by Moira Weigel
Print classified ads already required daters to do this. They forced you to boil down yourself and your desires into sound bites—and to know your audience. You could expect different people to read the personals at the backs of The New York Review of Books versus New York magazine, in the African American paper the Los Angeles Sentinel versus the beefcake glossy Exercise for Men Only. You had only a few words to catch the right eyes. Jeff Ullman, the Great Expectations founder, traveled the United States offering motivational lectures and seminars to anxious singles. When I reach him at his home in Colorado, he recounts how he used to boost the confidence of attendees by telling them they should not feel ashamed to be selling themselves.
“‘What is advertising?’ I would ask. ‘Let’s look it up in the dictionary.’” Then he would pull out a dictionary.
“‘Advertising. Taking a product or a service and promoting it.’ I believe that is what you’re doing. You’re a product, you’re a service, you’re a thing—you’re a bag of carbon and water—and you’re here because you want to mate, date, procreate. Every one of you is advertising for yourself.”
As more and more dating services began using computers—creating databases of clients and cross-listing them—the imperative to go niche would turn from being a good strategy to a technical requirement. You had to be able to express your personality in exactly the right keystrokes. Daters quickly learned to convert themselves to code.
Until the early 1980s, dating services had been seen as slightly pathetic. You can tell by how adamantly the pioneers of video dating insisted that their customers were not pathetic. Jeff Ullman, the Great Expectations owner, actually sued a local bank in Southern California whose billboards joked that its generous interest rates offered clients “more zeros than a dating service.” “When I saw it,” Ullman fumed to the Los Angeles Times, “I almost drove off the road!”
“These aren’t losers, you understand,” Joan Hendrickson assured The Washington Post of the clients she served at the branches of her upscale D.C. service, Georgetown Connection. “On the contrary, these are people who are confident and willing to take a risk.” In a business piece on the spectacular growth of the People Network and several other New England video-dating companies between 1981 and 1983, The Boston Globe concurred. “Once viewed as the alternative for love’s losers, they appear to be gaining a new image of respectability, especially among singles who are busy career professionals.
Yuppies had made work itself glamorous. In doing so, they had made it admirable (rather than pitiful) to be too busy to have a social or romantic life.
The way people talked about video dating reflected a new level of comfort with the idea that courtship was simply another part of the economy. Today, controversial dating services frequently invoke the existence of demand for their services as a moral justification that needs no further explanation. Before the August 2015 data breach that made Ashley Madison, the dating site for cheating spouses, infamous, the founder, Noel Biderman, defended it by saying that it simply facilitated interactions that would take place anyway. SeekingArrangement describes the “sugar dating” it brokers as “relationships on your terms.” It promises convenience—“find a relationship anywhere, anytime on any device”—and advertises “ideal relationships” that are “upfront and honest arrangements with someone who will cater to your needs.”
Of course, the market does not always offer happiness. The idea that new technologies could create a perfect delivery system for human desire set many daters up for disappointment. For some, it inspired unrealistic expectations.
In a video-dating tape that is still floating around on YouTube, a thin man with a mullet describes what he is hoping for: “a figure that is sexy … slim, tight, excellent legs.” He pauses to look up into the camera and literally smacks his lips. “Mmmm.” His was the problem that still confronts daters on many apps and services: The specter of infinite possibility and choice creates hopes that only can be dashed, again and again, in a search that never ends.
Article after article related how brutal video dating was on women. A headline in the Chicago Tribune joked drily that “For a 4-Figure Fee, You Get Rejected Regularly.” The story focused on the plight of an attractive, professional forty-something-year-old woman, recently divorced, who was roped into paying $1,450 for a membership from which she never got one single date. “Video dating services are great,” the authors joked. “Just as long as you’re either (a) A gorgeous woman, under 35, with a glamorous career, or (b) An average-looking man, under 65, with an ordinary job.”
Even the proprietors of dating services admitted that it was hard for them to help female clients who had passed middle age. Bob Greene, the columnist who had coined “yuppie,” told the heartbreaking story of a seventy-year-old widow named Nancy who drove in from the Chicago suburb of Berwyn to sign up for a service called Sneak Previews Inc.
“My husband died seven years ago,” Nancy told the owner, Joseph De Bartolo. “You get so lonely when that happens. Every year you get lonelier.”
De Bartolo told Greene that he had not wanted to take her money. He warned the septuagenarian, “We really don’t have a lot of people who it might be appropriate for you to choose.”
“That’s okay,” she replied. “I don’t expect to walk out with a date today.” When Greene followed up several months later, he found Nancy at home, alone.
* * *
Like the bars, speakeasies, and school dances that came before them, computer-dating services were platforms. Only the technology of courtship was supposed to have improved. Computers promised to rationalize the dating market—to clear up inefficiencies that kept the supply of yuppie singles from finding its demand. When online-dating companies began to take off in the mid-1990s, they assembled larger and larger databases and deployed automated processing power. As more Americans got online, and it became possible to delegate the work of a Cookie Silver to algorithms and a webcam, dating services would become affordable and available to virtually anyone who wanted to use them. You could belong to two or three dating services at once. By the turn of the millennium, the numbers of members of sites like Match.com and PlentyOfFish had climbed into the tens of millions.
In an article that appeared in Wired magazine in 2002, Nerve.com’s founder Rufus Griscom declared that the ascendancy of online dating was inevitable.
“Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won’t look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident,’” Griscom wrote. “We have a collective investment in the idea that love is a chance event, and often it is. But serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more and more efficient.”
Had we come Back to the Future? At the dawn of dating, all sorts of people had decried the fact that courtship was moving out of the home and into an anonymous, public world where money changed hands. Policemen worried that making dates was equivalent to turning tricks. Love was supposed to lie outside the economy; women could only give it away. By the 1980s and ’90s, however, respectable people were celebrating the possibility that courtship might be made to behave as rationally as the market was supposed to, via technologies that let you “do comparison shopping of potential dates from the comfort and privacy of your own home.”
* * *
The undercover vice investigators who stalked Charity Girls in the 1900s and 1910s were horrified by their transactional approach to romance. However, an odd couple that appears all over Hollywood comedies of the 1980s suggests that by then, mass audiences embraced it. The couple consisted of a prostitute and an entrepreneur.
It started with Risky Business (1983).
In Risky Business, when his wealthy parents leave him alone for a weekend, the high school senior played by Tom Cruise phones a call girl, Lana, on a dare. After their night together leaves him in her debt, and her pimp steals his parents’ chichi furni
ture, Tom Cruise must go into business with Lana to earn the money he needs to buy his heirlooms back. They team up to run a prostitution ring out of his family home for one night.
“My name is Joel Goodson,” Cruise announces after it has all worked out. “I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night.” Today, the portrait of the entrepreneur as a young pimp—or, rather, teen male madam—feels prescient. Had Joel Goodson been born two decades later, he might have founded Facebook. Like Mark Zuckerberg, he uses his parents’ capital to create a platform where others can exchange attention and emotions so that he can skim off the surplus.
In the Calling Era, the parlor, watched over by the lady of the house, was the inner sanctum of a female world entrusted with taming male tendencies toward aggression, greed, and lust. By the time of Risky Business, the parlor had become a living room and then a pop-up brothel. No parents were home.
The mythology of the 1980s and early ’90s glorified the escort and the entrepreneur as a perfect match because neither had anything he or she would not be willing to sell. In Pretty Woman, Richard Gere puts this bluntly. “You and I are such similar creatures,” his suave businessman tells the streetwalker played by Julia Roberts. “We both screw people for money.”
There was a lot embedded in this crude pun. For one, the idea that at the bottom, the escort and the entrepreneur did the same kind of work. In the late 1970s, the United States continued to deindustrialize, and the country experienced a trade deficit. Unable to keep up with increased competition from Japan and Germany or to afford the increasingly expensive oil that had once powered industrial production, the United States grew its service sector. Both the streetwalker and the stockbroker belonged to it.
In this sense, Richard Gere was right: They were not so different. Yet this service sector itself continued to split into two increasingly unequal groups. On the one side was the precarious and poorly paid majority; on the other were finance aristocrats. The kind of work the first did tended to be thought of as female—cleaning, serving food, handling customers, and so on. The kind the second did was quantitative and competitive; in their broad-shouldered suits, its icons projected masculinity. So while they had their similarities, these lovers were also opposites. They both screwed people. But they had very different power relationships with them and received different rewards.
Pretty Woman became the highest-grossing love story of this era, because it turned the disappearance of the American middle class into a fairy tale.
Many other romantic comedies told tales of class mobility, where humble, honorable people manage to marry out of dead-end positions into yuppiedom. The 1988 classic Working Girl, for instance. The title wink-winks, yet again, at the fundamental similarity of the businessperson and the sex worker. In the beginning, the “working girl” secretary played by Melanie Griffith must commute from Staten Island to work in a Wall Street office as a personal assistant to the pantsuited megabitch played by Sigourney Weaver. However, when an improbable series of events lead Melanie to impersonate her boss, she ends up landing a big deal. She also manages to steal her boss’s fiancé, Harrison Ford.
The final scene shows what happily ever after in a yuppie household looks like. Getting ready to leave for work in the morning, Melanie and Harrison wolf down their low-cal breakfast in a wordless ballet. As she pours his coffee, he pops the toast out of the gleaming toaster, and sticks it in her open mouth.
* * *
Calling and old-fashioned courtship, the scenery and setting of the parlor, encouraged the fiction that love had nothing to do with the economy. For bourgeois people, marriage was supposed to be a matter of spontaneous, spiritual affinity; for others, it was supposed to propagate a community or bloodline. But as dating neared its centennial, the situation reversed. Dating came to be seen as just another kind of transaction. Many people struggled to reconcile their desire to live efficiently with their desire to feel sexual desire itself.
Shortly after the 1987 stock market crash, Newsweek reported that a new disorder was troubling the yuppie population. “Psychiatrists and psychologists say they are seeing a growing proportion of patients … whose main response to the sexual revolution has been some equivalent of ‘Not tonight, dear.’” The Viennese psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan, who had established the first academically accredited sex therapy institute in the United States, in New York in the 1970s, diagnosed this. She called the problem “inhibited sexual desire” (ISD). It entered the DSM-III in 1988.
“Over the past decade ISD has emerged as the most common of all sexual complaints. By varying estimates, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the general population may experience it at some time, to some degree,” Newsweek reported. “One clinician goes so far as to call it ‘the plague of the ’80s.’” Against this backdrop, the sex worker starts to look like the prototype for a new woman who is expert in managing feelings—inspiring particular feelings in others and repressing her own—until the time when revealing them might be advantageous. This expertise allowed her to convert the desires of others into money, which was what any yuppie lover most wanted. She made feelings economically productive.
In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts lands Richard Gere by doing precisely this. Richard Gere admits to being a commitmentphobe who has never felt capable of falling in love; friends Julia Roberts meets when he takes her to a horse race emphasize that he is universally desired. No one seems struck by the fact that his professed inability to have feelings qualifies him as a textbook sociopath.
Richard Gere is handsome and eligible, and Julia seduces him by masterfully turning her own body into a commodity. “Did I mention, my leg is 44 inches from hip to toe?” she asks, in an early scene when she embraces him in the bathtub in his swank suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “So basically we are talking about 88 inches of therapy, wrapped around you for the bargain price of $3,000.”
When Richard returns a necklace that he had borrowed for her to wear to the opera, after failing to man up and become her boyfriend, the jeweler sighs. “It must be hard,” he says, as he accepts it back, “to give up something so beautiful.”
It is these words equating Julia Roberts with the necklace that make Richard realize that he has made a terrible mistake. He sprints away to get her back, scrambling up her fire escape just in time for the happy ending.
Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho came out several months after Pretty Woman. Whereas Pretty Woman was instantly beloved, American Psycho was and remains highly controversial. Several publishers dropped the manuscript before Vintage finally published it. But American Psycho basically tells the same story as Pretty Woman in another genre: horror.
Like Richard Gere, the protagonist Patrick Bateman is a wildly successful, handsome finance guy with a good pedigree who cannot feel anything without engaging the services of sex workers. Richard Gere consumes Julia Roberts figuratively. By letting him treat her body like a beautiful object, she helps him find it in himself to feel love. Patrick Bateman literally murders and eats the prostitutes he sleeps with.
“When I see a pretty girl walking down the street,” he jokes to a colleague, “I think two things. One part wants me to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.”
“What does the other part of him think?” the colleague asks.
“What her head would look like on a stick.”
Over the course of the novel, Bateman gnaws girls’ pussies off with his teeth and rips their limbs apart. He stuffs their orifices with Brie and prods a pet rat to eat their bodies from the inside out. He tries to cook girls into sausages and meat loaf. He fails. The matronly apron he wears is a joke. He is no good at cooking; he has clearly never had to do any housework for himself.
Bret Easton Ellis leaves his narrator unreliable. But the fact that we cannot be quite sure whether Patrick Bateman really kills anyone or is just hallucinating the whole thing should not reassure us for a minute. It is just another symptom o
f a terrifying kind of feelinglessness, the total devaluation of emotion in his world.
American Psycho highlighted the dark underside of a dating market that said that anything anyone wanted and could pay for was fair game. It exposed the yuppie as more than dysfunctional. He was satanic.
* * *
Meanwhile, downtown, a real-life nightmare was unfolding.
CHAPTER 8. PROTOCOL
“No wonder Africans called it ‘The Horror,’” Andrew Holleran wrote in 1988, in the introduction to Ground Zero. The collection of essays and articles documented the early years of AIDS in New York City, where Holleran, who had recently published his first novel, was writing columns for the gay magazine Christopher Street. At first, his “New York Notebook” mostly covered gallery openings, clubs, and the music that played at them. Then, in 1982, Holleran’s friends and lovers started falling sick.
Week by week, Holleran watched healthy young men go blind and grow emaciated. Lesions appeared on their faces and limbs; they lost their hair to chemotherapy. Holleran recorded his experiences visiting friends in the hospital. He brought them magazines. He searched for places on their bodies with no tubes running in or out, where he might lay a hand.
“Living in New York,” he recalled, felt like “attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were being taken out and shot, while the rest of us were expected to continue eating and make small talk.”
In November 1986, the lesbian artist and activist Jane Rosett attended a party at the home of her friend David Summers. In 1997, she would describe it in a eulogy for POZ, a magazine for people living with HIV. David had full-blown AIDS. His partner, Sal Licata, had organized the gathering to celebrate their seventh anniversary. He invited friends over to their apartment to “hang out in bed and hold David while he pukes.” Despite his suffering, David projected warmth and wit.
“It was a party,” Rosett wrote. “David held court and stressed how honored he was to have lured a lesbian into his king-size bed.” When his guests relayed gossip of who was sleeping with whom, he cheered. “More people are in love than in the hospital!” Within a few days, however, David died. Rosett returned to keep Sal company as he waited for movers to arrive and empty the apartment. He played the piano and taught her a song as they waited. Miss the touch, the touch of your hand, my buddy it went. During World War II, gay men in the armed forces had used it as a code. The next year, Sal passed away in a hallway of St. Vincent’s Hospital.