Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  As the disco craze seized New York, however, people went out less to mix with people they would not have met otherwise than to affirm their membership in a crowd that they belonged to already. You went out in order to be part of the scene that party photographers captured. Later you could smile and say, I was there.

  As being seen became its own end, going out became the means to reach it. The most popular discotheques became media phenomena. At Studio 54, a bouncer would usher a group of celebrities and regulars inside, then select from the countless other hopefuls based on their clothing and appearance. All of the popular discos carefully curated their nightly guest lists in order to create the right environment—the kind that would attract more media attention.

  The gay actor Richard Brenner recalled popular discos like Arthur and Cheetah. “They weren’t gay clubs. They just let in a certain number, a kind of quota, to give the place more of a party atmosphere.”

  The entrepreneurs who lifted the disco sound and look from gay African American DJs often ended up excluding the very kinds of people who had pioneered it. Just as T.G.I. Friday’s repackaged the gay bar as the singles bar, discos like Buster T. Brown’s stole Paradise Garage’s music and sold it to the Midwest.

  Buster T. Brown’s was the only singles bar in Cincinnati in the early 1970s. In 1974, it was sued for racial discrimination. Off the record, some waitresses and patrons admitted to the press that they thought the real issue was sexual insecurity among white men, who felt intimidated by black men who dressed and danced better than they did. On the record, however, they defended the management.

  “Oh, we don’t really discriminate against blacks,” one waitress told the Cincinnati magazine reporter Dan Bischoff. “It’s just that when too many start to pack the place in, we just start playing Beach Boys music. That usually makes them move on.” In the absence of laws segregating daters, unofficial techniques can still do it.

  * * *

  It has long since become a cliché to observe that the lines between public and private are disappearing, or that, in an age of ubiquitous mobile digital technologies, privacy does not exist. We take photographs of our food and share them with thousands of people. We tweet a clever joke while our date is in the bathroom. The smartphone has dramatically changed what it means to go out. By making it possible to leave home with the entire Internet in our pockets—with the profiles of everyone we love, or have loved, or might ever love, on hand and able to be contacted in an instant—the smartphone makes it possible never to be fully out or in.

  At the same time, many more people who were once “outsiders” to dating can now go out openly. Gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians no longer need to hide from the police. In many parts of many cities, couples who might previously have risked arrest as “degenerate deviants” if they expressed their affection openly, can now do so without fear.

  These are triumphs. Yet the spaces we call “out” are still not for everyone. Over the past few years, there have been many signs that trans people are gaining greater acceptance from the general American public. Yet trans daters are constantly threatened with hostility and violence. Trans women often become the targets of the very men who feel attracted to them—scapegoats for the confusion and self-loathing that such attraction can inspire. Many states still have laws on the books that make “trans panic”—a freak-out experienced upon realizing that someone is not the gender you thought—a legitimate legal defense that can be invoked to downgrade a murder charge to manslaughter. The life expectancy of a trans woman of color in the United States is around thirty-five.

  Going out is always about being among others. In this way, it creates a relationship between more than two people. And it is always potentially political. What we hope for when we go out is to be surprised. The surprise may be as ordinary as the slight thrill of jealousy you feel when someone else looks at your longtime partner. Or it might be the delight you feel when you yourself draw such a look. At bottom, a dater goes out to be recognized, even if it is as someone she did not know she was yet.

  When strangers catch each other’s eyes across a room, however briefly, they become a we. Whatever form our relationships take, and for however long they last, it is with a desire for we that they begin. We is the beginning of every story. And so people who go out create new kinds of community. Going out to date is one way to demand that the world recognize the right of everyone to desire.

  CHAPTER 4. SCHOOL

  As gay bars inspired the first straight singles bar, the success of the first dating app for “gay, bi, and curious” men launched an arms race to develop an equivalent for straight people. Released in 2009, Grindr uses geolocation technology to show members other members in their vicinity; it indicates precisely how far away they are and lets them initiate multiple simultaneous chats. In 2012, Tinder launched and quickly became the most successful of the products promising straight daters a similar experience.

  If every dating app re-creates some earlier, predigital dating experience, Grindr lets users relive the thrills of the speakeasy. Like an “invert” of yore, you scan a crowded bar for hints. Could he have the waxed and sculpted torso that appears headless on the profile you’re eyeing? Or is that stuffed shirt hiding it? Even if your phone avers that he is only ten feet away, the idea of walking up to the wrong stranger and asking “Sw33tbun?” might make you nervous.

  A night out on Tinder, however, feels less like cruising than like college. And Tinder facilitates a mode of interaction that has mostly replaced formal dating on college campuses: hooking up.

  * * *

  Those who say that romance is dead often point to college “hookup culture” as the culprit that killed it. Like the language of “treating” and “charity” that the first daters developed, the term blends an exchange of goods and services with an act of intimacy. Linguists have found that among African Americans, “hook up” still usually means something like “give” or “arrange.” Can you hook me up with a light? So and so got us the hookup on these backstage passes. But in the 1990s, white suburban kids started using it to refer to sexual encounters.

  As is the case with much slang, the power of the expression lies in its ambiguity. For a teen to say that she hooked up with a boy from her class might mean anything from that they had cuddled while watching a movie, to that they had had sex in the bathroom at a house party. I remember using “hook up” mostly as a term of discretion. Yeah, we hooked up was a gentle way to reproach the friend who kept fishing for details about your weekend.

  To speak of hookups made us feel grown-up, like we had finally outgrown the Truth or Dare? years when we kissed and told everything. But this vagueness gave prying grown-ups the pretext they needed to imagine the worst.

  In 2000, the celebrated chronicler of mores Tom Wolfe used Hooking Up as the title of a book of essays whose subtitle was What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium. For Wolfe, hooking up was the perfect metaphor for an America that had turned into a “lurid carnival” without rules or fixed commitments. He was on trend.

  We who were actually American girls then may remember watching a fifth grader appear on the morning news to answer Diane Sawyer’s questions about the “sex bracelets” she had been caught selling in her school playground or Oprah warning parents that high schoolers nationwide were throwing “rainbow parties,” thus called because the girls who congregated at them applied different shades of lipstick, then fellated boys who tried to collect rings of all the colors you know where. I remember wondering whether Oprah knew how blow jobs worked. My mother grossed me out by implying that she did.

  “The idea that girls your age get on their knees for just anyone!” she exclaimed. “I always thought that was something to save for when you’re, like, eight months pregnant and feel sorry for your husband.” Thank God I was leaving soon for college. Not that parental fretting ended there.

  By the time my roommates and I moved into our freshman-year dorm room, a parade of badly behaving undergrads had c
rossed American screens before us, showing us what to expect. On television, there was Girls Gone Wild, where hordes of drunken sorority members lunged at cameras, crying, “We want to go wild!” They kissed one another and lined up to bare their breasts in exchange for Girls Gone Wild trucker hats. MTV’s Spring Break showed a live stream of hard-bodied and bikini-clad students grinding on one another in Cancún.

  In movie theaters, the first American Pie movie followed the capers of a group of high school friends all desperate to lose their virginity all the way to becoming a huge box office hit. In the sequels, you could watch the gang go to college and return to misbehave at summer beach houses and reunions. Around the same time, a group of actors who some Hollywood reporter dubbed the “Frat Pack” were getting famous by making gross-out college comedies like Van Wilder and Old School. For anyone with an Internet connection, there was a seemingly infinite variety of both amateur and professional pornography purporting to show “real college sluts.”

  Surveys in magazines like Cosmopolitan suggested that the first generation to arrive at school educated by online pornography had studied up on anal sex, multiple penetration, girl-on-girl action, and were eager to put their theories into practice. I remember a lesbian friend complaining how difficult it was to get her desires taken seriously when so many straight girls were kissing girls just to earn hoots from male onlookers. If you wanted to prove you “really” liked girls, she said, you had to put in a semester sleeping with all the other lesbians on campus.

  It was like a teen sex bubble. Plug “hook up” into Google Ngram Viewer—an engine that searches the millions of printed sources available on Google’s database, and then generates a graph showing how frequently a word or phrase appears. You’ll see that the phrase lurches up around the time of the first tech boom. The hookup rose as unstoppably as real estate and stock market values. It shared the ebullience of an economy that seemed to be disproving the fundamental laws of capitalism.

  For a while it looked like kids, at least the kinds of upper-middle-class white kids who showed up on television, really could keep getting more.

  * * *

  The average Americans who went to school in the 1990s or early 2000s had around fifteen years between when their bodies hit sexual maturity and when they settled down—if they settled down. As of 2010, the median age of first marriage was over twenty-seven for women, and over twenty-nine for men, and more and more people had no plans of marrying at all.

  The spread of high school and college education in the early twentieth century created the ambiguous stage between childhood and work and marriage, where more and more millennials seem to be staying—or stalling, depending on who you ask. By 1910, high school attendance was almost universal in cities, and by 1930, college enrollment was triple what it had been in 1900. Both institutions extended the phase that psychologists call “emerging adulthood.”

  A period where one had all the freedoms of an adult with none of the responsibilities lent itself to satire. A character in the popular 1912 campus novel Stover at Yale delightedly trills the chorus of a popular song: “Oh, father and mother pay all the bills, And we have all the fun!”

  Yet to go to college was not just a frivolous self-indulgence. As the United States transitioned from an industrial economy to one based on consumption and services, college offered a new phase of necessary training. Shopgirls and waitresses had to figure out how to conduct themselves in the workplace in order to maximize their chances of success. In the 1920s and ’30s, a more privileged group of young people went to school to practice the same skills.

  The rise of college and the spread of coeducation in the twentieth century also shaped the history of dating. Young people who moved to four-year institutions and enrolled in classes together started meeting and mixing in new ways. And they started thinking about courtship differently, as a kind of learning process.

  Today, friends reassure us that even the most soporific date or apocalyptic breakup teaches us something. Now that many women and men have shaken the stigma formerly attached to premarital sex, we can generally “go the limit” with partners we will not marry without risking arrest or censure. There are few lines you might not cross in order to learn.

  For young people lucky enough to spend four years at a residential college, this is especially true during their years on campus. From the outside, campus courtship may look like chaos. It has, to most onlookers, for as long as students at four-year colleges have dated. In fact it is an extension of the education that such schools offer. The most important learning, the brochures say, takes place outside the classroom. Many students act as if “going out” is the point of going to college.

  They are right to sense that going out in college is different from how they will be able to at any other age, or in any other context. The selection process whereby a school chooses students and the relatively homogeneous and predictable environments in which they live and study suggest the opposite of a speakeasy or a wide-open bar. It seems to promise safety, even if that safety is illusory. (According to the most recent statistics, one in four women will be sexually assaulted while attending college.)

  Memories of their former dissolution may later console professionals through years of boring desk jobs. You had to choose adulthood, they think wistfully. Your wild youth was too wild to last. But the most apparently anarchic college courtship rituals in fact train students to follow highly specific scripts. The point of mastering them has less to do with romance than with what might make them successful thereafter. Shopgirls and waitresses had to learn the flirting skills that gave them a chance at professional success on the job. More privileged students can take the time to master them on the quad or at the frat.

  * * *

  The turn of the millennium was not the first time that the American media had been transfixed by young people partying right up to the brink of economic crisis. In the 1920s, national newspapers and magazines reported extensively on the sexual escapades of high school and college students. Before hooking up, there was “petting,” and everyone was doing it.

  In the 1940s and ’50s, Alfred Kinsey defined petting as “deliberately touching body parts above or below the waist” (thus distinguishing it from “necking,” or general body contact sustained while making out). In terms of the baseball metaphor, petting covered everything between first base and home plate.

  “Mothers Complain That Modern Girls ‘Vamp’ Their Sons at Petting Parties,” The New York Times proclaimed in 1922. The Atlantic and The New Republic, the most prestigious magazines in America, regularly included features on “These Wild Young People” written by “one of them.”

  At least one audience was guaranteed to take an interest: the petters’ parents. Between 1900 and 1930, a dramatic demographic shift changed family dynamics across the United States. Birthrates had been falling since 1800. By 1900, the average American woman was having only half as many children as she would have three generations earlier. Thanks to increased access to birth control, couples in the professional and managerial classes were stopping after their second or third kid. These parents did not have to exercise the kind of severe discipline that had been needed to keep order in households of nine or ten.

  Parents lavished affection on children and sought to help them flourish by discovering and developing their interests. The proliferation of advice literature about the new “emotional” family offers evidence of their commitment to this project. By the mid-1930s, 80 percent of women in professional families and nearly 70 percent of women in managerial families read at least one book on child rearing every year. The largest proportion read five. Fathers, too, began buying these books and attending events like teacher conferences.

  These were the original helicopter parents. They sent their children to school longer and allowed them a great deal more leisure than they themselves had enjoyed. Ironically, the more they gave their children, the less influence they exerted over them. That role was taken over by their peers. As y
oung people started spending less time with their families and more time with one another, they created their own culture. Petting was part of it, and helped prepare kids for a world that was changing faster than their parents could keep up with.

  * * *

  The process began in high school. By the 1920s, more than three-quarters of American teens attended. A study on child welfare commissioned by the White House in the early 1930s found that outside school activities, the average urban teen spent four nights per week engaging in unsupervised recreation with his or her friends. Their activities included dating—going to watch vaudeville shows or movies, going for ice cream or Coca-Colas (“coking”), going to dances organized by schools or thrown, impromptu, in a classmate’s basement, and simply piling into a car together and cruising around.

  Parents and schools tried to impose guidelines on these activities. My grandfather, who was a young dater in the 1930s, recalls a schoolteacher admonishing him and his classmates that if they let girls sit in their laps while “joyriding,” they had to be sure “to keep at least a magazine between them.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald warned that “none of the Victorian mothers … had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.” A quick glance at the tables of contents of various editions of Emily Post’s Etiquette books captures how quickly the shift happened. The 1922 edition contained a chapter on “The Chaperon and Other Conventions”; by 1927 it had been retitled “The Vanishing Chaperone and Other New Conventions”; and by 1937, “The Vanished Chaperone and Other Lost Conventions.”

  That certain conventions had disappeared did not mean that courtship had devolved into a free-for-all. Rather, having been brought together in schools, young people were developing their own codes. Peer pressure replaced parental discipline.