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?

Shibori and Appropriation

I am a big fan of Japanese design. I like traditional Japanese clothing and home interiors. I love the clean, austere lines combined with graceful decorative elements that, for me, define the Japanese style. I often wear a Japanese garment called a ‘hippari’ (in fact I’m wearing one now as I write this), which was the working person’s short kimono, worn over pants. I make these for myself using a pattern by a company called Folkwear, which specializes in traditional clothing from around the world.   

One of the traditional Japanese dyeing techniques is Shibori, which you can think of as a formal form of tie-dye. Just this last weekend I had the opportunity to take a class in this decorative technique. I was thrilled at the chance to improve my hipparis by adding traditional design elements.

pieces made in the class by various members

The morning of the class I read an article in the Washington Post about a new form of political correctness: a concept called ‘cultural appropriation.’ The article describes a “war” in the art world in which it has become common to attack “any artist or artwork that incorporates ideas from another culture, no matter how thoughtfully or positively. A work can reinvent the material or even serve as a tribute, but no matter. If artists dabble outside their own cultural experiences, they’ve committed a creative sin.”

I told the people in my Shibori class that we were all guilty of a terrible crime: we were racist imperialists plagiarizing another culture. We all laughed and continued on with the lesson. If that sounds absurd to you, it is, but here’s an example from the article where the attacks had a real-world impact:

This summer, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been dogged by charges of cultural insensitivity and racism for its “Kimono Wednesdays.” At the event, visitors were invited to try on a replica of the kimono worn by Claude Monet’s wife, Camille, in the painting “La Japonaise.” The historically accurate kimonos were made in Japan for this very purpose. Still, Asian American activists and their supporters besieged the exhibit with signs like “Try on the kimono: Learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist today!” Others railed against “Yellow-Face @ the MFA” on Facebook. The museum eventually apologized and changed the program so that the kimonos were available for viewing only. Still, activists complained that the display invited a “creepy Orientalist gaze”…

It is far from clear that the appropriation police speak for the people and communities whose cultural honor they claim to defend. The kimono protest, for instance, found little support from Japanese Americans living in the Boston area; indeed, many actively backed the museum’s exhibit, as did the Japanese consulate.

Art, not to mention culture itself, is a living expression of human beings as they interact with the world. Cultures have always assimilated elements from their neighbors and become more dynamic and interesting as a result. The Europeans who came to North America and interacted with Native Americans assimilated many of the values of the native peoples. It has been argued that the iconic American—the cowboy—is a fusion of European and Native American cultures.

And to continue with the Japanese theme, much of what we think of as Japanese, including their clothing and their language, were ‘appropriated’ from China many centuries ago.

Yes there were examples in the past when oppressed cultures’ artistic expressions were stolen. But. as with so many movements, some proponents take it to the extreme.

Isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

One Fear to Rule Them All

This summer marks the 70^th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the beginning of an era of nuclear fears that dominated the childhoods of people of my generation. We were raised in fear. I can remember civil defense drills when we marched single-file out of our classroom and stood against the lockers in the hallways; training for what to do when the bomb dropped. My husband Arthur, who was born six weeks after the bombs dropped on Japan, remembers marching from the school to a train depot; he never knew where they’d have been taken if war had started. Our parents were just as terrified by the nuclear brinkmanship our leaders were engaged in.

I was reminded of this when I read a column by Fareed Zakaria in today’s Washington Post, about the opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Zakaria paints Obama as an optimist resisting a sea of pessimists. As an example of a pessimist he quotes John McCain saying, last year, that the world is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime” (which includes World War II and the Cold War).

Zakaria then goes on to show how a pessimistic attitude has been a common American reaction to events for decades now:

In an essay in 1989, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington noted that the United States was experiencing its fifth wave of that kind of pessimism since the 1950s.

First, he explained, Sputnik shocked the United States, and by the early 1960s, the country was convinced that the Soviet Union was on a path to overtake it economically, technologically and militarily. When the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, people saw the Middle East’s petro states as the world’s new power brokers. By the end of the 1970s, with the Soviet Union modernizing its nuclear arsenal and on the march — from Afghanistan to Central America — scores of commentators prophesied that Moscow was winning the Cold War. And when Huntington wrote his essay, conventional wisdom was that an invincible Japan would soon become the world’s No. 1 economic power.

None of these came to pass. The pessimists were wrong. The optimists, who saw the unique power and vitality of America as strengths that would enable us to overcome obstacles, were right.

Nowadays the pessimists are warning about a nuclear Iran being an existential threat to the United States. That’s as absurd as George W. Bush’s warnings about Iraq in 2003, and yet people still believe it. Just as absurd is the belief that ‘The Terrorists’ are an existential threat, yet our country’s policies are built around the need to overcome this ‘threat’ at all costs.

Yesterday I talked with two people, in completely separate conversations, who are both convinced that the economy is about to go into free-fall and the dollar will soon be worthless. “The only thing left of value will be gold,” they both nervously told me. Needless to say, they were both extremely pessimistic about the future of this country.

There’s power in fear. Fear makes people passive. They are less likely to challenge their leaders. Fear causes people to shrink their expectations of life so that all that matters is survival. When a citizenry is afraid, they will only ask their government for protection. They won’t ask for a decent life, educational opportunities, good roads, decent health care, etc. When there is an existential threat, these priorities pale in comparison to the importance of survival. Spending half of the federal budget on defense looks like a bargain, not a theft.

I Helped Her Cry

Just recently I read a lovely story in a book called “Healing After Loss,” (daily meditations for people who are grieving), which made me think of the film ‘Inside Out.’ It perfectly describes what Sadness did in the film. (see my blog post on the film.)

A little girl got home from visiting her friend later than her mother had expected. When her mother asked the reason for the delay, the child said, ‘I was helping Jane. Her doll broke.” 

The mother asked, “Did you help her fix it?” 

The child said, “No. I helped her cry.”

Sometimes that’s what we need more than anything else: someone to sit with us and feel our sorrow. That is my experience with grief: no one can end my sorrow, no one can ‘fix’ it, but when others share it the pain lessens just a little. I don’t feel so alone. If/when you know someone who is grieving, don't be afraid of their tears. Cry with them. 

Making Friends with my Emotions

‘Inside Out’ is a remarkable film that animates a model of the human mind in a very entertaining fashion.

The main human character is an 11-year-old girl named Riley, but the majority of the action in the film takes place in her mind. The conscious mind is portrayed as a control room staffed by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. The emotions interpret and react to events in Riley’s life, and the emotional response puts a stamp on experiences as they are saved to long-term memory. (The filmmaker acknowledges that he had to simplify the emotional composition of the human mind to keep the film from being overwhelmed with characters. I think he did a good job at picking the most important ones.)

In the beginning of the film, Joy rules the control room. The other emotions have their place, but most of Riley’s memories have Joy’s emotional imprint.

A catastrophe knocks Joy and Sadness out of the control room and they are forced to find their way back. They traverse the vast maze of Long-Term Memory; the cavernous, scary Unconscious; the funny Dream Factory and Imagination Playhouse; and the abyss of the Memory Dump.

If you haven’t seen the film, I’d encourage you to stop now and read this after you’ve seen it.

What the film illustrates beautifully is that all of our emotions have their place. We may dream of a life with no sadness, no anger, no fear. Many of our spiritual pursuits are about getting to a place where there is no suffering; where only joy—bliss—remains. But I have found myself increasingly wondering: is that pursuit compatible with the nature of existence? Is the pursuit of ‘no suffering’ in fact anti-life?

Grace

Grace is a concept I have struggled to understand. I was raised as a Christian and learned in that context that grace was something God gives to undeserving human sinners. When I rejected the religion of my youth I rejected grace too, and thought no more about it.

When I developed my HACLG (hac-ul-gee) system for my spiritual path (honesty, humility, acceptance, compassion, love, gratitude) I would say, “gratitude is as far as I’ve gotten and it wasn’t easy for me to get to gratitude!” [I used to call this GLACH; read my blog post about it.]

Then my beloved husband Arthur died, and there was an aura around his death that could only be called “grace.” I couldn’t think of another word to describe what I was witnessing. What I saw was a profound alignment with the way it was, a dropping of all resistance and opposition to the flow of the universe. And it was so beautiful. Arthur was graceful, in every sense of the word.

I saw then that grace was a second ‘g’ to add to my system. When you have gotten to the stage where you accept reality so fully that you are grateful for the way it is, you become filled with grace. You are in synch with reality; you are flowing with the stream of reality, not fighting against it.

I like this definition of grace from an online dictionary: “Seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion.” That effortlessness can only come about from the complete lack of resistance to the flow of reality.

Yesterday I listened to President Obama’s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was murdered in his Charleston church. I was awed by the fact that Obama took grace as his theme.

President Obama spoke (at about 18 minutes into his speech) of how the (alleged) killer couldn’t see the grace surrounding Rev. Pinckney because he was blinded by hatred. Obama continued that he’d been contemplating grace the whole week, including the grace of the families who lost loved ones, and then he recited the first verse of the song, “Amazing Grace.” The crowd went wild with delight. Then he said, “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”

He kept returning to the theme of grace, and then ended with this thought (about 34:00): “the path of grace requires an open mind, but more importantly an open heart. That’s what I felt this week, an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called for right now, I think…if we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” Then he paused and said, “Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace.” And he was clearly moved by the concept of grace…and then famously he began to sing, and the whole crowd leapt to their feet to join him.

I thought at the time the singing might have been spontaneous, but according to the New York Times it wasn’t. However, the fact that grace was the central theme was President Obama’s idea:

Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.

…

He also inserted lines from his favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as a refrain, and, on the way to Charleston aboard Marine One, he told his advisers that he might sing some of those lines “if it feels right.”

I may disagree with President Obama about the meaning of grace, which he defined in the standard Christian context, but I am grateful that my president could leave politics behind and fill this important speech with such moral power.

Grace. So now my path is: H₂ACLG₂. Starting to look like a chemical equation for a spiritual life!

A Love Affair with my Dead Husband

My beloved husband Arthur has been dead for almost four months now. Yet, in the last couple of months, I have come to realize that our love affair is continuing. Obviously it’s taken a different form, but the relationship lives on in a very real sense.

Before today I have only talked about this with one other person because I thought it would probably sound odd to people who haven’t lost a lover to death. I know it would have seemed odd to me not long ago. The one person I did share it with lost her husband some years ago, and she was quite sympathetic, as I knew she would be.

Then yesterday I read an essay in the New York Times entitled I Am a Bigamist. The author, Jill Smolowe, is also a widow, and she writes about how her love affair with her dead husband has continued, even in the new relationship she has with her second husband, a man who lost his wife and has his own separate love affair. Ms. Smolowe says they discussed their continuing love affairs before they were married. Because in her heart she is still in love—and married—to her first, dead husband, to be married to a second man means she is a bigamist. How beautiful; such an expansive vision of love, and of life and death.

In “Better Angels,” a lyrical film about Abraham Lincoln’s youth, death plays a major role. Abraham’s mother died when he was fairly young. In the film, Abraham has a very special relationship with his mother, and her death was difficult for him (I assume this is based on fact). His father re-married, and there are some touching scenes where Abraham learns that loving this new mother doesn’t diminish his love for his biological mother.

The most moving scene for me was when the new mother went into a field and met the ‘ghost’ of Abraham’s mother, and the two women interacted in a loving way. What I saw communicated between the two was the understanding that the biological mother had her part in this family and the two women were going to co-exist. After I saw this movie, I thought, “If I ever have another intimate relationship, that person is going to have to learn to co-exist with Arthur’s spirit, which will always be here beside me.”

I am grateful for Ms. Smolowe for this article, helping me understand that this experience I’m having is something to celebrate, a sign of the great love that exists between Arthur and I. Arthur may have died, but our love lives on.