Taken together, such Web sites and apps make a permanent bathhouse of our surroundings. Sexual frames of mind once relegated to special environments are no longer thus bound. And so the bathhouse brain, which is primed for immediate satisfaction, becomes our everyday brain. If I’m sitting in a sun-dappled park reading Sense & Sensibility and suddenly take up the idea that I’d like some action right now, it’s only my own starched manners that will stop me.
• • • • •
Gay men are only the first wave. Straight people are quickly remodeling their own sex lives. Along with selling used sofas and renting apartments, Craigslist, the massive, global classified Web site, has lively sections devoted to the proffering of sexual trysts. Neatly divided by orientation, the site’s “Casual Encounters” pages overflow with gentlemen declaring themselves “fit, hung, ready to please” and ladies demurring, “Please have good hygiene.” Meanwhile, Chatroulette links strangers from Beijing to Bogotá via webcam feeds—inevitably leading to the ubiquitous Roulette Flashers, men who masturbate before the camera in the hopes of titillating/appalling female viewers (a report from TechCrunch found that one in eight users on Chatroulette is broadcasting R-rated content).
These forums may be tawdry and voyeuristic, but even innocuous connections made on Facebook often belie a sexual pursuit (its progenitor, Facemash, was a game in which Harvard students rated their classmates as “hot” or “not”).20 Explicitly or otherwise, mainstream technologies are now integral to the game. Youths send homemade porn to one another via their phones, while apps like Snapchat encourage risqué photo sharing because they promise to automatically delete images (although, naturally, this turned out to be untrue).
This is not a question of simply transferring offline behavior—meeting via newspaper classifieds, for instance, or picking up a stranger in a bar—onto the Internet. Yes, we’ve turned every new broadcast technology into a beacon for the lonely (the first printed personals were created a mere fifty years after the invention of the modern newspaper), but no, the Internet is not just an extension of what came before. Surveys conducted in 1980, and again in 1992, demonstrated that less than 1 percent of the population was then meeting through newspaper ads. Today, at least one in five relationships begin online. According to a massive 2010 BBC World Service report spanning nineteen countries, nearly a third of us now consider the Internet a decent place to find a mate, and similar Pew Research Center work focusing on Americans in 2013 saw that number rise to 59 percent.
For many of us, the days begin and end with a consoling look at a phone or a laptop. We find ourselves on constant alert for connection—and sexual connection is prime among these. Our technologies offer something irresistible: a shortcut between desire and consummation. They grant us twenty-four-hour access to an alternately frustrating and exhilarating pool of sexual potential and a far larger scope of search. Online connections are, in sum, fast food and dire nourishment in one.
After all, absences are difficult, even torturous. And the alternative, the digital world we’ve erected to fill those absences, is uniquely adapted to excite our bodies and minds. That much is evident in our basic physiological responses. When we receive a text message, our heart rate increases, blood flow to our skin increases; 83 percent of us, according to one study, even hold our breath. (Writer Linda Stone dubbed this “e-mail apnea.”) And as Gary Wilson has pointed out, the dopamine rush we get from viewing porn online is often greater than that induced by real sex (or even old-fashioned magazine porn), because all that clicking and scrolling exploits the searching-and-seeking drive that served our hunter-gatherer ancestors so well. Porn sites deliver a never-ending stream of Tabasco sauce and, “as long as a guy can keep clicking, he can keep going, and so can his dopamine.”
But amid the smorgasbord of Tabasco-laced sexual broadcasting, emboldened as we are with the possibility of getting what we want whenever we want it, some essential absence has been taken away. How did our erotic lives get powdered into instant coffee? (Just add desire.)
• • • • •
In 1965, accountant Lewis Altfest, together with his computer whiz buddy Robert Ross, created Project TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing), a commercial dating service that, like the descendants it would spawn, relied on the inputting of personal information (do you dislike foreigners? would you rather be Einstein or Picasso?). A customer would pay $5 and fill out a questionnaire, which was then run through an IBM 1400 Series computer equipped with an algorithm that let Altfest and Ross find matches for lonely hearts.
They were keenly aware that computer-aided dating could be seen as both nerdy and déclassé, so for months they walked the streets of New York’s Upper East Side, scouting for upscale singles. To doormen, they explained they were working on a graduate research project; once shown into the lobby, they made their way to the wall of mailboxes. Whenever one had two different names on it, Altfest and Ross assumed the occupants were single and added those names to their list. “It was a tailored approach,” Altfest told me. “And, if I do say so myself, it was a very sophisticated approach.”
Once they knew who was rich and single, Altfest and Ross declared their TACT program an “East Side experiment,” something that only people living in the right neighborhood could join. “We restricted it to the poshest area in the city, and sent personalized invitations to all the single people there. We said, This is an experiment, and you’d be doing us a favor if you participated. You obviously don’t need a date; you’re simply helping us out.” The normal return on a direct mail advertising program like that is 1 percent; Altfest and Ross got close to 25.
The race to translate human desire into 1s and 0s had begun. At the same time, a group of Harvard kids was pushing Operation Match, which used computers to identify compatible couples from a bank of college students who had self-rated their own attractiveness and intelligence. Every communication technology is harnessed by the horny of the world, but those students with their lists of tech-sanctified lovers were experiencing something quite new. Apparent in the infancy of online dating were the first intimations of a population in love with off-loading romantic decisions to a yenta algorithm. What a strong impulse that would turn out to be: the desire to have one’s desires directed.
Emerging as it did during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, TACT played off fresh, even courageous, social mores. Dating, courtship, and sex were all becoming more liberally defined at precisely the moment when computers were broadening options for interpersonal connection. By the early 1990s, AOL introduced chat rooms where users could cyberflirt; soon after, sites like Match.com created mathematical formulas to pair up singles. The romantic revolution would deliver us from the silencing odds of our old social circles into a (highly managed) crowd of potentials.
• • • • •
The advent of GPS-enabled phones has made it possible to take the search outside and into real time. To get a picture of the future marketplace for online hookups, I sat down to lunch with Morris Chapdelaine, a muscled and fast-talking man about as far from tech nerd as one can get. Chapdelaine is the executive editor of a new app for gay men called GuySpy (which had just welcomed its millionth user from its HQ in White Salmon, Washington).
Like Grindr, GuySpy allows men to find one another using GPS, but it fashions itself a social network, too, complete with news stories, blogs, and a community of users. It also pushes established privacy boundaries by pulling up mapping systems and pinpointing the exact street corner that your soon-to-be lover is loitering on. It even includes the option of making anonymous phone calls. Midway through our meal, Chapdelaine had his phone out and was flipping through nearby men. “He’s cute. . . . He’s cute. . . .”
The point is unbridled freedom and access, commensurate with the expanding freedoms and access enjoyed by gay men in general. “Gay bars that exist today,” said Chapdelaine, “they aren’t even trying. They just paint it black, offer some bad drinks. And you know what? They’re over. Gu
ys want to go to the nice bars, to the nice restaurants. You want to be able to hang out anywhere with your straight friends. This app lets them do that.”
Chapdelaine is on to something: I spoke with Terry Trussler at Vancouver’s Community-Based Research Centre, whose latest research compiles surveys from eighty-six hundred gay men. Trussler found that three-quarters of young men are dissatisfied with designated gay spaces, preferring to roam outside village ghettos. Thirty-six percent of those under thirty used their cell phones to find casual sex (compared with 18 percent of older men). According to Trussler’s report: “Internet and smartphones, not bars and cafés, have become the main means of connection between men under 30.”
Traditionally, when gay men left their ghetto, they were effectively neutered. You couldn’t know who was gay at a mainstream venue, so sexual advances became problematic at best and a physical risk at worst. Today, when gay men go out into the larger world, technologies like GuySpy point out the queer potential of any space. In other words, one can make a four-person gay bar out of a forty-person restaurant. But only, of course, if everyone’s using the technology. By this light, mobile sex apps could be something more than erotic fast food. Their use could be a revolutionary act, a way for a sexual minority to stake out territory traditionally denied them.
But why stop there? Apps could next inject this revolutionary attitude toward sex—overt, open, casual—beyond gay culture and into the mainstream. The question is, can the bathhouse brain work for straight people (and lesbians)? Would this approach to sex even be tenable? According to Chapdelaine, it’s inevitable. He argues that his app is the future, like it or not. “Ten years from now, this is going to be an integral part of everyone’s life, gay or straight.”
• • • • •
This brings us to the heterosexual hitch: the female question. Do women want the revolution?
In 2011, U.S. neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam published their analysis of the Web search behavior of more than one hundred million men and women around the world (eat your heart out, Alfred Kinsey). Ogas says that, indeed, women’s preferences are why heterosexual sex culture is so different from gay men’s. “Quite frankly,” he told me, “a sex site like Grindr shows us what all men would do if women weren’t involved.” His position seems to be confirmed by examples of Grindr-esque efforts where men aren’t involved at all: Qrushr Girls, a lesbian variation of Grindr launched in 2010, attracted a mere fifty thousand users in three months and then failed.
Whatever engineered them, the blockades between women and casual hookups have thus far kept online technologies from becoming overt, mainstream sex sources for straights. Early attempts to replicate Grindr and GuySpy for heterosexuals are platonic by comparison. One app, called Blendr (yes, produced by the folks behind Grindr), is making a go, with more than 180 million members. Except that Blendr seems ashamed of its true intentions; it bills itself as “a place to find friends,” which would be a great tag for a location-based social app for kindergarten children, but less so for consenting adults in search of sex.
On Grindr, a photo of a man’s naked torso is accompanied by blunt descriptions of his weight, preferred sexual position, and HIV status. When I scour the Blendr site, though, I learn that “Brittany” likes Hugo Boss and the movie Titanic; and “Anna” wants to go Rollerblading with a guy who is older than twenty-five. So much for Blendr’s casual sex life.
Perhaps future generations of heteros will be more sexually adventurous? There seems to be a growing comfort with broadcasting sexual desire, at least. When 606 students were canvassed at a single high school in the southwestern United States, almost 20 percent of them admitted to having sent a sexually explicit image of themselves through their phone (twice as many said they’d received such an image). (On Grindr, too, it is the digital natives who form the largest user group, and it is also they who are most comfortable with enabling the app’s geolocation software.) But that’s not the whole picture.
Reading media reports of grade-eight children sending one another homemade pornography leads to the gut feeling that digital life must be an invitation to a hypersexed reality. However, gossipy accounts of adolescent sex lives don’t necessarily translate to what’s going on. Statistics Canada conducted a National Population Health Survey in 1996–1997 (immediately before the Internet’s proliferation) and then again in 2005 (after teenagers had gained access to complex online worlds). Comparison of the two shows post-Internet teenagers were actually having less physical sex than their pre-Internet peers. The number of teens who reported having sexual intercourse dropped from 47 to 43 percent. A more recent StatsCan study found that between 2003 and 2012, there was zero change in the number of sexually active young people. In fact, the only significant change is that youths who are having sex are now more likely to use condoms. And the average age when we lose our virginity (seventeen) has not changed in twenty years. The next generation, then, may be producing more signals of sex without actually having more of it.
What’s not clear is whether all this sexual posturing is making us happier and more fulfilled. As we fill in the longing, the absences that characterize so much of history’s erotic art, love songs, and poetry, with the constant connection of digital technology, what fine yearnings have we made extinct? Craigslist, sexting, and porn are superb dismantlers of sexual mystery, but I don’t know that desire without mystery, without absence, is quite enough for me.
• • • • •
Of course, other kinds of mysteries are ideal grist for the Internet. Consider Toronto-based AshleyMadison.com, which helps its sixteen million users arrange extramarital affairs. If the business of online hookups has a bogeyman, it’s Noel Biderman, CEO of the company that owns AshleyMadison and half a dozen other sites that unabashedly satisfy the needs of specific populations—his CougarLife.com, for example, helps young men meet divorcées and single moms; meanwhile, his EstablishedMen.com helps “perfect princesses” find older, wealthy guys.
Their traffic charts the ebb and flow of secret human appetites: Monday morning is the busiest time at AshleyMadison, as disappointing weekends lead to cheating; late Sunday night is the busiest time for CougarLife, as drunken older women (and drunken young bucks) return home, alone, from the bar; and every site promoting casual sex gets a major spike the day after New Year’s, as the world’s population makes a bleary promise to itself that, surely, it can do better.
While we spoke, Biderman moved about his twelfth-floor office at Toronto’s RioCan Complex (a hub of social media, housing outlets of Facebook and LinkedIn, too). He’s a smart, charismatic man. His rationale, surprisingly, matches the harm-reduction argument used to justify safe injection sites: Whether you like it or not, this activity is going to happen, so we might as well mitigate the risk. “Before the Internet, most affairs had to be with someone in your circle, someone at work or your sister’s husband,” he says. “That’s way more damaging.” We get to the rub pretty quickly: “It’s ridiculous that people take these moral stands about it,” he told me. “You can’t market infidelity. You, for example”—he takes a sharp breath—“I can’t convince you to have an affair; you either will or you won’t. I can only convince you to use my platform. These Web sites are just a platform. We’re as agnostic as a phone.”
I ask him where hookup technology is headed, and he lays out a bold vision. “We’re going to have to build something that goes beyond self-representation,” he explains, citing the myriad ways our subjective hang-ups keep us from accurately representing ourselves. Biderman’s argument is that we actually get in the way of our own hookups, that we don’t know, or won’t admit, what we really want. Instead, we should open up access to the minutiae of our lives (your Web search history, that video you e-mailed your dad, the music you listen to) so helpful algorithms can do their job properly.
“If we can use science, use algorithms, to make our relationships more successful, then that’s a positive,” he tells me. “We need to get over this i
dea that infringing on privacy is such a problem. Does it matter if a computer knows what you watch on television?”
• • • • •
I don’t care whether a computer knows that I’ve seen all of Modern Family twice. But I do care very much whether my love life is crowdsourced. Yet how could it not be, the more I become enveloped by online processes? And if we end up browsing for sexual partners the same way we hunt for a decent sushi joint, will our true sexual potential have been revealed by the magic wand of Grindr and the rest? Or will it have been masked by the static of the medium itself? Will the omnipresence of choice, in other words, block us from the absences that so often fuel our desires?
The Greek word eros in fact denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for they who are absent.” There is some (perhaps antique) quality of our search for intimacy that actually demands the separations that precede our meetings. I’m not arguing for abstinence here, or even for monogamy. But it seems clear that online technologies promote us toward a state of constant intimacy, and that’s not necessarily an ingredient in erotic desire.
The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection Page 17