You might think that today’s DM-sliding fuckboys are history’s worst flirts, but that’s because you’ve never been hit on by a Victorian man drunk on his own cleverness.
History buff Alan Mays has been collecting 19th-century “acquaintance cards” for years and publishing them to Flickr. The cards, popular in the late 1800s, were emblazoned with notes meant to spark conversation with or express interest in women. Imagine if you got your Tinder bio printed on business cards and then started giving them to random strangers. That was how they flirted in the 1880s.
Suddenly, DM-sliding seems positively whimsical.