The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  But, in answer to this one essay question in the online survey, many more students chose to comment generally about all online dating apps, which include Tinder, Grindr, and even Snapchat (in some students’ opinions), without naming Tinder specifically. In fact, this optional essay question was one of the most popular in the entire survey. What’s most interesting is that, though very few students claim to use these apps, they certainly have opinions about them.

  The vast majority of those opinions—like students’ overall opinions about online dating—are extremely negative. Young adults do not like the idea of meeting people they might date or hook up with online. Nor do they take advantage of any platform that widens their options beyond campus. And they are incredibly judgmental about those who do. What’s more, in these particular answers, students’ comments reveal a lot of negativity about hookup culture in general—and the reason students feel so strongly about these particular apps is because they believe they perpetuate hookup culture or, worse, exacerbate it and contribute to the devaluation of dating and sex on campus.

  One young man said, simply and succinctly, that because of these types of apps, “hookup culture is becoming pervasive and commitments are being thrown out the door.” A young woman commented, “It’s not real and I think it makes it harder to find real relationships. I think it’s totally changing the way people date, often promoting hooking up and sex instead of finding someone who genuinely cares about you.”

  Those students who offered an opinion on how these apps influence dating and sex on campus displayed severe distaste for them and the power they have to worsen what these students already see as a problematic dating and hookup scene. They frequently used words like “pathetic,” “stupid,” “sexist,” “superficial,” “terrible,” and “horrible.” They felt such apps could even be “dangerous” or lead to dangerous situations, and that they exacerbate the objectification of women or of people in general. These apps are disrespectful of sex, commitment, and human contact and have a detrimental effect on dating and sex.

  SEXTING: A GENERATION DIVIDED

  Another topic, besides so-called hookup apps, seems to cause otherwise reasonable people to panic: sexting. Generally, when I asked college students what they thought about sexting, I got one of two answers. One was a passionate “No way! I would never do that!” The other was a shrug. About half the students I interviewed thought that the people who sext are unbelievably stupid. The other half thought those people were lying because sexting is very common.3

  Of course, students have very different ideas of what “sexting” actually means.

  “I think it needs to be more defined, what sexting is,” Mark begins. “Anything of a sexual manner, even if they’re naked or not—I would consider that sexting. I know some people maybe would consider, if they’re naked, or if they don’t have certain clothing, then that’s sexting. Or to where you’re texting in kind of a sexual way. I think people try to make it more severe than what it really is. It’s pretty wide, I think, how it should be defined.” Mark goes so far as to include flirty texts as sexting, too. “Just like flirting, like, ‘Oh, what are you wearing?’ or ‘What are we going to do later tonight?’ Or sending pictures, like, if a girl was pulling her shirt down a little bit. Anything that has kind of a sexual reference I would consider sexting, if it’s sending pictures, just texting or even if it’s emailing.”

  Occasionally, students even interpreted “sexting” as using apps like Tinder or seeking sex via social media. Most understood the term as having to do with making explicit sexual remarks via text, and most commonly as sending suggestive or nude photos. Snapchat came up often in the context of discussions about sexting, since a lot of people think of Snapchat as the ideal sexting app.

  Occasionally, someone like Matthew grew a little embarrassed discussing the topic. When I asked him about sexting, he was one of the students who immediately referenced Tinder. He felt like people on his campus used Tinder “all the time” to search for hookups—but, again, with other students, not with strangers. “If they’re on Tinder, they’re looking for somebody to hook up with that’s like really close to them,” he says with a laugh. They’ll use Tinder to “invite them to the party that we’re going to that night.”

  With regard to “sexting” in a more technical sense, Matthew thinks that it also “happens all the time.” He likens it to phone sex of the past. Then he goes on to say something I find really interesting: “I’m actually guilty of [sexting] because this summer I sexted my girlfriend a few times because she lives three hours away from me so I can’t be there all the time.” I ask him why he said he was “guilty” of sexting. He chuckles, grows a little red, and starts stumbling over his words. “Well, I don’t know, because I know that, people have, like a bad image of people, um, anyway, like my parents wouldn’t approve and, like, um, like my pastor wouldn’t approve. So, like, guilty is one of like my first reactions when I’m like talking to someone about it that’s not my girlfriend, you know?” he says, laughing nervously again. I press him to consider why he feels embarrassed to admit this. “I shouldn’t be doing [it] so I feel a little embarrassed about it. But, yeah, I’ve done it before because I can’t be there all the time and it’s just a way to, you know, keep a relationship intimate from a distance. So I don’t think it’s always a bad thing. I’ve only sexted in a relationship,” he adds, laughing once more. “When people sext each other outside a relationship, I think it’s very strange. Like, a few of the guys on the [baseball] team have sexted girls back home that they have not really anything to do with, and I don’t know. I find that really weird. That’s something I would never do, but I know it happens all the time.”

  Matthew draws a sharp distinction between sexting within a relationship and sexting outside a relationship. “I suppose you really should only [sext] with somebody you really trust and you’re in a relationship with, like a committed relationship,” he emphasizes. “Obviously breakups can go really bad, and if that person doesn’t care about you as much as you thought, then maybe they’ll do something to ruin your image.”

  Students who do sext occasionally often made it clear that they did so only within committed relationships. Sexting with a significant other is one thing; sexting with a stranger is something else entirely. Even students who said that they’ve never sexted, or never would, would often say that they thought it was okay for other people to sext with their significant others but never with a stranger. The latter is just too risky.

  Vidya thinks that sexting is pretty universal among college students. “I know my friends do it,” she says with a laugh. “Not that they’ve taken it too far, but it’s definitely something that’s a lot more common now than I feel like it was, especially with smartphones, especially things like Snapchat, where for ten seconds, you can see a photo, you know? And I know people do that… . But it’s definitely a lot more common, especially with all these tools that you have, like front-facing cameras and FaceTime.”

  The idea that “sexting happens” just because we have the “tools” for it—front-facing cameras, apps like Snapchat, FaceTime—is the same argument a number of students made when talking about selfies. Technology makes sexting easy, so of course everyone does it.

  One young man at a Catholic University had a rather romantic idea of why people shouldn’t sext, and what sexting has to do with valuing (and devaluing) our bodies and relationships. “Sexting, it’s not really something that somebody should be doing because it’s disrespecting your body,” he says. “It’s kind of saying that all there is to your body is what you can see from the picture, whereas if you wait for somebody, like a significant other, to see the more private parts of your body until a later date like marriage or even, at least, farther into the relationship if not marriage, it’s more special. It can be more romantic than just an outright naked picture.”

  Then there is the young woman who thinks sexting is just plain stupid: “I mean, you see people that are having scandals�
�� . I mean, there’s politicians that have been found with nude photos and stuff like that. Just leaving that footprint isn’t a good idea. I don’t know, maybe people get pleasure out of it, but is it really worth it if it’s such a risk that someone could find those photos? And even if you’re not a public figure, someone could use a photo they have of you to ruin your reputation even just within a college campus, within a high school, by distributing those photos. I mean I guess sending the photo is not really a big deal, but I would never do it.”

  Then there are students like Joy who have mixed feelings about sexting. Like many students, she feels that at a certain age, you’re just too young for it and it’s shocking, but as you get older it can be okay in the right circumstances. “I remember when I was in ninth grade and I had a phone, and some guy texted me asking for tit pics, and I was like, ‘What?! No!’ I wanted to cry. I was like, ‘That’s the most repulsive thing you’re asking me for!’ … .My philosophy on it used to be, when I was younger, that if you’re not comfortable enough to see something in person, you shouldn’t be seeing it on a screen.” Joy feels you should be “old enough and mature enough” to do it, and she feels this way about herself now. She has a boyfriend, and sexting is a part of their relationship. “I’m not going to say I’ve never sent a sext, because if we’re in a long-distance relationship, there’s gonna be times where I might send you a picture of something, you know?” Joy still has limits on sexting, though. “I wouldn’t do it as a casual [thing], with, you know, someone random,” she adds.

  Then there is Brenda. Unlike Joy, who grew into sexting as she got older, Brenda seems to have grown out of it. “It’s common among people my age, not necessarily my friends,” she says. “We talk about this all the time actually. I think a couple of us used to do it a little more frequently, including myself. It was a thing for us senior year of high school, but now we’ve grown out of it and it just really isn’t a thing… . You can’t just trust anyone with that kind of stuff.”

  Many people drew distinctions based on age and relationship status. And lots of the students I spoke with were worried about their younger siblings, who might not be mature enough to think through what they are doing. The consequences, they fear, could haunt them for life.

  But no one had a more elaborate theory of sexting than Jeremy.

  JEREMY: SEXTING THE RIGHT WAY

  I meet Jeremy on a beautiful, sunny day at his idyllic Catholic college. He wears a colorful, tie-dyed bucket hat on his head, a Beatles T-shirt, skater shoes, and shorts, and he exudes a sort of relaxed enthusiasm. Jeremy is an incredibly fun person to interview—lively, hilarious at times, very intelligent and thoughtful. He’s on just about every social media platform imaginable—Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Vine, Tinder, Instagram, Facebook. He has a girlfriend back home, and when I ask him what sorts of things make him happy, he replies, “Too much makes me happy,” without skipping a beat. He’s a laid-back guy, disposed to enjoy life and have a positive attitude about things. In general, Jeremy posts whatever he wants on his accounts, though he does “watch his ass,” he explains, because he doesn’t want anybody Googling him and finding something for which he might get judged unfairly. He sees social media a just another outlet to express himself.

  Jeremy enjoys selfies, he tells me, especially on Snapchat. But he prefers texting most of all because it’s so private. Then I ask Jeremy what he thinks of sexting.

  “I don’t really have a problem with it,” he begins. “Social media is way different now than it was, than it would be if it was presented a couple years ago. I think Snapchat and things like Tinder for sexting are more common in my generation, and I think we know how to use it. I mean, obviously not everybody, because there’s people who abuse everything, but I think my generation knows how to sext in a responsible way, and they don’t just send things out to random people. It’s kinda like Snapchat is—Snapchat is connected to your contacts, so I know the people I’m sending it to. And Tinder, Tinder’s kind of more of, like, a stranger meet-up site, but you talk to the person before. One of my buddies met his girlfriend on Tinder, and she’s really cool, we all hang out with her. I like her, she’s a nice person. So, I think our generation knows how to sext responsibly and not go meet somebody who might, you know, kidnap you.”

  Jeremy has mentioned “sexting responsibly” twice now, and I want to understand better what, exactly, he means.

  At first, he tells me I’ve asked him a difficult question. But then he begins to parse out an answer. “Sexting responsibly,” he says, pausing for another beat, “would mean, if you’re not sending your pictures or, like, sexy text messages to somebody you don’t know. I mean, I’ve sexted before, but it’s only been with, you know, a girl I’ve been talking to for a while, and I feel like I have a connection to her. So, I think sexting responsibly has to do with not only knowing the person outside of social media, but having that type of sexual connection, I guess, even outside of social media. I mean, I wouldn’t sext with a random girl on the street, but with my girlfriend, yeah. That’s more responsible because I know my girlfriend. There’s less of a chance for her to leak all my stuff out to the Internet and have it out there for everyone.”

  I ask if he worries that could happen anyway.

  “No,” Jeremy says. “I mean, I trust the girlfriends I’ve had. I obviously trusted them or I wouldn’t have dated them, but I think, I find somebody who, even if we were to break up, it wouldn’t be out of spite. I’d leave it on a good enough note where we wouldn’t attack each other’s personal things over social media. So, I’ve never really worried about it. Maybe I should be, but I never really worry about it too much now because I’m more responsible about it, sending it to people that I trust rather than people I just met over the social media site.”

  Jeremy doesn’t worry too much about online privacy, either. He thinks about it a little bit, like everybody else, he imagines, but only a little. “But at the same time, I don’t post anything that I should be worried about,” he explains. “Not anything that could get me in serious trouble, at least. So, I mean, I worry about privacy and maybe my account getting hacked, but most of the time my account gets hacked and people just write stupid stuff, it’s never really, like, they steal my information. So I’m never really too worried about it. I change my password probably, maybe every once in a while. Not too often, but I think I stay up on it enough where nothing serious will happen.”

  At the end of our interview, Jeremy says he wants to talk about freedom of expression. What he tells me reflects his generally positive attitude toward social media and new technologies, including sexting. “I think our generation has taken such a great step toward freedom of expression, and I think social media really amplifies that,” he says. “There’s a lot of diversity online. So I think when you go online, it gives you such a greater aspect and you can see the different views from people, and some people use it as a place for [judgment], but I don’t think it’s a place for judgment. I think it’s a place for you just to express yourself and maybe find people with common interests. I think it really affects the world in more of a positive way than a negative way, if it’s used correctly.”

  THINK (ABOUT YOUR FUTURE) BEFORE YOU SEXT

  Jeremy has some company. About 14 percent of students in the online survey approved of sexting and see it as a positive, normal, and fun thing that people do. Some of these students spoke about how sexting can be great for a relationship, especially a long-distance one, or just wanted to say that there is nothing wrong with the practice. But the overwhelming message they sent was that you need to be responsible about it, which means not sexting people you don’t really trust. And nearly half of the respondents were highly disapproving of sexting. Some of these students felt that sexting was “morally wrong” and even “disgusting,” and “degrading,” and a number of them were against the practice because they felt they got too many unwanted sexts. But the most common feeling wasn’t that sexting is immoral, but that it’s ris
ky. These were students who spoke of sexting being dangerous because everybody knows (or should know) that photos and sexts can get passed around. These students believed that if you sext you’re crazy because once you do, total disaster and ruin are just around the corner. People in this group expressed high levels of awareness that nothing is really private on the Internet and on phones, and also that everything you do on a device and that you send over the Internet is permanent. One sext can come back to haunt you even years from now.

  This is one more sign of the heightened awareness that one wrong move, one risky post, one photo that you took just for fun could potentially rob you of your future hopes and dreams. These students thought that sexting is only “for people too immature to know any better,” who haven’t yet learned to “professionalize” everything they do online. Many college students would think that the idea of “sexting responsibly” is ludicrous. They would listen to Jeremy and shake their heads because, they think, he’s kidding himself.

  Those who turn to the technology and say that sexting is inevitable have a point. Smartphones have invaded nearly every aspect of our lives, so why should our sex lives be any different? Many students treat their smartphones as if they are attached to their bodies, and they have incredibly deep and complex feelings about their devices. Some can’t bear to be without them, while others feel enslaved by them.

  10

  MY SMARTPHONE AND ME

  A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP