The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (21 page)

The point is unbridled freedom and access, commensurate with the expanding freedoms and access enjoyed by gay men in general. “Gay bars that exist today,” said Chapdelaine, “they aren’t even trying. They just paint it black, offer some bad drinks. And you know what? They’re over. Guys want to go to the nice bars, to the nice restaurants. You want to be able to hang out anywhere with your straight friends. This app lets them do that.”

Chapdelaine is on to something: I spoke with Terry Trussler at Vancouver’s Community-Based Research Centre, whose latest research compiles surveys from eighty-six hundred gay men. Trussler found that three-quarters of young men are dissatisfied with designated gay spaces, preferring to roam outside village ghettos. Thirty-six percent of those under thirty used their cell phones to find casual sex (compared with 18 percent of older men).
According to Trussler’s report
: “Internet and smartphones, not bars and cafés, have become the main means of connection between men under 30.”

Traditionally, when gay men left their ghetto, they were effectively neutered. You couldn’t know who was gay at a mainstream venue, so sexual advances became problematic at best and a physical risk at worst. Today, when gay men go out into the larger world, technologies like GuySpy point out the queer potential of any space. In other words, one can make a four-person gay bar out of a forty-person restaurant. But only, of course, if everyone’s using the technology. By this light, mobile sex apps could be something more than erotic fast food. Their use could be a revolutionary act, a way for a sexual minority to stake out territory traditionally denied them.

But why stop there? Apps could next inject this revolutionary attitude toward sex—overt, open, casual—beyond gay culture and into the mainstream. The question is, can the bathhouse brain work for straight people (and lesbians)? Would this approach to sex even be tenable? According to Chapdelaine, it’s inevitable. He argues that his app is the future, like it or not. “Ten years from now, this is going to be an integral part of everyone’s life, gay or straight.”

• • • • •

This brings us to the heterosexual hitch: the female question. Do women
want
the revolution?

In 2011, U.S. neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam published their analysis of the Web search behavior of more than one hundred million men and women around the world (eat your heart out, Alfred Kinsey). Ogas says that, indeed, women’s preferences are why heterosexual sex culture is so different from gay men’s. “Quite frankly,” he told me, “a sex site like Grindr shows us what all men would do if women weren’t involved.” His position seems to be confirmed by examples of Grindr-esque efforts where men
aren’t involved at all: Qrushr Girls, a lesbian variation of Grindr launched in 2010, attracted a mere fifty thousand users in three months and then failed.

Whatever engineered them, the blockades between women and casual hookups have thus far kept online technologies from becoming overt, mainstream sex sources for straights. Early attempts to replicate Grindr and GuySpy for heterosexuals are platonic by comparison. One app, called Blendr (yes, produced by the folks behind Grindr), is making a go, with more than 180 million members. Except that Blendr seems ashamed of its true intentions; it bills itself as “a place to find friends,” which would be a great tag for a location-based social app for kindergarten children, but less so for consenting adults in search of sex.

On Grindr, a photo of a man’s naked torso is accompanied by blunt descriptions of his weight, preferred sexual position, and HIV status. When I scour the Blendr site, though, I learn that “Brittany” likes Hugo Boss and the movie
Titanic
;
and “Anna” wants to go Rollerblading with a guy who is older than twenty-five. So much for Blendr’s casual sex life.

Perhaps future generations of heteros will be more sexually adventurous? There seems to be a growing comfort with
broadcasting
sexual desire, at least.
When 606 students were canvassed
at a single high school in the southwestern United States, almost 20 percent of them admitted to having sent a sexually explicit image of themselves through their phone (twice as many said they’d received such an image). (
On Grindr, too, it is the digital natives
who form the largest user group, and it is also they who are most comfortable with enabling the app’s geolocation software.) But that’s not the whole picture.

Reading media reports of grade-eight children sending one another homemade pornography leads to the gut feeling that digital life must be an invitation to a hypersexed reality. However, gossipy accounts of adolescent sex lives don’t necessarily translate to what’s going on. Statistics Canada conducted a National Population Health Survey in 1996–1997 (immediately before the Internet’s proliferation) and then again in 2005 (after teenagers had gained access to complex online worlds).
Comparison of the two shows
post-Internet teenagers were actually having less
physical sex than their pre-Internet peers. The number of teens who reported having sexual intercourse dropped from 47 to 43 percent. A more recent StatsCan study found that between 2003 and 2012, there was zero change in the number of sexually active young people.
In fact, the only significant change
is that youths who
are
having sex are now more likely to use condoms. And the average age when we lose our virginity (seventeen) has not changed in twenty years. The next generation, then, may be producing more signals
of sex without actually
having
more of it.

What’s not clear is whether all this sexual posturing is making us happier and more fulfilled. As we fill in the longing, the absences that characterize so much of history’s erotic art, love songs, and poetry, with the constant connection of digital technology, what fine yearnings have we made extinct? Craigslist, sexting, and porn are superb dismantlers of sexual mystery, but I don’t know that desire without mystery, without absence, is quite enough for me.

• • • • •

Of course, other kinds of mysteries are ideal grist for the Internet. Consider Toronto-based AshleyMadison.com, which helps its sixteen million users arrange extramarital affairs. If the business of online hookups has a bogeyman, it’s Noel Biderman, CEO of the company that owns AshleyMadison and half a dozen other sites that unabashedly satisfy the needs of specific populations—his CougarLife.com, for example, helps young men meet divorcées and single moms; meanwhile, his EstablishedMen.com helps “perfect princesses” find older, wealthy guys.

Their traffic charts the ebb and flow of secret human appetites: Monday morning is the busiest time at AshleyMadison, as disappointing weekends lead to cheating; late Sunday night is the busiest time for CougarLife, as drunken older women (and drunken young bucks) return home, alone, from the bar; and every site promoting casual sex gets a major spike the day after New Year’s, as the world’s population makes a bleary promise to itself that, surely, it can do better.

While we spoke, Biderman moved about his twelfth-floor office at Toronto’s RioCan Complex (a hub of social media, housing outlets of Facebook and LinkedIn, too). He’s a smart, charismatic man. His rationale, surprisingly, matches the harm-reduction argument used to justify safe injection sites: Whether you like it or not, this activity is going to happen, so we might as well mitigate the risk. “Before the Internet, most affairs had to be with someone in your circle, someone at work or your sister’s husband,” he says. “That’s way more damaging.” We get to the rub pretty quickly: “It’s ridiculous that people take these moral stands about it,” he told me. “You can’t market infidelity.
You
, for example”—he takes a sharp breath—“I can’t
convince
you to have an affair; you either will or you won’t. I can only convince you to use my platform. These Web sites are just a platform. We’re as agnostic as a phone.”

I ask him where hookup technology is headed, and he lays out a bold vision. “We’re going to have to build something that goes beyond self-representation,” he explains, citing the myriad ways our subjective hang-ups keep us from accurately representing ourselves. Biderman’s argument is that we actually get in the way of our own hookups, that we don’t know, or won’t admit, what we really want. Instead, we should open up access to the minutiae of our lives (your Web search history, that video you e-mailed your dad, the music you listen to) so helpful algorithms can do their job properly.

“If we can use science, use algorithms, to make our relationships more successful, then that’s a positive,” he tells me. “We need to get over this idea that infringing on privacy is such a problem. Does it matter if a computer knows what you watch on television?”

• • • • •

I don’t care whether a computer knows that I’ve seen all of
Modern Family
twice. But I do care very much whether my love life is crowdsourced. Yet how could it not be, the more I become enveloped by online processes? And if we end up browsing for sexual partners the same way we hunt for a decent sushi joint, will our true sexual potential have been revealed by the magic wand of Grindr and the rest? Or will it have been masked by the static of the medium itself? Will the omnipresence of choice, in other words, block us from the absences that so often fuel our desires?

The Greek word
eros
in fact denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for they who are absent.” There is some (perhaps antique) quality of our search for intimacy that actually demands the separations that precede our meetings. I’m not arguing for abstinence here, or even for monogamy. But it seems clear that online technologies promote us toward a state of constant intimacy, and that’s not necessarily an ingredient in erotic desire.

Here is Simone de Beauvoir on chivalric love: “
The knight departing for new adventures
offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love.” Tomorrow’s lovers will have a hard time understanding that. All their knights will sit, forever, at their feet.

Gay or straight, it’s in our sex lives that the distance between online abstractions and our lived experience is most intensely felt. The crowded, sense-depriving focus of an online experience is the opposite of the spare, sense-gorged experience of cruising the sidewalk at dusk. And isn’t it often the weird, unaccountable qualities in a person (his Woody Woodpecker laugh, the way she hugs her friends too hard) that draws us to those who aren’t our “type”? If, in our online pursuit of love and sex, we lose those intangible signals, will we one day forget their value so completely that future generations—mired in ever more complex variants on this same perma-readiness—will find it difficult to recall that valuable absence for themselves? The world’s largest dating site, PlentyofFish, has seen a massive shift from desktop usage to mobile usage—80 percent of their activity is now run off cell phones. And when users make the switch, they discover an intense love of instant feedback and constant gratification: The number of messages they send jumps by a factor of three or four.
Mobile users check their PlentyofFish
messages an average of ten times every day.

We might grumble to our grandchildren about the days when people picked up lovers from sparsely populated bars with the same antiquarian fustiness that a fifteenth-century scribe must have felt when the printing press spewed forth those millions of bound volumes. And there’s a sad, rare quality to this nostalgia: We will lament what was lost for only this tiny moment in time. Few in the future will go looking for loneliness.

• • • • •

It would be disingenuous to omit my own sexual career from all of this. My experiences are timid, but, like sixty million others, I broke down one lonely evening and created a profile on PlentyofFish. The spotty results bottomed out with an ornery graduate student whose photos were the most generous things about him.

After I’d bought us a couple of coffees, we started walking the seawall bordering Stanley Park and he grew increasingly irate at the confusion of bodies around us. A child in its mother’s arms let out a holler of joy when a flock of birds flew by, and my companion pulled a sour face.

“Don’t you hate that sound?” He shuddered.

I looked at him. “The sound of children laughing?”

“Exactly.” He picked at something in his teeth.

There was a pause. And then, casting my eyes out over the crowd that swarmed the seawall, I gave a little jump and pretended my phone had started vibrating in my pants. “Hello?” I said to nobody. “Really? But I’m in the middle of a date.” I looked at him while I held the dead phone to my ear. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

“I think I made a bad impression,” he huffed as we hurried back into town.

“No, no,” I lied. And a moment later, as he went in for a hug, I looked down at my phone again. “I have to . . .” But all I could manage was to hold up the device as though the thing itself were a vague yet unimpeachable excuse.

Later that week, in a moment of melancholy, I found myself creating the sort of slapdash artwork that nonartists sometimes make. I tore from a book of Pablo Neruda poetry several short love poems, which I then stapled together, making a long scroll of them that I could nail to the wall by my computer. On this scroll I recorded, in thick black marker, the messages I was receiving from suitors on PlentyofFish. Neruda would begin, “Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body,”
and a PlentyofFish suitor would conclude, “Sup, cute pics.” The juxtaposition depressed me in a satisfying way, and I kept the thing nailed there to remind me what I was missing.