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?
