5 Bad Sex Trends From 2015 That Need to Stop in the New Year
We can all do better.
At the end of each year, I like to engage in the most
masochistic behavior anyone can ever undertake: trying to see if I can remember
the entire roster of my sexual who’s who from memory. Both a test of age and
indexing capabilities, I often end up losing track. But it’s not just because
I’m a little trampy when I drink tequila – I get sidetracked recounting the
best of the worst, trying to figure out just where hookups in my past went
wrong, just before they turned into a dumpster fire.
Usually this stock taking leads me to resolving to avoid
very specific behaviors – no more affairs with the boss’ best friend, no more
allowing my orgasms to go unfulfilled, significantly clearer establishment of
the reasons we don’t do butt stuff, and the like. The same goes for my friends,
whose own experiences added to the roster always made for a nice time capsule
of sexual trends of the year (did you know 2008 was a very popular year for
casual sex tapes and BJs in sexy librarian glasses?). But in asking around this
year, I noticed a different trend. Our sexual resolutions – the sex and dating
moves my friends and I vowed to abolish from our dating repertoires – had taken
a turn for the slightly more serious.
Sexy stuff came up to be sure, but so did a lot more commentary
on behavior; namely, respect. And more surprisingly – that sentiment was echoed
by all genders. If 2008 was the year of the civilian sex tape, 2015 is the year
of civility being as important as sex. In that spirit, I took to the streets of
my friends’ sex lives, as well as my own, to compile the 2015 list of bad sex
behavior that we’d all like to see disappear by 2016.
1. Netflix and Chill
More than any other response, people vehemently raged
against the idea of “Netflix and chill” (we already covered the fact that it’s
a terrible date). The reasons were varied as expected; most old grumpuses
echoed that “Netflix and chill” is nothing different from “Do you want to come
over and watch a movie?” though a few brave men copped to the fact that the
more ubiquitous Netflix and chill became, the more they had to try new moves to
get women to smash (apparently just asking has become too difficult).
My friend Freda sums it up best. “Netflix and chill [needs
to stop] being a ‘cool new sex thing,’” she rants. “The theme of my
relationship has been Netflix, chill, and six months of leg hair growth for
four years. This isn’t new!”
2. Internet Date Shaming
It’s 2015. Everyone is on Tinder. Or Hinge. Or Bumble. Or
OKCupid. In the next five years, previously unseen thumb tendonitis will become
the new “Did
you know your cell phone is bad for your spine?” insofar as technology
breaking our bodies down just as Darwin predicted. Yet for some reason, online
dating hasn’t completely shaken off its archaic stigmas.
“You’d think the negative reaction towards others hearing
that people met online through an app thing should have died off in 2015,”
laments my friend Nate, who has met previous girlfriends both in-person and
through OKCupid. “I am hopeful the stigma really goes away in 2016.” Another
friend, John, a stock broker with no free time, mentioned that while he has no
problem copping to meeting dates through apps, he does often “bump up” which
apps he used when talking to friends. “We’re in our 30s; I can’t tell my
friends I met a woman on Tinder, even if she’s fantastic – I lie and say Hinge
nine times out of 10.”
Stigma isn’t the only problem online dating should long
since have outgrown: social shaming is an even bigger one.
https://twitter.com/GMPaiella/status/682232994841649157
As my friend Gabriella points out, rarely a week passes
without a new listicle categorizing Tinder fails, or a tweet or screenshot
popping up on Instagram loudly calling out daters – often male – for bad
behavior. While explicitly abhorrent texts and unsolicited nude pics often
deserve a good tongue lashing, lately it feels like a lot of these call outs
are often a cruel response to people doing the best they can to play through
life’s most awkward ball game: dating. The only thing more ubiquitous than
people using dating apps in 2015 was people chronicling dating app bad
behavior; at this point, we get it, we’ve seen it all, we don’t need to see
anymore. This is what group text is for.
3. Benefits without Friends
While having brunch with a friend in an open marriage, I
couldn’t stop quizzing her on the logistics of having a sexy new boyfriend,
while still being madly in love with her equally sexy husband. “Well, my
boyfriend always calls and shows up when he says he will; I’m never in the
dark, so I’m never jealous or curious, which is when the fantasy and obsession
would usually kick in for me,” Jeanne explained. “We just respect the shit out
of each other, so there’s no guessing game. It’s just like any other casual
hookup, isn’t it?”
Jeanne, who’d been out of the dating game for a long time,
was shocked to hear that most friends with benefits trafficked in far less
humanity; in fact, every one of the eighteen people I spoke to who had a FWB
relationship this year admitted to it ending badly, or at least annoyingly. And
every single time, whether it was one side catching feelings, or one party
being annoyed that the other only called late night and on their own schedule,
the same issue kept cropping up: the “friends” part of “friends with benefits”
had all but gone by the wayside.
“I’ve been hooking up with my best friend – BIG MISTAKE –
and now he’s aloof in the way guys get when they don’t want you to crush on
them,” complained my friend Marie. “Which would be fine if he was a normal
dude, but he’s my best friend, so this only ends badly when I lose a hookup and
my friend.”
Having been rendered mute in many a casual relationship of
my own, I’m all for the emphasis on respect. Sometimes you just want to get
brunch with a person who hung out inside of you for a minute without him
assuming you also want to make it Facebook official, you know?
4. Bad One-Night Stands
“I would like to see the classic one-night stand go the way
of the dodo. As in: You meet somebody, you fuck, you never hear or talk to them
again. It’s not that I’m against casual sex – by all means, keep it loose! Fuck
lots of people! Eschew romantics for fuck buddies! But lately I’ve been trying
to avoid the one-time bang for this simple reason: If it’s good, I’m gonna want
to do it again.
And there are ways to make sure whether it’ll be good before
you commit to bringing someone home. Have a heavy make out, cop a feel, text
your fantasies beforehand — anything to better gauge whether this person will
fuck you well. And if it still goes bad, better to have a
half-night stand than grin and bear it.
I realize that occasionally even the hottest foreplay can
lead to shitty sex. And I fully endorse a tryst on a work trip or vacation. But
even then, the single-serving
boyfriend is more satisfying than one drunken bang.”
— Tami, 30
5. Ass Eating
I will never stop singing “But he gotta eat the booty like
groceries,” after hearing Jhene Aiko croon it this year, but I can assure you
no one is getting near my truffle butter in this lifetime. Between Allison
Williams getting her ass motorboated on “Girls,” and Nicki Minaj continuing her
ass-centric dominance over the music charts, 2015 has been the year of butt
stuff. But my god, at what cost? I don’t even want someone to kiss me after
they’ve gone down on me even though I know that’s a terrible thing to say as
both a woman and a feminist and if a man said that to me after I gave him head
I’d fuck him up, yet I’m now expected to be sexually attracted to someone whose
tongue was all up in where I shit on a near-consistent basis?
I get that ass eating is fantastic, and I would love to
possess the lack of inhibitions necessary to be an ass eating aficionado,
especially because who doesn’t love the feeling of being motorboated, am I
right? But I like ass eating to be a personal choice, not a cultural necessity,
and I fear if I don’t get on the train now, I’ll never be able to keep up with
future stakes being raised. I’m willing to come around on a well timed finger,
but near-perpetual ass-eating?
Let’s leave that on HBO.
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