Horny college kids, steeped in their frenetic hookup culture, have stopped attending rainbow parties just long enough to find a new way to feed their sex addictions: Facebook.
Bang With Friends is a Facebook app that lets you pick potential sexual partners from your list of friends and mark the ones you want to “bang.” If those friends also use the app and select you in return, you both get notified by email that there’s some casual sex to be had.
It’s up to you and your friend to figure out the rest.
Created by three twenty-something guys from California, the app has taken the single most common use for Facebook — creeping on your friends — and made it explicit. And apparently that’s exactly what people were clamouring for. In less than two weeks, the app has amassed hundreds of thousands of users.
As might be expected with a Facebook app about casual sex designed by three straight dudes, Bang With Friends has its detractors. For one, there was no option for same-sex banging when the app launched, which the trio chalked up to the sudden spike in popularity while the website was still being fine-tuned.
“We’ll be honest with you, we made this in two hours… with a lot of Red Bull and vodka,” one of the creators told the Daily Beast. They have since opened up the app to allow gay pairings as well.
Another problem with the site is its frat-bro tone, exemplified by the image of a woman with a dress pulled over her head that greets visitors to the site, apparently chosen for the “erotic, laidback, and whimsical nature of the photo.” The three creators, who have chosen to remain anonymous, also referred to themselves as “online pimps” in earlier interviews, and the website’s URLs don’t do much for the cause of subtelty.
But for all its flaws, this app has clearly hit a nerve. Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest insight was that people want to interact with their friends online and not some random usernames in a Yahoo! chatroom. Bang With Friends just takes that logic to its ultimate conclusion, and it’s a bit surprising that it took this long for someone to come up with this.
Others see this is another embarrassing low-point in our ongoing loss of real-world communication and life skills, and a blogger for the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship even called it “the evilest app ever.”
“I wonder how many abortions this will lead to, how much heartache Bang with Friends will cause,” wrote Adam Jeske, who also encouraged his readers to fight such sinful behaviour on Twitter using the hashtag #HappyPrude.
With all this commotion, I sent off some questions to the creators of this Facebook app and newest threat to society. Their emailed response is included below.
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Q: I’m guessing you three are using the app. Any success stories yet? And if not, how embarrassing is it to pour this much time and effort into fucking your friends, having the app explode in popularity, and still not getting laid?
A: Ouch, it burns! One of our close friends found success soon after we launched, so that gives us some comfort.
Q: Isn’t a big part of Facebook already about creeping on your friends and virtually flirting with them? By making it explicit, aren’t you destroying the unspoken agreement among all FB users that we use the social network for romantic/sexual adventures?
A: We’re making it easier to break the ice and find more than friendship if you’re both into it. Basically, enough of the bullshit - a straightforward way to find out who’s really into you without risking your friendships or liking every post on their wall in the hopes they get the hint.
Q: Will you branch out into other possible arrangements? Like, what if I only want to bang my friend in a threesome with another friend? What about specific sex acts? I don’t think I should be forced to “bang” my friend if all I want to do is masturbate next to her as she eats a Cobb salad.
A: We like where your heads at! Stay tuned… and enjoy your jerked Cobb salad!
Q: In response to Bang With Friends, some people have taken to Twitter using the hashtag #happyprude to stress traditional values and relationships. The writer who started this called Bang With Friends the “evilest app ever.” Any response?
A: We weren’t aware of that, but thanks for giving us a laugh! Actually, we’re happy that they are finding happiness in their “traditional” values; Plenty of other people appreciate our unabashed approach that recognizes the crucial role that sex plays in relationships.
Q: I selected a whole bunch of my friends that I wanted to bang over a week ago and I haven’t gotten any responses. Obviously your website is broken. How do you plan to fix it?
A: Sorry about that - clearly there’s an error. Looking into it more, I believe you simply had too many incoming ‘Down to Bang’ requests so our system got overloaded from the sheer sexiness of it all.
Bang With FriendsEd Yourdon/Flickr