We're Living Through a Sex Recession

Supply has never been higher, but demand is way down. Will we ever pull out of it?

- Dave Holmes

OUR WAITRESS CROUCHED DOWN TO EYE level and said, "Hey, bitches," then, earnestly, perhaps less joyfully than she might have earlier in her shift: "Are you thirsty bitches?" She said it with a sense of duty. We were at a restaurant called Bacon Bitch, and this is what is done there. Bacon Bitch had come up in a Google search for "brunch nearby" on a Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach, and when I'm presented with an option that sounds like a waking nightmare, I am powerless to pass it up. So we went and ordered the Bloody Marys with the hash brown and the fried egg on top, because we were both thirsty and curious bitches.

You can picture the place, so I don't need to tell you there was a lime-green neon sign that read "Bitch don't kill my vibe" in cursive. You are already seeing the waitresses' tight uniforms and hearing the innumerable bachelorette parties that surrounded us. You have a completely accurate mental picture of the mimosa-drunk 21st-birthday boy tottering toward the bathroom in knockoff Balenciaga slides. It was Disneyland, except instead of Mickey Mouse, it was just the word bitch.

I loved it, because it was very stupid, and for that reason, it felt very current. It was a piping-hot snapshot of our culture at this moment, so awash in sexadjacent semi-salaciousness it came back around to being wholesome. Even polite. When our waitress jostled our table as she scooched past, she whispered with absolute sincerity, "Pardon me, bitch." It was the very picture, run through a filter and posted on Instagram, of the Sexual Recession.