by Rachel Hills
During the same period, Courtney was starting to have her own feelings for girls, spending her evenings glued to the TV screen, drinking in images of Emily VanCamp on Everwood and Alexis Bledel on Gilmore Girls. She didn’t recognize those feelings as sexual, though; all she knew was that she was drawn to the young actresses. “At that point, the only thing I knew about same-sex relationships was that it was this thing that old women did,” she explains. “So even though I was having crushes on girls on TV, I really didn’t have the language to say that it was a crush. There was no link in my head between what was going on between Aunt Jean and Aunt Susan and the way I felt about Emily VanCamp.”
Courtney started to think that she might be bisexual in her early teens, but it wasn’t until her third year of college that she fully came to terms with the fact that she was interested in girls. Even now, Courtney sometimes struggles to differentiate her desire to be sexual with other women from her desire to be intimate with them in a more platonic way. “Like, I’ll see a girl and think she’s pretty, and I’ll have to stop to ask myself, ‘Do I want to be her or do I want to have sex with her?’ ” It might just be that she has more practice being attracted to men, she concedes. “In a lot of ways, with girls, it’s like being fourteen again. And realizing for the first time that, oh, maybe kissing isn’t so gross after all.”
Nor does every public expression of desire indicate an underlying longing for sexual release. Andrew, a twenty-three-year-old from London, is quirky and confident, with curly blond hair and an impish smile. He is in a committed relationship now, with a girl he plans to marry someday. But in his younger years, he and his friends treated hooking up as a game, picking up women and taking them home every chance they could. “It was insane,” he recalls.
But on the nights when Andrew “won” the game, by meeting a girl, charming her, and bringing her back to his house, a funny thing would sometimes happen. He would find that he didn’t want to have sex after all. “I couldn’t get it up,” he says incredulously. It wasn’t nerves, he insists; it was that there hadn’t yet been time to build up the chemistry between them. “I know it’s a massive immaturity, but I didn’t realize you had to have lust in order to enjoy sex,” he says. “I thought it was all about the pickup.” For Andrew, it was the appearance of desiring sex that mattered most, not the desire itself.
Control: The Battle of Who Could Care Less
Part of the reason we pursue hotness and horniness is because we hope they will make us more desirable, and therefore more lovable. But we also pursue them because they promise another kind of security: the ability to control our romantic and sexual futures.
We are taught that if we transform ourselves into sufficiently enticing people, then we will be the ones deciding whether a hookup or flirtation turns into a fully fledged relationship. If we are the person who is most sought after at a party or on a dating website, we can have the power to choose who we date, rather than wait to see who chooses us. And if we need the person whom we are with less than they need us, we won’t have to fear getting hurt.
Desire and desirability are more than just stamps of social approval. They are a form of emotional armor, an illusory promise that if we shape our appearance and demeanor in all the right ways, we will be safe from pain or rejection. But the bid to be “hot, horny, and in control” also turns sex and relationships into a game—sometimes literally, as in the case of bestselling self-help books such as The Game and The Rules—in which the victors are those who attract the greatest number of desirable partners without risking any vulnerability. As Nate, a confident twenty-one-year-old, puts it: “It’s like Monopoly. Whoever has the most money at the end wins.”
Occidental College researchers Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman call this bid for control “compulsory carelessness”—the idea that sexual success depends on not being too emotionally invested in the person or people you have sex with. Under this model, sex is both spontaneous and disinterested, an outcome of neither emotional connection nor physical attraction, but rather a detached execution of a social script and biological urge. To care too much, either for your partner or for the act itself, would be to cede control.
“You don’t ever want to drop the mask of being cool, calm, collected, and powerful,” explains Ashley, a twenty-seven-year-old massage therapist from Portland. “You want to appear like you are choosing to sleep with the other person, not like they are choosing to sleep with you. You want to appear like you have the number one say.”
Barefaced and bubbly, with wavy ash-blond hair, Ashley has been in a monogamous relationship with her girlfriend for three years. But she is animated when she describes the hookup scene at her university and the women she dated in the years after she graduated.
Ashley didn’t sleep around when she was an undergraduate. Like most college students, she only had one or two sexual partners each year. But she kept her relationships deliberately casual, things that happened as if by chance at parties or on weekends but were never discussed directly. “You would have sex with the same person consistently for a season, but it was still very casual sex,” she recalls. “It wasn’t like you were doing it because you were in love and wanted to get married. You definitely would never describe them as your girlfriend or boyfriend.”
After college, the arrangements evolved into something more closely resembling a formal dating relationship. “We’d go out to dinner or an activity, and then we would come home and either say good night or stay.” But the importance of appearing uncommitted remained as it was before. “I would meet up with Jo on one night, and Lesley on another,” Ashley says. “But I couldn’t be somebody’s girlfriend. You had to be dating multiple people. And even if you weren’t, you would lie and say that you were. You didn’t want the other people to think that you were falling head over heels for them. There was this mutual fear that the other person was going to go crazy on you, and you didn’t want to appear like you were the crazy one in any way.”
Ashley acknowledges that pretending to be dating multiple people when you’re really only dating one is pretty “crazy” behavior, but the aim was to communicate that you had other alternatives, she says. “You want to show that you are independent and grounded and strong, that when you’re not with the person you’re seeing, you’ve got other stuff going on,” she explains. Still, why not just say you’re hanging out with friends or going to a concert? I ask her. “It’s not as exciting or interesting,” she replies. “Maybe in reality, I choose to be at home reading a book. But being able to say that one of the things I’m doing is another woman is very powerful.”
Visibly dating multiple people doesn’t just show that you are attractive and in demand. It also suggests that you have an appropriately high sex drive. “I do think that the ‘wanting sex’ thing plays a really big role,” says Ashley. “Because if I had sex with Renee on Tuesday and Thursday, and I don’t have sex Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, is that a concern? Does it look like I’m not interested in having enough sex?”
The idea is to avoid being vulnerable by limiting your emotional investment. “Needy isn’t sexy,” as Jasmine, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Toronto, puts it. Historically, this kind of feigned indifference might have been achieved by delaying or withholding sex. But today sex is a given, and delaying it too long can feel like a risk unto itself. Instead, indifference is communicated by withholding feeling, by refusing to show your emotional cards before you are sure of what the other person’s cards might say in return.
This isn’t to say that people don’t fall in love. The hookup may have replaced formal dating as the mechanism by which young people in particular form relationships, but for most people, casual sex—if it happens at all—is one piece of a bigger puzzle that also incorporates love, short-term relationships, and periods of sexlessness and celibacy. Nor is it to suggest that, for all our attempts at projecting detachment, we are no longer vulnerable when it comes to sex. Sex is still a highly emotional matter, whether the emotions
in question relate to how we feel about our partners or how we feel about ourselves.
The feminist psychologist Wendy Hollway has observed the way that heterosexual men will often describe their female partners as the more “emotional” figures in their relationships, arguing that it serves as a means of deflecting from their own emotional needs. By attributing any negative or overpowering emotions they might be feeling to the women they are dating, they are protected from having to deal with their own difficult emotions. But men are not the only ones who turn from their vulnerability in this way, or who recoil from people who express their emotions too readily. Women aren’t lining up to date needy men either, says Pete, a smart, sensitive twenty-two-year-old from Seattle. “I’ve got friends who will spend an hour writing a single text message so as to appear interested but not too interested.”
This desire to seem “interested but not too interested” is one reason that alcohol is so prominent in campus sexual encounters, argue Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman. They quote Charlotte, a college freshman who writes: “A sober hookup indicates [you are] serious, which either no one is interested in or no one is brave enough to admit they want.” A drunken hookup is careless, an aftereffect of inebriation rather than attraction. It is only the sober advances that are considered “real,” and that pose the biggest risk to our reputations and emotional security.
The Opposite of Sex
Ironically, it is often when we feel least in control of our sex lives that we are most inclined to want to prove our mastery over them. The behaviors I have described in this chapter—the jostling to gain status through the manipulation of appearance, the pursuit of socially desirable sexual partners, the exaggerated performance of what passes for fun and freedom—are not usually those of people who are comfortable with themselves or their relationships with other people. Nor are they the behaviors of people who are reveling in the physical pleasure of sex for its own sake. They are postures, an attempt to turn the complex, vulnerable people that we are into the uncomplicated, emotionally impenetrable people we would like to be. As Tom, twenty, observes, “The people I know who have the most playboy-ish attitude are actually the people who are most emotionally needy.”
Reflecting on my own sex and relationships history, it is when I have been most insecure in my attractiveness that I have retreated into beauty culture, obsessively monitoring and manipulating my appearance in order to more closely fit a cultural ideal. Reeling from romantic or sexual disappointment, I would color my hair, paint on a smile, and embark on a mission to become as thin as I could. When I feel more secure in my desirability, I am more content to let things be, including my appearance. It is when I have been least sexually active that I have talked the most about sex. And it is when I have been least certain that my interest will be reciprocated that I have felt the greatest need to play it cool—“to try,” as I put it in a song I hummed to myself while getting ready for a college party one winter evening, “to look like I’m not trying.”
Being hot and horny may have become our cultural shorthand for desire, but these traits are often less about our hunger for other people than they are about our hunger to be recognized by others. Arguably, hotness and horniness are the opposite of desire: based on thinking rather than feeling, a performance of identity rather than the realization of a sensual yearning. Ashley recalls the conversations she and her friends would have about sex in high school. “Instead of talking about how it makes your skin feel, the focus was on what you did, who you did it with, and what you produced,” she says. “It was more like a scientific-method kind of thing than how you communicated on a physical level.”
Just as important, chasing the hot and horny ideal doesn’t work. Learning how to pattern your physical appearance to the socially sanctioned mold of “hot” might provide a short-term confidence boost, but it probably won’t make you feel deeply desirable. Or at least it never made me feel that way. Nor does performing “horniness” teach us how to desire other people.
In fact, the pursuit of surface-level hotness and horniness might prevent us from fully experiencing desire, enforcing artificial limits on who and what we find attractive. For all that we are told that physical attractiveness is a formula, what each of us actually finds attractive is both broader and more idiosyncratic than what Hollywood sells us as hot. “I used to think there was one specific type of girl that was my ‘type,’ ” says Marie, a dark-eyed seventeen-year-old from Kentucky. “Blond, or really skinny and conventionally attractive. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve noticed that I’m not just attracted to people who are really thin.” What she really likes, she tells me, “is when people are bright.” She blushes. “I feel a bit giggly just talking about it.”
Nor does going through the motions of being a “fun,” sexually liberated person always translate to actually having fun. As Andrew’s tales of aborted one-night stands demonstrate, it is possible to have a lot of sex and not really enjoy any of it, or even to feel much desire for it.
For women, this divide between “being” fun and having fun can be even starker. Research by American sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong, Paula England, and Alison Fogarty shows that women only orgasm 32 percent as often as men do in first-time heterosexual hookups. By comparison, they orgasm 49 percent as often as men do in repeat or ongoing hookups, and 79 percent as often in relationships. This “orgasm gap” isn’t just a question of emotional connection but of pragmatics: women are less likely to receive oral sex in a casual hookup than they are in a relationship, and less likely to receive the clitoral stimulation many women need to climax. “Sex in relationships tends to be better in part because . . . one has a greater incentive to treat one’s partner well if a repeat is likely,” the researchers observe. “Also, good sex takes practice, as, over time, partners learn what turns each other on.”
A year and a half after we first met, I phone Meghan to check the details of her story and to see how she is doing. As usual, she has a boyfriend, but this one is different, she tells me. She met him online, after her relationship with her latest alpha asshole went spectacularly bust. “I was blindsided,” she recalls. “I was like, Why did this happen to me again? This always happens and it’s not fun anymore.” As she reflected, she realized there was a pattern to the guys she usually dated: she met them in bars or other social situations where it was difficult to talk and impressions were formed rapidly, on little more than the way she or they looked. “If I’d had to filter them for intellect or personality first, I never would have dated most of them,” she reflects.
So she decided to change her method and find a mate in a forum where the content of what she had to say would matter as much as the color of her highlights: she’d look online. She met her new beau within two weeks of signing up for a dating service. They’ve now been dating for six months.
“He’s very laid-back,” Meghan tells me. “Funny, quirky, calm. Very successful. He has the confidence that I always got from the alpha-male guys, but none of the stupid swagger.” And the most important part, she says, is that she feels like a three-dimensional human being, rather than a two-dimensional trophy girlfriend. “I’ve told him my weirdest, nerdiest thoughts that I wouldn’t normally tell people, and he thinks that they’re hilarious. All the reasons that he likes me are based on who I actually am as a person. My physical appearance is a bonus, but it’s not the focus. Other guys would try to tell me how to dress and not to talk to other guys.”
It’s not that the usual physical attraction isn’t there, Meghan stresses. “He’s really cute. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he has broad shoulders, but he doesn’t dress like he’s trying to impress people. If he’d seen me at a bar, I don’t know that he would have even wanted to talk to me.”
Why not? “Because I didn’t look like a person of depth,” she jokes. “I looked like someone who had the intellectual maturity of a sloth.” It was only when Meghan let go of her compulsion to treat relationships as a “game” that she finally experienced h
olistic desire.
5
Masculinity: Inside the Boys’ Club
It is 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday, and the men of Alpha Epsilon EtaI are sound asleep. I am on campus in small-town Ohio to meet with some of their members, and my first interviewee for the morning, Max, has just phoned to let me know he is running late, still on his way back into town following his girlfriend’s sorority formal the night before. He tells me to let myself in through the back door—it’s unlocked—and to wait for him in the kitchen. I do as he instructs, laughing as I inform him that where I’m from, no one leaves their door unlocked, and they certainly don’t invite people they don’t know to hang out in their homes when they’re not there. Least of all journalists.
I’ve never been inside a frat house before; we don’t have them in Australia, where I grew up and went to school. The closest thing I’ve encountered is one of the all-male residential colleges at the university where I studied as an undergraduate, notorious for their wealthy inhabitants and for their occasional media scandals. Fraternity houses are the stuff of pop-cultural legend, an undiluted window into Planet Guy. I’m not sure what to expect.
Wedged on the edge of campus between a fellow fraternity and a women’s soccer club, the Alpha Epsilon Eta house is smaller and less imposing than the Greek houses I’ve seen in the movies. Its initials are not carved in stone above stately doors but drilled into a small metal plaque, like a midlevel executive office door at a downtown law firm. It looks just as you’d imagine a house full of college guys to look on a Sunday morning. The kitchen table is scattered with red Solo cups and almost-empty beer cans. There are dirty plates and a couple of discarded bags of chips on the floor. A young woman lies on the couch in the open lounge area, sleeping off the party from the night before. On the front porch sits a table with the words “place scrotum here” scrawled on the top, and written on the kitchen wall is a rhyming manifesto espousing the virtues of brotherhood, friendship, and booze.