Area Man Is Not Fucking, Which Must Mean No One Else Is

Right?

Over at the Washington Post, Jon Gugala would like us to know that being a single white male isn’t the 24/7 bonefiesta we’ve been envisioning all these years.

Single men are having less sex than you think

Sure, he’s free to explore the singles community in his area with services like Tinder and OKCupid, but he’s exhausted of the process (and looking for something a little more serious). Plus, he’s made it this far without STIs he says, so now more than ever he feels cautious about sleeping with new people at all.

This hands-off approach seems to be making him comfortable as an individual, which is great. Live your truth! But there’s one piece of disparity within the article’s structure that ends up being funny—at least to me. It’s that the headline—“Single men are having less sex than you think”—speaks for all “single men,” and yet the piece exclusively includes information about only the author’s sex life. There are no interviews with other singles, no research data. Just intimate knowledge of Jon’s personal habits. At one point, he writes:

Well, I masturbate a lot, if you really want to know. Single guys are doing it way more than you might believe possible, if that is possible. Doing it seems to help, as not — by my own trial-and-error — can lead to embarrassing texts of the “U up” type. I do CrossFit and play volleyball (a lot and a lot).

How do we know “single guys are doing it way more than you might believe possible”? He just told us he jerks off a lot, but there’s no quote from “Brian, 35” corroborating his claim. It is a piece, in essence, that shouts, “Because I am not having a lot of sex and I am a single man, we can say conclusively that single men are not having a lot of sex.”

On the one hand, I feel for the guy, because writers don’t usually have final say over the headlines for their pieces, and editors are interested in getting as many people as possible to click through to read, so depending on who your editor is, your sweet personal essay about finding your dad’s old flip flops in the attic may end up being entitled “Bikinis, Booze, and War” or some shit.

On the other hand, hehe :-).