In some ways, dating apps are the anti-internet

Nerds – allegedly not the problem this time

The least believable of the reasons given for the non-success of such apps is that because Silicon Valley is all run by male nerds they just don't understand women or their needs. Which is, unfortunately, part of the analysis being utilised by Whitney Wolfe (one of the Tinder founders) in her development of an app called Bumble.

Which is basically Tinder but only women get to decide to open up a conversation.

The thought behind it, says Wolfe, is simple. Having spoken to so many women who had been put off dating apps by a constant stream of creepy, uninitiated and often abusive messages from men, there seemed an obvious need for a platform that offered some level of female empowerment in the digital dating sphere.

That there is so much gross behaviour on such apps I don't doubt. But I do doubt whether there's a technological solution to it. I think it's more likely that it will be a social solution that comes up trumps in the end.

Consider a very basic model of human heterosexuality: men propose and women decide. How that proposal is made will be part of what the decision is. A male two-year-old will both crap anywhere and wave his willy at any- and everyone.

One of the major tasks of parenting is to socialise both behaviours out of him. The toilet training might take a year or so while the willy bit can take decades.

And what really does that is the discovery that waving willies at adult women just doesn't get you laid – far from it, in fact. Waving a penis substitute like a red sports car, the more expensive the better, might, but note that substitute bit there.

From my vantage point of being both old and extremely married, I think that's what will end up happening in social and dating apps. For at the moment, this is all terribly new and we've no set social mores to follow. Thus all too many men revert to the two-year-old's behaviour.

But women will educate us in what works and once the lesson sinks in that asking 50 random strangers “Hi, wanna jiggy?” doesn't actually work, then our approaches will be tamed down to those that do work.

Educate not in the sense of having to consciously think about it, but just in the sense that if jiggy is the aim then people will pretty quickly work out what achieves that aim and behave accordingly.

I wish everyone in this space the greatest of luck, of course, but I do think that this is a problem with a social solution rather than a technological one. On the very reasonable grounds that this is a problem that every society ever has had to deal with and they all do manage to deal with it in different ways.

There's always some socially acceptable manner of asking if a woman wants to get jiggy (even if it's often been “will you marry me”, although in some other cultures that seems to cause sex to end) and we'll figure it out soon enough online too.

Simply because humans are very interested in sex and so we end up doing what allows us to have more of it. ®

*Not startling, because most of us have worked out that most humans are highly interested in sex.