Sex with Japanese cocaine dealers, fart fetishes and dates that end in tear gas New Yorkers love sharing hookup horror stories, but we deserve better
On a warm Thursday night in July, hundreds of New Yorkers — most of them single women — gathered at Littlefield in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to trauma bond over the horrors of modern dating. They came to attend About Last Night, a nationwide event started in 2016 where people get up on stage to tell tales of terrible dates and lament the misery of looking for love.The event aims to help singles feel less alone, but the stories of fart fetishes and perverted coworkers actually showed just how much bad behavior singles — especially women — are letting their partners get away with.One woman, Jesse, recounted having her first one night stand in New York City at age 22.
The older man she was hooking up with got up, sat on his standing desk, and rode it up and down naked as she watched, baffled.Another young woman, CJ, recalled hooking up during lockdown with a “Japanese cocaine dealing skater boy with a lisp,” only to realize that she was actually in love with another member of her 28-person cooperative housing living set up.After leaving his apartment high on cocaine, she spontaneously joined a nearby Black Lives Matter protest, where she was tear-gassed by police.A guy named Jared recalled going on a date with a woman who admitted she was in a 24/7 dominant-submissive kink relationship with an older man who had been reading all of their texts and controlling whether or not she could see Jared or be intimate with him.There were also quite a few appeals to bathroom humor. Frankie recalled a budding romance with a coworkers, who admitted on their second date that he was sexually aroused by women farting.
He began sending links to flatulence-related pornographic videos — while sitting just a few cubicles down from her at work.Chase James, the Los Angeles-based founder of About Last Night, said the event was inspired by his friend group’s ritual of sharing their own terrible experiences from the night before over breakfast.He started the series in San Francisc...