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Tech

Swiping Right in Other Cities

The soft kink of travel Tinder.

In Austin, the men on Tinder are woodsy as hell, at least by New York standards. My friend, who is on vacation there, sends me screenshot missives of guys in skinny jeans holding chainsaws; a picture of a pudgy, grinning man helping a toddler in a camouflage cap to hold a handgun. Bay Area Tinder, by all accounts, is superior to New York Tinder: more weird-looking boys, and weird-looking boys tend to fuck better than gorgeous ones. Every other Tinder boy in Philly is wearing a sports jersey; in Boston the bro's talisman of choice is a backwards cap. In Rome I hear the app is flooded with Americans on holiday: photos of women holding pets, or twisting into a complicated yoga pose.

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And in New Orleans, to my pleasant surprise, Tinder reflects all the eerie sex appeal that makes the city itself so captivating. On the first day I'm there, I'm invited to join a cult (probably a joke) and to attend a swingers party at Collette, a sex club downtown—no strings attached, says my potential date, you can do whatever you want once we're in. We just need girls to go with us so it doesn't cost too much.

For the class of twenty- and thirty-somethings that Tinder was developed to cater to, the app can be an incredibly appealing way to feel out a new place. The company itself knows this: the soon-to-be-launched paid Tinder Plus includes the option to browse users in other cities. To open Tinder in a place you don't live is to get a targeted and deeply satisfying cross-section of the local population: basically, the people who own smartphones, like apps, don't mind kicking it with strangers, and enjoy making out.

Granted, when I started asking my matches what their experiences using the app had been like, it was clear Tinder, like other dating services, is in many ways easier for women. Some men said they couldn't get anyone to hang out with them because of the assumption was that they were just looking for a quick bang (or were total creeps, which, well, maybe they were). But when I used it in the South recently, Tinder's rapid-fire interface (and, I guess, my expertly crafted travel Tinder profile) made it shockingly easy to ask for tips. Don't have time to hang out this weekend? That's cool. Where should I go dancing tonight?

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If the best silly, ham-fisted metaphor we have for something like Tinder is the singles bar—which the app encourages, egging you on like a goofy wingman when you find a match: "say something witty!"—opening Tinder when you're away from home could be like wandering into the greatest, weirdest, least sceney house party on the planet. Suspend all the finger-wagging that attends the idea of meeting strangers online—as if aforementioned singles bar is really any better—and you've got an in, which is what anyone dropped into an unfamiliar city is usually looking for.

They ended up throwing a house party together with snow cones and fireworks (and yes, they also boned)

One of my matches sent me a dispatch from Mobile, Alabama recently. He's in the film industry, so his version of travel Tinder is a little more hands-on; he spends seven months on location or more and uses Tinder everywhere he goes. Mobile wasn't going so hot so far (lots of "boring" girls) but he uses the app to "get a local to talk to you." When he was in Jackson, Mississippi awhile back he absolutely hated it, until he matched with a girl and went night sailing with her friends. They ended up throwing a house party together with alcoholic snow cones and fireworks (and yes, they also boned). It sounded like just the sort of social embeddedness that a service like Airbnb imitates when it facilitates your stay in a stranger's home. But give me weird new friends with sailboats over playing pretend I-live-here in a sparkling clean apartment any day.

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Austin Tinder.

And then there's that other kind of social embeddedness: the chain of friends and acquaintances that links one city to another, in my case among the mobile and educated and iPhone-pawing class that bounces between Portland and Oakland and Brooklyn and New Orleans, to name a few. Recently, a BuzzFeed writer sang the praises of using Tinder to find the missed connections in his life, the cute friends-of-friends eyed across the room but never spoken to, a good friend of a friend you've always heard about but never met. Since Tinder's loose version of accountability relies on Facebook's friend networks, it's pretty easy to find the people you might hang out with if you lived a different life, in a different place.

For example: on New Orleans Tinder, both a friend and I matched with a cute little bearded thing who said he liked farming; he and I had worked with the same people, but at different times, back in New York. My friend and I chatted with him separately through the app until he realized we were together. On the way over to his house the two of us half-jokingly considered the possibility that after dinner there might be a bottle of wine, scattered candles, and maybe some R. Kelly facilitating the most cliched act of straight-guy kink. Instead, we ate an incredible homemade meal—plus cookies from scratch!—in his gigantic New Orleans kitchen and promised to say hello to our mutual friends when we were back in the city.

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Both my friend and I matched with a cute little bearded thing who said he liked farming

But none of that should obscure Tinder's central function, which is to help people get laid. When I was at a small music festival upstate last fall with about 200, mostly New York-based twenty- and thirty-somethings, the Tinder scene was absolutely rabid—people made rendezvous points in the woods behind the makeshift venues. And really, one of the most erotic things about hooking up—or even simply being in—another city is the cover it gives you to try on different versions of yourself. Tinder, with its tiny, fleeting modes of interaction, its easily-abandoned and rewritten bios, is incredibly well-suited to soft fantasy. It's sexy as hell.

By way of example, I direct you to another friend of mine, a travel Tinder hero and an inspiration to us all. When she's in another city her profile reads, in full: "In town from New York City. Take me to your favorite bar and pretend to be whoever you want." Now, when I travel, I use her bio as my template. I strongly suggest you do too.

Molly Osberg is on Twitter.

This story is part of Motherboard's Sex Ed Week, a series of sex-focused science and technology stories. Check out more stories here: http://motherboard.tv/sex-ed