver to the Devil in exchange for the iPhone, his first thought probably wasn't, "I bet someone will create apps that ease no-strings-attached sexual encounters." Just kidding, he's a savvy dude so I'm sure he knew right away people would use the device for hookups and masturbatory purposes.
Smartphones are powerful gadgets. It's almost as if it were specifically designed to facilitate two people's genitals finding one another. One company, Nearby Buddy Finder LLC, decided to leverage the power of smartphones and created an app to do just that. They called it Grindr, and it was limited to gays, bis, and bi-curious. Or as homophobes subconsciously call them, "people just like me but more honest." Recently they released Blendr, the same thing but with support for a wider variety of orifices.
It got me wondering, who has an easier time getting laid with a smartphone: straights or gays?
The Pre-game
Since I would be attempting to get
some action both on the gay app and the hetero app, I need to get some
controls in place and minimize any variables. I decided to use the same
photo, same screen name, and same general approach to verbiage.
The
first thing I wanted to do was pick a screen name that encompasses who
my pretend persona is. My inner child is a sick, perverted little
17-year-old that watches porn on library computers, so I needed my
screen name to reflect that. Dickfist_McIroncock? Alan_Thicke? In the end, I went with Girth_Brooks.
The Setup
The
first thing I noticed was that Grindr and Blendr had a different method
of setting up profiles. Blendr required you to set up your profile; you couldn't even browse other users until
you did. With Grindr, you could literally start looking
for ass the second you fired up the app. With a blank profile
you can start soliciting for anonymous boning immediately. That alone should
have been an indication.
Anyway, I started
filling out my profile, and about half way through I realized I needed
to be sexy in order to secure offers for doin' it. I always thought Jude
Law would be the only guy I'd play gay for, yet here we are. It's clear
to me I would need to use a stock photo of some smoking hot dude if I
wanted to get any action. Why, you ask? Well, this is me.
and a dude who would wait in his car until a stripper finished her
shift. I needed to change that, otherwise this article would contain
nothing but a recounting of how I made myself depressed and spent the
rest of the evening eating dulce de leche Häagen Dazs ice cream since no
one wanted to blindly fornicate me.
So I did what the majority
of people on dating sites do: Lied about my appearance. I decided I'd
make a model regret it by scouring Flickr's Creative Commons database
for "hot guy" and came up with this dude who looks like a Rafael Nadal and Brandon Routh lovechild:
Grindr
I
shit you not, the instant my photo was approved, I received three messages.
I responded to a couple, and by the time I was done with that I
received more.
extremely classy dude sent me a cock photo as his opening line. If this
approach worked in person, I wouldn't be an unregistered sex offender.
guy lived in my building and was 153 feet away from me. That's a
fucking hallway, people. To put it into perspective, I'm closer to a
blowjob than to my car.
was surreal. I saw one of my friends and my sister's friends (both
openly gay, so no "btw dude, um..." awkward chats later), and I kept
getting messages to the point where I feared my creation had spun out of control. My pic was approved at 7:14 pm, I closed the app to
check up on Blendr for a few minutes at 7:17 pm, reopened it at 7:22 pm,
and closed it for good at 7:24 pm.
Total usage time: 6 minutes
Total messages sent to me: 13
Total pictures sent to me: 6
Total dick pics sent to me: 1
Blendr
I
filled out my profile, added interests to shit I assumed women would
like - cats, cooking, romantic comedies, etc. My "about me" states that,
"I'm a pretty typical guy. I cook write poetry, and love to just listen
to people talk. I'm a great listener." Chicks dig that, right?
I
started this little experiment at 7:14 p.m. as well. No messages right
away, fine. I minimized the app to view my gentlemen callers on Grindr.
I
reopened and closed it a few times while checking back and forth
between Grindr and Blendr. I never even saw anyone online. Granted, the
app was just launched a few days ago, but something tells me even with
double the usage of Grindr, I shouldn't expect so many back-to-back
messages immediately upon connecting. Unless those Blendr users happen
to be gay.
Total messages sent to me: 0
Total pictures sent to me: 0
Total dick pics sent to me: 0 :-(
Results
If
being gay were a choice, I'd be gaying up all over town with this
thing.You know what it is to go online and immediately have a couple of
dudes willing to help you "put things in places", so to speak? If this
app worked for straight people as free and easily as Grindr does, I'd
rack up so many diseases the Center for Disease Control would send an
intern to personally euthanize me.
To the gentlemen misled by my antics, I'm sorry. There are plenty of fish in the promiscuous sea, though, so go get 'em!
However,
at the end of all of this, I was still curious to see if the quick
responses arrived because of the photo I used. I decided to quickly
change the photo to my personal seductive one. I got this within one
minute.
