Love in the Age of Tinder

I haven’t dated since the early 1980s. So I am wildly out of the loop when it comes to modern dating. But I’m always curious about what’s happening in our culture, so a Vanity Fair article on the online dating site ‘Tinder’ caught my eye this week.

From what I understand from the article, users of Tinder specify a geographical radius-of-interest, then scan photos of interested users in that zone. Using only the photo as a basis for decision—thumbing right for yes and left for no—they ‘hook up’ if one of their chosen users is also interested in them.

This is not about dating though. This is about sex pure and simple. Many of these ‘hook-ups’ last less than an hour. Specifying the distance to the hookupee means you can leave your friends at the bar, go off for a casual fuck, then rejoin your friends and continue partying; maybe even hookup again before the night is through.

I felt really sad by the time I finished reading. These young people are suffering the consequence of a huge misunderstanding of what the free love movement and women’s liberation movement of the 1960s were all about.

The free love movement did not advocate Tinder-like sex. What it did advocate was: if you feel a strong emotional and physical connection with another human being, act on it. Don’t be constrained by societal rules. This was the feminist message also, counteracting the double standard where men were relatively free to act on their desires but women were more limited.

The crucial difference between free love and Tinder is connection. Free love says connection is first and primary. Sex flows from that connection. Sex is actually secondary. You may note the word ‘love’ in ‘free love.’ It’s not ‘free sex.’

Somehow this became translated into ‘women’s equality means the right to have sex with anybody without any emotional attachment just like men do.’ It’s like the ethos of porn—sex stripped of all feelings—is becoming the American norm for sex.

This isn’t freedom. It’s the equivalent of America’s obesity epidemic, which is being fueled by consumption of processed foods completely stripped of nutritional value. Tinder sex is love-making stripped of the nutritional value of love and emotional connection. It’s starving the people who are consuming it. And at what cost in their individual lives and the life of our society in the future?

The author of the Vanity Fair article talks with groups of young men and women (separately to increase frankness) and it’s well worth reading. What came out in the discussion with some college women was that it was very unusual for them to have orgasms in a Tinder hookup. The men are only interested in their own pleasure, and sex often has a very porn-like feel to it. What was surprising was that in this conversation:

They talk about how it’s not uncommon for their hookups to lose their erections. It’s a curious medical phenomenon, the increased erectile dysfunction in young males, which has been attributed to everything from chemicals in processed foods to the lack of intimacy in hookup sex. 

“If a guy can’t get hard,” Rebecca says, “and I have to say, that happens a lot, they just act like it’s the end of the world.” 

“At four in the morning this guy was so upset, and I was like, Dude, I’ll just go to fucking sleep—it’s O.K.,” says Sarah, 21, the one with the long curly dark hair. “I get really tired of faking.”

These young people are interacting with other people through screens almost all the time. Are they losing the ability to interact authentically, face-to-face?

Erotic Plasticity

I’ve just read two books about sex (Sex at Dawn, and Perv), and the same fascinating study, about something called “erotic plasticity,” was mentioned in both.

In 2005 psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to heterosexual and homosexual men and women. The videos depicted a wide variety of activities covering various sexual combinations: male/female, male/male, female/female, female alone, and man alone. At the end, just for the hell of it, she threw in one of bonobos mating. The subject’s genitals were wired to measure blood flow (an accurate indicator of arousal) and the subjects also indicated how turned on they felt with a keypad.

Men were consistent—if they were heterosexual the naked women turned them on but the men did not, and if homosexual, vice versa. The bonobos didn’t turn any of the men on. In addition, the men’s reported feelings matched their genital blood flow.

But women responded genitally to everything—even the bonobos! However, they didn’t report being turned on to everything. They only acknowledged arousal about a subset of videos.

This is interesting enough, but there’s more. It would be easy to conclude that this is just a strange human quirk. But another study, done in 2001 with goats and sheep, shows the same erotic plasticity difference between males and females.

Masters of Sex

I was intrigued when I heard Showtime was going to do a series on Masters and Johnson, the sex researchers, so even though I almost never watch modern soap operas, I made an exception and have watched all of the episodes so far.

After a couple of episodes I got impatient to learn what was true and what was invented, so I got the book that inspired the series, Masters of Sex, by Thomas Maier. I was glad to see that much of the television material is true to what is presented in the book.

From my point of view Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson were heroic people, willing to make sacrifices to study an incredibly central part of human life that had been ignored because of puritanical fears. Masters had an extremely successful ob-gyn practice and was a respected member of the Washington University medical school, and studying sex put all of that on the line. In fact, because of the small-mindedness of many of the doctors at Washington University, he ended up walking away from it so he could continue the research. Johnson was a single mother and she spent very little time with her children because she was so devoted to the work.

As a female, I was fascinated by Virginia Johnson. She didn’t ever get a college degree, yet through her intelligence, talent, and hard work she became Dr. Masters’ equal in the research. And this makes Masters equally fascinating: he was capable of letting go of the arrogance so many doctors take as their right.

Another thing that made Johnson unusual and the perfect partner for this research was her attitude towards sex. She was a free-spirit born before her time, a woman who somehow escaped the indoctrination that sex had to be linked to love and relationship. Her enthusiasm and openness drew volunteers to participate in the study, and the volunteers included doctors and doctor’s wives! Because she was comfortable with her own sexuality, she was able to create an atmosphere that allowed volunteers to feel at ease having sex in a clinical setting. When they switched from research to creating therapies, Johnson actually took the lead, and once again I think it was because of her understanding of the fundamental importance of sex in our lives.

This attitude is clear in the (following) comment Johnson made about the therapy, called “sensate focus,” which was a series of touching exercises, without intercourse, to restore/establish intimacy. Maier writes:

So many patients had been taught that sex was wrong that it rendered them unable to make love in a mature or even adequate way. “What is totally foreign to effective sexual development, in spite of centuries of practice, is the notion that sex is dirty, supplemented by various controls exercised through fear, rejection, ignorance, and misconception,” Johnson later said.

It’s easy to watch the TV show and assume a sense of cultural superiority—our 21^st century sexuality is so much freer than that of the repressed 1950’s. But is it really? I was an adolescent during the height of the Sixties free-love and women’s liberation movements and I took them to heart. I thought women would/could escape the cultural demands to look a certain way—makeup, high heels, bras, etc.—and we could just love the one we’re with without it meaning anything other than mutual pleasure.

Carina Chocano eloquently expressed the way I perceive modern female presentation in a recent article in the New York Times:

[The Showtime series] prods us to look at sex not as entertainment (even, of course, as it provides that) but as both basic animal behavior and a societal construct...

Sex may be completely out in the open now, but for all its prevalence…it still feels schematic and hidebound. In the past 30 years, ideas about what makes women “sexy” have become narrower, more rigid and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic is especially insidious for young girls’ self-perception, as they constantly absorb the message that the modern choice comes down to either abject invisibility or duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at when I see Kim Kardashian or Miley Cyrus, or their millions of adolescent imitators. But I’m pretty sure it’s not liberation.

The idea that frank presentations of sex are somehow daring or iconoclastic is an enduring idea whose time has, perhaps, come and gone. As symbols of a repressive norm, we may have simply replaced “’50s housewife” with “porn star.”

I liked her phrase, “societal construct.” Most of us don’t think of sex that way, but our attitudes towards it are heavily influenced by our society’s belief systems. It was foolish of course to think in the 1970s that we could overthrow thousands of years of social rules overnight, but still, I’d love to live to see the day when the norm about sex wasn’t “repressive.”

One of the fascinating aspects of Masters and Johnson is that they started having sex during the research project. Unfortunately some things never get explained in Maier’s book, and chief among them (in my mind) is Masters and Johnson’s attitude about their sexual relationship. Clearly it happened, but neither of them ever spoke or wrote about it in detail (at least according to Maier’s research), so we can only speculate. There is talk that Masters demanded sex early in their work as a condition of Johnson’s continued employment, and Johnson did give some support for that having happened in an interview with Maier. The TV show portrays their sex as part of a long-standing scientific tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves. I imagine, given both of their dedication, that this was at least partially true. Their lives also demonstrated how difficult it is to separate sex from emotional attachment: they did eventually marry.

One huge disappointment: Virginia Johnson destroyed all the audiotapes of interviews and films that had been created during their research. These could and should have been donated to a university, and it’s a great loss to our culture. It’s kind of inexplicable considering her devotion to the studies, other than an expression of spite towards Masters (who had divorced her to marry his first love) or towards the society that had rendered Masters and Johnson somewhat irrelevant after a decade or so of being on the cutting edge.

A bit of trivia: I was raised in St. Louis, where Masters and Johnson did all of their research. I lived there from 1961 until I graduated from high school in 1976 and I was completely unaware that they were based in my hometown. This was the height of their fame, and when I asked my mother about it she professed ignorance also, even though my father was associated with the medical school of Washington University at the time this research was taking place.

Exposing Myself

My husband, Arthur Hancock, has just published his memoir, entitled Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth. Arthur has had an amazing life, filled with unusual adventures. It's available in both print and Kindle versions. The book chronicles his two main obsessions, sex and the pursuit of meaning:

What happens when a twenty-eight year old man, whose primary interests are sex, nonconformity, and playing music, stumbles upon the meaning of life? On a rainy day in northern California, he abruptly discovers just how superficial his perception of the world really is. His subsequent quest to understand this life-changing experience, to seek truth over lies and love over lust, is reported here in uninhibited detail. Graphic sex, a plausible metaphysics, and a 21st Century psychology that spells the end of shame, blame and arrogance.

From chapter one:

I was like my namesake, Arthur the King, staggering back from the great stone with Excalibur freed in his hand and a look of complete astonishment on his face. All I’d been expecting was cosmic sex with my young goddess. Instead, completely unprepared, I had broken through an unseen barrier that imprisoned me in a painfully limited reality, entered an undeniably superior realm of consciousness, and walked around in it for several hours. This new reality was no hallucination; it was more detailed, beautiful, and logical than anything I’d ever experienced in my ordinary state of awareness.

You can read the first two chapters at the Kindle store.

Our Culture's Strange Attitudes Towards the Male Body

The Anthony Weiner episode revealed the widespread presence of (from my point of view) backwards attitudes towards sex. And this attitude is present in supposedly sophisticated elite media types.

For example, on John Stewart, a woman “analyst” gave the female point of view: “Women don’t want to see men’s bodies because they’re ugly. Women have beautiful bodies. Men just need to keep their shirts on.”

This past week Doonesbury portrayed the FOX reporter wrestling with the issue of his inappropriate tweets, and when he showed a female coworker one of his pictures, to test whether they were lewd, she recoiled in disgust.

How often did I hear in discussions of the issue that Weiner had sent “pics” of his “junk.” In other cultures, for example ancient Greece, the male body has been the model for artists—see Michelangelo's sculpture of David. I find it very odd that most people in our culture seem to agree that the male body is ugly. How many women have tweeted photos of their bare breasts? How many men have complained?

We are still an incredibly Puritanical people. This is in evidence in our reaction to “sex scandals,” but how much does sexual repression cause people to do incredibly stupid things like tweet a picture of their erection in their underwear to a stranger? Maybe if we got over our old-fashioned attitude toward sex and allowed more freedom to people to express themselves sexually (other than for a lifetime with one partner) we’d have fewer of these scandals. Why can’t men (and women!) visit prostitutes? Why can’t erotic performances be staged in major halls? Why can’t we follow the sexual connections we feel with certain people in our lives, even if it’s only a one-time experience?

Ted Rall calls sexual freedom the next frontier of civil rights in his syndicated column. He writes,

If slavery was America’s original sin, Puritanism was its original curse.

In recent years the United States has made significant strides towards greater equality and freedom. Racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry have been significantly curtailed by new laws and cultural education. But we still have work to do. Four centuries after people so uptight they couldn’t get along with the British invaded the New World, however, the United States remains one of the most sexually repressed Western countries.

It is not good for us.

“If expression of sexuality is thwarted, Christopher Ryan wrote in Psychology Today last year, “the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire. Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression.”

In other words, mean parents, churches and right-wing politicians.

“Instead,” Ryan observed, “the rage is generally directed at helpless victims who are sacrificed to the sick gods of guilt, shame, and ignorant pride.”

Like, for example, gays. Fourteen states still had sodomy laws on the books by the time the Supreme Court invalidated them in 2003...

One day, I hope, we will live in a nation where another person’s sexual expression is no one’s business but theirs and their sexual partners. We will be allowed to do whatever we want with whomever we want, as long as what we do is with a consenting adult.

Even if we take pictures and post them online.

Power is the Best Aphrodisiac

Today Rep. Anthony Weiner joined the long list of philandering male politicians who have been caught (the list of the ones who haven't been caught is probably even longer).

Last week I saw a documentary about ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer. I remember thinking after his ritual press conference with suffering wife at his side, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know they were after him, those Wall Street financiers whom he had investigated?" Just like I had thought about Bill Clinton, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know the Republicans were after him with everything they had?"

What occurred to me while watching the Spitzer film was that I was expecting rational behavior from these men. I was acting as if they had free will, as if they were sane creatures capable of choosing the best option for their life.

I have written a manuscript, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity," which argues not only that we do not have free will, but that our "choices" are made in a part of our mind which is not conscious. Our rational minds come along after decisions and actions have been made, spinning stories that explain why we think the things we think and do the things we do.

What is true about men, I think, is that power acts upon them as a strong aphrodisiac, which then stimulates some kind of reaction, most likely chemical, that greatly boosts their sex drive. They are not rational agents choosing to engage in risky sex, they are victims of a physiological response that naturally occurs when men gain power.

Of course, women are attracted to powerful men from an aphrodisiac reaction of their own, so the two reinforce each other.

Perhaps by recognizing this as a real, organic, and physical process that men are prone to, we could envision some way to prevent these politicians from self-destruction.

Or we could change our societal attitudes toward sex and say "So what?" when we hear of another politician engaging in sex outside his marriage.

As an aside, one of the things I found creepy about George W. Bush was that it was impossible to imagine him ever being embroiled in a sex scandal. What was wrong with him that he was so sexless?