When my friend Jonathan* decided to “get back out there” after a decades-long relationship, he was braced for the gentle hell of “the apps.” After all, the pitfalls of online dating are cultural canon at this point: ghosting, bots, rudeness, functional illiteracy, people into “clean eating” … and on and on.
Even so, Jonathan was unprepared when his first few dates avoided small talk in favor of extremely graphic bedroom talk. In fact, the women he went out with seemed actively annoyed that he wasn’t ready to get to the “What do you like in bed?” part before their coffees cooled.
Perhaps that’s because he met them on Feeld, the sex-forward dating app that’s begun a slinky, kinky creep into the mainstream. While it’s long been on the radar of the fetish and queer communities (it was founded in 2014), Feeld has seen a climbing popularity that has piqued the interest of relationship-seeking sexual normies. And some of them might not be wholly ready for Feeld’s erotic frankness.
Feeld users can choose from an embarrassment of riches—genders, orientations, identifications, kinks, and combinations thereof. So if your idea of a good time isn’t being slapped with a dildo by a man with six girlfriends … is it even worth your time?
As one straight, cis monogamist friend who recently tried the app reported, “It can be intimidating if you’re not there for a male-male-male-female foursome.” Another warned that Feeld skewed “too young,” both in age and temperament. “It was a lot of 22-year-old ENM Marxists,” he said, rolling his eyes. (ENM would be “ethical non-monogamy,” a Feeld-ubiquitous term for open relationships.)
My friend Carlo tried Feeld briefly, not because he’s sexually adventurous, but because a new app sometimes means new people. “I’ve been swiping through the same women on Hinge and Bumble for years,” he explained. “If I’m sick of seeing them, they’re definitely sick of seeing me.” But unless he wanted to date a woman who was already married or partnered, it was mostly familiar faces. Another friend, Sofia, who’s more sex-positive and horny than most, felt overwhelmed by Feeld’s panoply of kink checkboxes and ended up ticking off “rape fantasy” in a panic over seeming too square.
Not everyone finds it overwhelming. My friend Cait, a hot queer person who likes sex in more volume and variety than anyone I know, has had great success finding fellow respectful perverts. She’s been happily dating a couple she met on the app, and she pointed out that among Feeld’s seemingly endless identifications and kinks, you can choose more wholesome offerings such as conversation and being held.
Sexual openness definitely feels like a Feeld requirement, but that could be nice if you’ve been out there a while and you’re tired of the usual first-date 20 questions and want to get right to whether or not your date eats ass (and likes to be held after).
Could this indicate a general foregrounding of sex over the usual emotional-connection stuff, like whether you both hate hiking? Perhaps it’s a cultural overcorrection, or a response to times when we feel more disconnected than ever, and tensions between straight men and women seem at an all-time high. Maybe there’s one of those compound-German-word feelings that describes the horniness one feels when one suspects the world is ending. But most likely, Feeld is just a new way one can repackage oneself to get laid. Or maybe even just a little bit cuddled.
*All names have been changed
Julieanne Smolinski is a Los Angeles–based TV writer
