Future Sex (4 page)

The business strategy was different on websites that excluded women. The founders of Manhunt, which transitioned from a phone chat line to a website in 2001 and became one of the most popular early dating sites for gay men, quickly recognized that in the world of men interested in meeting
men, what job the person had or where he went to college were secondary questions. Sexual attraction and explicitly sexual communication tended to come first.

“A website operated by straight people just does not register with gay men,” Jonathan Crutchley, Manhunt’s co-founder, said in a 2007 interview. “When you fill out their questionnaires the questions that a woman would ask a man when she’s
looking for someone to marry, like ‘How much money do you make?’ ‘Do you want children?’—these are ridiculous questions. A gay man could not care less how much money you make, could not care less about wanting children. They want to know your physical attributes; they want to see pictures; they want to know what you’re into.” It was not that his clients did not seek long-term partnerships and families,
said Crutchley. Many of them did. The difference between the two approaches was in the process of evaluation. For a significant number of men, sex had its own intrinsic value and quantitative metrics, independent of the qualifications that determined whether you wanted to live with someone and adopt babies with him. Sexual attraction was not a mysterious chemical accident but something that
could be researched and described in language. Sexual desires were not ineffable wisps of the imagination; they could be named. Someone like me, in contrast, believed that if I enjoyed going to a museum with a man the sexual attraction would just follow, without anybody having to talk about it.

In March 2009, a “social discovery” app called Grindr invited men to “find gay, bi, and curious guys
for free near you!” When enabled on a mobile device, Grindr produced a grid of users, organized in order of proximity. Information about each user ranged from a headless torso with a sobriquet, to smiling, fully clothed portraits with real first names. Full nudity was not allowed in profile pictures, in part to comply with the rules of the app stores, but people could send each other more explicit
photos once they began chatting. Grindr’s founder, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker named Joel Simkhai, said that the app was more about accessing a social community than it was about finding sex. He had invented it because he wanted to know who around him was gay, and 67 percent of users said they used it to make friends. On the other hand, it was called Grindr.
The New York Times
kept describing
it as a “hookup app.” The logic, I guess, was that a conversation that began with “R u hung?” had as its end goal an anonymous sexual encounter, whereas one that began with “Hey there gorgeous, ready for the weekend?” would result in a malted with two straws in it followed by an engagement ring. I think that was the story we were telling ourselves.

Before Grindr presented another idea about how
to use an iPhone, Internet dating had succeeded as a technological change that did not dismantle certain myths about the progression of romance. OkCupid was just another way to ask someone out on a date. Grindr introduced the theory that one could look at a picture of someone’s abdomen and soon be having sex with a neighbor, and the theory became a question. Should one do this? My answer was no,
obviously not. I could only see threats of sexual violence and disease. Still, I liked the idea of it; I liked that our phones beamed signals to orbiting satellites to reveal people only a few feet away; I liked the idea that the strangers of the city could lower the barriers of their isolation. I anticipated when such a technology would become available for my demographic even though I already
knew I wouldn’t be bold enough to act on its potential. I wasn’t alone in wanting it to happen. Web articles speculated about the arrival of a “Grindr for straight people” or a “Grindr for lesbians.” These articles had a wistful tone, and even the ones that fretted over “hookup culture” believed in the power of a GPS-equipped mobile device to sexually liberate women, as if the technology would free
us from all the fears and superstitions. The consternation about the “decline of romance” revealed inadvertent optimism that we really could become a society where every single person would feel sexual belonging by activating a program on her phone on a Friday night. Even the opprobrium was idealistic, with its faith that technology would change everything.

In 2011, Simkhai launched such an app.
He called it Blendr, but it failed to deliver results comparable to its men-seeking-men counterpart. Once he allowed everyone into the network, it lost its purpose as a means by which to find a coherent social community. Worse, when users started chatting on Blendr and a man sent an unsolicited picture of his penis, women deleted the app.

Tinder arrived a year later. It was a general-interest
dating app that in many ways mimicked the interface of Grindr. It showed photos of other users in a person’s immediate vicinity with only name, age, and a tag line of written text. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swiped them to the left (no) or right (yes). It was a Grindr for straight people, but its success with straight people had everything to do with changing Grindr into a clean,
well-lighted space. Tinder had innocuous graphic design and peppy animation. The copy of its messaging was buoyant with exclamation points. The profiles were tied to Facebook profiles so that you knew a person was “real.” Users could not exchange photographs within the app, to lower the risk of unwanted sexual imagery. They could exchange messages only when two people swiped each other to the
right and would “match.” Tinder’s founders called this the “double opt in.” The founders of Tinder denied any comparisons with Grindr, or that the app’s purpose was to help people arrange casual sex. “Girls aren’t wired that way,” said Sean Rad, adding that married people could also use it “to find tennis partners.”

I didn’t think straight women lived dramatically different lives from gay men.
I saw two cultures with distinct stories about the right way to act and to be, with differences in what they were willing to declare about themselves. Grindr had presented an idea. Tinder had modified that idea according to another culture’s concepts of propriety. The gestures toward the two mythologies were very banal: a black screen background versus a white one; photos of body parts versus photos
of people doing adventure sports. Two sets of symbols and gestures that would end the same way, with two people in a room together and no guidance.

Of course I knew many friends who had fallen in love online, who had found in the technology a clear, sense-making corridor from being single to being in a couple with no detours into other possibilities. I felt more affinity with the people who had
not found love, especially those who expressed a feeling that endless stretches of Internet dating put them outside of an ontological monoculture that they could neither describe nor name: people who had gone for several years without bringing anybody home for family holidays, who were used to going to weddings by themselves, who knew they embodied some ahistorical demographic whose numbers were
now significant but which was lacking any sense of group consciousness, let alone any declaration of sexual purpose.

These technologies, which presented a certain possibility of freedom, revealed how little we demanded. In theory, I could behave as I wished. Without breaking any laws I could dress as a nun and get spanked by a person dressed as the pope. I could watch a porn starlet hula-hoop
on my computer while I had sex with a battery-operated prosthetic. I could contact a stranger on the Internet, tell him to meet me at the north entrance of the Woolworth Building, tell him I would make myself known only if he arrived carrying three Mylar balloons referencing distinct Disney animated classics, and then, if he fulfilled my wishes, go to his place for sex. I could do all these things
without having to wear a scarlet letter, get thrown in jail, or be stoned in public.

I did not do any of these things. My timidity not only concerned ideas of sexual “safety” (especially since most such ideas were ruses that gave women a false sense of control in an unpredictably violent world). My avoidance of sex also had a lot to do with an equation, a relationship of exchange around which
I organized my ideas. I saw sex as a lever that moderated climatic conditions within the chamber of life, with a negative correlation between the number of people I slept with and the likelihood of encountering love. Being sexually cautious meant I was looking for “something serious.” Having sex with more people meant I privileged the whims of the instant over transcendent higher-order commitments
that developed over long stretches of time. I equated promiscuity with youth culture and thought of longer monogamous relationships as more adult, and it seemed depressing to still be having casual sex on a regular basis for an interminable number of years. The arbitrary nature of these correlations had not occurred to me.

Even though I felt certain I would eventually meet someone, I consumed
many theories about why I was alone. The books and magazines I read supplied an ongoing and detailed investigation of female malaise. All over America women wondered what had happened to the adult life they had imagined as children, and whether to blame its elusiveness on material changes or personal shortcomings. The old-fashioned theory that a woman might be unlucky and had not met the “right guy”
no longer satisfied them. Books urged the single woman to “settle” and marry the imperfect suitor, or to accept that “he’s just not that into you.” The literature counseled behavior modification, telling her to follow “the rules” or to temper adoration because “men love bitches.” Another set of ideas reassured the woman that she was not to blame—her problems were caused by the Internet: porn had
encouraged a culture of loveless, aggressive sexuality or had drained men of sexual animus; the “marketplace” of Internet dating made consumer products of humans and overwhelmed them with choices. Fake-sociology journalists explained to her that she lived in an unfortunate era of societal confusion caused by unclear postfeminist gender roles. This literature could be helpful. It recognized a situation.
But it never found a way out.

Instead, these theories compressed the life of “woman today” into a single, unhappy narrative. It began with accounts of how technology was ruining things in high school, how teenage girls had now assimilated ejaculate in the face and Brazilian bikini waxes, how blow jobs were the new kissing, and how girls used social media to send boys pictures of their breasts
to be popular. These young women would progress to college, where, after initially thinking that having sex with a man meant committed monogamy, a woman would first suffer disappointment then shift her outlook to “try not to get attached.” Absent the intention of finding love as she pursued sex, the story went, love would never arrive for her. The young woman would then arrive in New York or Dallas
or Chicago, where men don’t pay for dinner anymore, and romance is only so many text messages sent while drunk at two a.m. The men were listless dilettantes, the women gym-toned and frantically successful. The confused heroine was often counseled to withhold sex, in exchange for what wasn’t exactly clear. As she aged, the articles shifted to stories of regret, how at one point she thought that
marrying young would be detrimental to her career, and now she worried about her attractiveness and fertility, as if every woman is presented with a clear choice between career and family in her mid-to-late twenties. By the age of forty the single women, tired of waiting for commitment from men, were using technology to get pregnant by themselves. Babies equaled the fulfillment of a great destiny,
although women who had married and had children sounded extremely busy and unhappy, suffered in their careers, and lost interest in sex. The narrative of married life culminated in a hazy binary of male politicians who cheated on their middle-aged wives versus happy couples who settled into gardening, fitness, and conversation about television shows over dinner. Researchers were hard at work trying
to invent a pill to incite sexual desire for married women who loved their husbands but did not love having sex with them.

The stories all became one story, documenting a long series of contemporary threats to the ideal of “the committed monogamous relationship,” that managed to include every expression of female sexuality that happened outside of it. The only way a woman could keep from undermining
this version of love was by saying no to sex, never pandering to male desire, and never expressing any overt sexual interest in the new channels of photography and text. Critics would lament that if a person were to design a fantasy world based on the whims of a young man, its rules and ethics would look much like the social world of the contemporary college campus. What men wanted from sex
was assumed to be sex; what women were described as wanting when it came to sex was not sex at all, but rather a relationship in which one had sex, a structure in which sex happened. The consensus about what young men were said to want from sex—lots of it, perhaps with a number of different partners—had no female corollary. “What kind of sex do you like?” was a question the Internet dating apps
did not ask.

If a woman thought she would most likely sabotage her future happiness through her sexual choices, it followed that it would be difficult to plainly state one’s desires, or even to describe in explicit language the sex she wanted to have. Every sexual expression raised the question of false consciousness: women were described as “objectifying themselves,” “degrading themselves,”
or “submitting unthinkingly to contemporary pressures.” They were accused of succumbing to “the pornification of society” and altering their bodies to please men. Rather than following the natural impulse of an adventurous young person a woman was “adopting the sexual behavior of the most opportunistic guy on campus” or “masquerading her desperation as freedom.” Once married, a woman who became a
swinger was accommodating the desires of her philandering partner rather than acting on her own free will. A woman could not even give a blow job without a voice in the back of her head suggesting she had been “used.”