by Moira Weigel
Other tales of digital love were darker. There were accounts of online affairs splitting up previously happy marriages. Even more prominent were horror stories about online predators. In many ways fears that these inspired resembled the “white slave” panic that had struck around the dawn of dating, when many do-gooders warned young women that to accept a date was to put yourself in grave danger.
In the late 1990s, newspapers and magazines were filled with stories about online predators preying on white suburban children, in particular. Often, the heroes of these stories were online vigilantes who took it upon themselves to police chat rooms. In the early 2000s, the news show Dateline NBC created a whole reality series dedicated to this premise. Collaborating with a watchdog group called Perverted Justice, the staff of To Catch a Predator would impersonate underage people online. They approached users saying that they were thirteen or fourteen. After a few sessions of hot and heavy typing, the decoy kid would suggest meeting in real life. If the adult accepted, he would find himself confronted live on camera, and would be arrested by the police.
While a few cases of abduction and abuse surely did happen, they were hardly common. Early studies of chat rooms showed that some users misled the people they spoke to online, usually about their physical appearance or marital status. And of course cybersexters put on naughty personae like This Is A Naked Lady. But on average, people were in fact far more honest with strangers than they were in real life. It was this accelerated intimacy that was the problem. It was addictive.
Online dating addicts were often the butt of jokes, especially if they were still in high school. They made easy targets. But in retrospect, what was risible about cybersex was not that it was perverted. It was that it was so unproductive. It rarely created real-world couples; most participants never met IRL (“in real life”). And it squandered enormous amounts of potentially valuable attention.
The pioneers who commercialized the Internet rightly saw this wastefulness as an opportunity. When America Online and Prodigy introduced their services in the early 1990s, they offered a slew of “lifestyle” chat rooms aimed at singles, because they recognized that such conversations would be a huge draw. They quickly found ways to derive enormous profits from platforms where people could exchange erotic and romantic attention. Tech companies still do.
Let’s be honest. It’s not like we don’t still spend hours using our computers and other devices to stalk our love interests. “He tweeted twice today and he still hasn’t emailed me back,” a friend seethed to me recently. She stopped and shook her head at her own absurdity. “I know that and I don’t even follow him on Twitter!” It’s not like it’s any less pathetic to check the account of someone you’ve met once than it was to log on to a chat room hoping that the handle you cybersexted with last week might turn up. It’s no less lonely. It’s just less stigmatized, because now the economy runs on these kinds of feelings.
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The same factors that let retailers like Amazon cater to the “long tail” economy enabled dating subcultures to thrive. In the 1950s, if you were one of the statistically small group of people who long for a partner to smear food on them during orgasm, you would likely have to forgo that fantasy. However, the Internet made it easy to find others who shared your fetish, or at least propose it to others at lower risk. The safe sex movement gave daters the vocabulary to examine and define their desires. The World Wide Web helped make these desires central to dating identity.
If people had long thought of dating as a form of shopping, during the 1990s they became more educated consumers. They were more likely to know what kind of sex they were in the market for and to believe that having their desires met was an important part of feeling fulfilled. Instead of just happening upon a sexual position in the throes of passion, lovers were more apt to sample from a series of predefined positions they had seen described or depicted. And they were likely to seek relationships with others who had similar interests. As a growing number of niche media channels, on cable television and online, displayed different lifestyles, a growing number of “sex educators” blurred the boundaries between advocacy and advertising.
Every dating lifestyle had its own expert. As early as 1987, the feminist Betty Dodson sang the praises of female masturbation in her book Sex for One. Like other feisty feminist “sex educators” of the era, Dodson traveled around the country teaching women to give themselves pleasure—and to demand the same from their partners. The long tail economy ensured that anyone interested could buy the tools that Dodson and others demonstrated. In 1993, the sex educators Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning founded the sex toy boutique Toys in Babeland in Seattle. Their motivation was noble: There were few sex shops aimed at women, and the founders wanted to offer the curious information and encouragement. In 1995, Toys in Babeland started a mail-order business with a small print catalog; the website, www.babeland.com, followed soon after. The steady business it did generated the revenues that allowed them to open outposts in Los Angeles and New York.
The Internet made it possible to corner a national niche market, as long as you understood people’s tastes specifically enough. Whatever your Thing might be, you no longer had to yearn for it alone. In 1991, a good friend of a gay video store clerk named Dan Savage told him that he was leaving Michigan, where they both lived, to move to Seattle and start a weekly newspaper. Savage jokingly pitched the friend an advice column and was invited to go with him. The column that he wrote for The Stranger was irreverent and hilarious. It got national syndication, and soon turned Savage into a celebrity. He went on to write books upon books of relationship advice, and, as of 2006, to host a podcast that still has thousands of followers.
Savage Love brings the specificity of the checklist to the advice column genre, promising to help readers navigate a seemingly infinite array of sexual preferences. When readers inquired after sex acts that did not have names yet, Savage invented them. He coined terms like “pegging” to fill in the gaps in an already-intricate taxonomy that readers wrote in about. (Pegging referred to female-on-male strap-on anal sex.) With new words at their disposal, Savage’s readers could describe the acts they hoped for or hated in more and more detail.
Knowing and expressing one’s sexual tastes, Savage told his audience, was a key part of dating. Better to confess a penchant for pegging to a new lover early on than risk suffering through decades of love unpegged. Better to know what kind of relationship a new crush is seeking before discovering a painful mismatch. If you wanted to be happy, you had to learn to understand your desires and express them clearly. If you did, you could renegotiate the terms of conventional romantic relationships.
Even marriage.
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Savage has long recommended a model he calls “monogamish” to long-term couples, whether they are gay or straight. It means what it sounds like. The partners agree in advance that each is allowed to sleep with other people, occasionally, as long as they do not allow it to threaten the primary relationship. Savage insists that most long-term relationships are monogamish already; couples are simply unwilling to admit it. Other advice experts took things further. The 1990s saw a surge of interest in “polyamory”—maintaining multiple open and fluid relationships.
The Ethical Slut came out in 1997. It remains one of the most widely read how-to guides for “the lifestyle.” The authors, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, argue that the world is suffused with enough sexual energy to satisfy everyone. “Many traditional attitudes about sexuality are based on the unspoken belief that there isn’t enough of something,” The Ethical Slut says. “We want everyone to get everything they want.” The chapter “Varieties of Sluthood” insisted that the possible configurations are endless. But the different arrangements that the book describes do share certain basic traits. They are customized and flexible. “Relationship structures,” the authors say, “should be designed to fit the people in them, rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship.�
�� Individuals freely link up to create new structures. “One woman of our acquaintance has a lifetime lifestyle of having two primary partners, one of each gender, with her other partners and her primaries’ other partners forming a huge network.”
“Relationships that add, and inevitably also subtract, members over time tend to form very complex structures with new configurations of family roles that they generally invent by trial and error.” Rather than networks, Easton and Hardy say, they like to call these kinds of self-defining communities “constellations.” But the utopia of linked communities based on abundant sexual energy, branching out unstoppably and constantly reorganizing themselves, sounds a lot like the Internet. The Web was not just a guide for the perplexed. It also was a model for dating in a global economy whose boundaries were growing increasingly fluid.
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Needless to say, many Americans were horrified. Around the turn of the millennium, conservatives came back at the peggers and polyamorists with purity balls and chastity pledges. Conservative parents started hosting alternative proms on public school prom nights, which young women attended with their fathers; at these events, fathers publicly made vows that they would defend the virginity of their daughters. At colleges across the country, students in the True Love Waits movement began wearing “purity rings” that signaled their commitments to remaining chaste until marriage.
The media called these standoffs the “culture wars.” But culture wars was a misnomer. In the age of the network and the protocol, there was no single American culture left standing to defend. As panic about AIDS subsided from the mainstream, safe sex and the new culture of explicitness remained.
The frankness that AIDS activists had inspired, and the sense of infinite possibility that the Internet evoked, have continued to shape dating in the new millennium. You can make as many chastity pledges as you wish, and date only people who also have, but this will be just one consumer choice among many others. In the 1990s, the purist and the punk were just two kinks in the long tail of a market that was growing ever more segmented—and staying open 24/7.
CHAPTER 9. PLANS
Time is money. As schoolchildren, we learned that Benjamin Franklin said this. He did, in Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One—a self-help manual that he published in 1748, to teach colonial Americans how they, too, could get rich. But the Founding Father was not the first to recognize that time was money. In fact, when the phrase made its debut in print, it was on the lips of a nameless housewife.
In 1739, a Pennsylvania periodical called The Free-Thinker recounted the sad story of “a notable Woman, who was thoroughly sensible of the intrinsick Value of Time. Her Husband was a Shoe-maker, and an excellent Crafts-man,” the author recalled, “but never minded how the Minutes passed. In vain did his Wife inculcate to him, That Time is Money: He had too much Wit to apprehend her; and he cursed the Parish-Clock, every Night; which at last brought him to his Ruin.”
This particular sensible wife may lie forgotten on the wayside of history. But we have all heard stories like hers. To this day, the male ne’er-do-well, who uses wit to avoid recognizing that it is high time he gets his life together, appears as the hero of countless romantic comedies. A regular patron at the bars in many cities, he remains as lovable as he is indecisive. It is his female partner who will become the tragic victim, if she lets him get away with it. When it comes to romance, many of us still seem to believe that planning is a woman’s work.
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Love takes work, the therapists and self-help gurus tell us. It also takes time, and given that time is money, many daters seem understandably reluctant to gamble too much of it on any one romantic prospect.
Lovers today are less likely to be star-crossed than overscheduled. How often have friends complained that they have “no time to date” or “to invest in a relationship”? How many have brushed one another off with the excuse that it was “not a good time” or they needed “time to think” or “to be alone for a while”?
Different people have proposed different ways of dealing with the problem of being too busy to find partners. Some have tried to turn the search into a game. In the late 1990s, an Orthodox rabbi named Yaacov Deyo became concerned that single members of his congregation in Los Angeles were struggling to meet other young Jewish professionals. In 1998, he invited a group of Hollywood friends to his house to brainstorm solutions. What they came up with, they called “speed dating.”
A few weeks later, Deyo invited all the Jewish singles he could round up to come to a Peet’s Coffee in Beverly Hills and brought a hand-cranked noisemaker—the gragger that Jews use during Purim celebrations. He paired the men and women off and instructed them to chat for ten minutes each; after ten minutes he would whirl the gragger. These afternoon meet-ups at Peet’s became so popular that Deyo began using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the feedback the daters provided about one another and their interactions. Within a year, copycat events were taking place all over the country. But some high-powered professionals say they do not have time for games. They do not have time even to manage their online dating accounts.
They can turn to Virtual Dating Assistants. The founder, Scott Valdez, started the company in 2012 after trying to hire an online dating assistant over Craigslist. In 2015, for $147 per date, or $1,200 per month, VDA consultants would help a client select prospects and plan the details of a date down to what outfit he should wear.
“Online dating’s a part time job,” a banner across their website trumpets. “Let our experts do it for you!”
The question remains: What’s the dater who doesn’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spare every month supposed to do?
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Pragmatists preach that love is all timing. You don’t get married when you find the right one; you marry the one you find at the right time. They say this as if it should be comforting to imagine that our hearts follow a secret schedule—that the right feelings will arrive at their appointed hour, to carry us away with whomever we happen to be standing next to on the platform. But what if the person we find ourselves dating at, say, twenty-eight, is not the “right” person? What if we fall in love long before the train is due to leave, or start looking only after it has departed? What if our lives are not on this track at all?
Romantics, on the other hand, insist that there is no use fretting about how or when we will find love. It will happen when you least expect it! It follows from this worldview that when you do find your special someone, you will “make time.” A person in love will do anything and everything to be with his or her beloved. It is equally clarifying and distressing to believe the reverse: If your lover is not doing anything and everything to be with you, it must not be true love.
In 2004, Greg Behrendt, the author of the bestselling self-help book He’s Just Not That Into You, called BS on men who professed to be too “busy” to be devoted boyfriends. “‘Busy’ is another word for ‘asshole,’” he wrote. “‘Asshole’ is another word for the guy you’re dating.” In case the reader has missed the point, he later reiterates this cardinal “relationships rule” in all caps: “THE WORD ‘BUSY’ IS A LOAD OF CRAP AND IS MOST OFTEN USED BY ASSHOLES … Men are never too busy to get what they want.”
Behrendt gained his expert credentials by serving as the sole straight male script consultant on Sex and the City. Given the fixation of that show on dating—and on female friendships that consist mostly of talking about dating—it makes sense that Behrendt assumes a straight woman can always find time to obsess about the men she is seeing. In the end, however, the romantics and the pragmatists are basically offering the same advice. The one tells you to bide your time until the lightning bolt strikes. The other suggests waiting until a moment that seems opportune. Either way, the point is, Stop worrying. Which is another way of saying: Get back to work!
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As advice, it is not terrible, because the thing is, many daters are not just being “assholes.” They real
ly are busy. The ways that people spend their days and make their livings have always shaped how they experience time. In the decades since the era that the self-help experts have in mind when they refer to “traditional” dating, the rhythms of our lives have changed dramatically.
The custom of dating developed under a particular order. It came from an era when life was supposed to divide cleanly into work and leisure. Even the word “date” comes from the idea that there is a point in time when you will meet up with a love interest. So, too, does “going out” assume that there is a world of entertainment, separate from the world of home and work, for you to go out into.
Perhaps this is why today “dating” often sounds like a slightly sleazy euphemism. When a new boyfriend and I run into an ex of his, his vague use of the verb makes me feel hysterical.
“He said they dated for two weeks,” I whine to a friend afterward. “And then he thought about it for a minute and was, like—actually, less! What does that even mean?”
“It means they had sex, like, three times,” my friend shushes me. “Maybe four. Relax!”
A line like I’ll pick you up at six bespoke a worldview. Dating was a departure from work. A kind of scheduled spontaneity, a date was recreation in its most literal sense: a kind of fun that was supposed to reproduce the workforce.
The patterns of “respectable” middle-class dating also implied a trajectory in time. As dating became the main form of courtship, daters implicitly promised each other that the time they spent together was an investment. It earned them closeness they could draw on in the future. A dater might date around awhile, but it was assumed that a couple would either grow more and more intimate, until its members were ready to get married and start a family, or they would break up and restart the process with someone else.