I was once interviewed by a reporter who asked my opinion on the ‘app’ called “Bang With Friends” in light of my work with divorced women. Not too surprisingly, I had never heard of it before. Apparently how it works is you import your list of Facebook friends into the program, and then you can send out secret messages to whomever you’d like to “bang”. If that person sends a reciprocal secret message, you are each notified so that you can arrange the “hook up.”
The Dangerous Implications
My reply to the woman was that I thought it was degrading, destructive and dangerous. That,
1. Any woman who would offer her body up online is no different from a hooker. This app acts as the go-between (pimp) and the girl simply clicks a button rather than stands on the street corner waiting to connect.
2. It is dangerous. How long before someone hacks into this and does terrible things with that information. Blackmail? What about underage kids posing as someone 18 or older and getting involved with this behavior? What about the possibility of someone saying they want to hook up and then they change their mind? Would stalking and harassment follow?
3. This is bad for current relationships. This makes it really simple for someone in a relationship to sneak around and hook up with someone they meet or connect with online. These kinds of liaisons rarely stay secret and the result can be the destruction of good marriages and good families.
4. This is bad for future relationships. It creates a false concept of sex in a relationship. Sex is a wild, fun, wonderful, intimate (and sacred) experience between two committed people. Bang With Friends sex leaves out the deep connection that happens when you have sex with someone you love and replaces it with something superficial, shallow and, in the end, selfish.
5. This is bad for our culture. Technology makes connections of all kinds easier. Some of those connections are good. Some definitely not so good. Making sex into something completely trivial and transitory might be temporarily pleasurable, but in my opinion it degrades sex itself.
In my opinion, this app is the epitome of people appealing to the the desire for something wonderful and turning it into something cheap for personal gain. Sex in the proper context with the right person can be amazing. It can be an exciting quickie on a table or a long, leisurely fulfillment after an exhausting day. On the other hand, it seems to me, turning your computer into an online pimp service is unhealthy in the long run for the people who created it; those who promote it; and those who use it.
