Regards, Ivan
Posted on 01/11/2003 4:18:26 PM PST by MadIvan
Internet dating has prompted a return to Seventies-style free love. But this time it’s got no soul, writes Naomi Wolf
Casual sex is back. One more relic of the early 1970s is apparently returning to the scene: hipster trousers and peace movements have been joined by a resurgence of the “zipless f---”, as Erica Jong christened it. If you hadn’t noticed this, don’t feel too bad. It could have to do with where you live. According to New York magazine, arbiter of all things cutting edge in Manhattan, the new fleshpots are teeming in certain urban centres in America.
At first glance this seems a ludicrous claim: this is the country that puts “The New Virginity” on Time magazine’s cover; a country whose president proclaims from the bully pulpit the benefits of “abstinence education” — even though Texas, his home state, saw teen pregnancy rates rise to the second highest in the nation under his abstinence-education-pushing governorship. This is a country that thinks it newsworthy that Britney Spears is or is not a virgin.
But when it comes to sexuality, hypocrisy has long been America’s middle name. Its attitude towards sex is puritanical and prurient at the same time. Despite the virgin-friendly rhetoric of the heartland’s pop culture and its White House, New York magazine is indeed onto something: in the decadent cities and, I would add, in certain trendy college towns, new technologies and attitudes — among teens and twentysomethings, primarily — are indeed creating a subculture in which random sex is once again having its day. The feel, however, is completely different from the innocent abandon of the sexual revolution the first time around.
Technology has opened the door, starting with the internet.
In New York, among reasonable, personable people, internet dating is not only acceptable now, it is often desirable. Close women friends of mine have found casual dates and lovers — interestingly, not husbands — on the net. We have spent evenings of hilarity ridiculing these self-advertisers’ flights of personal idealisation (“people call me rugged”) and faux-romanticism (how many blokes really like taking “long hand-in-hand walks on a beach” that often?). But they sort through what is essentially an erotic catalogue, select the best on offer and go for it. To me, who came of age before this was possible, the method appears to be a potential step-by-step way of arranging dinner with an axe murderer or contracting the pox. But I am married and, thus, a dinosaur. My fears — shaped by having dated in the Aids-aware 1980s — are no longer dominant in the city among younger, single people.
Technology in the form of medical advances, too, has helped clear the way for the new sexual revolution. The past 10 years here in the city have seen prominent men with Aids — and with access to protease inhibitors — live, thrive and look great. The Grim Reaper imagery behind all dating in the 1980s and 1990s has faded. Now young people on the prowl for Eros see the HIV-positive basketball star Magic Johnson looking hale on the sides of buses, scenes of men with HIV partying in hot little tank tops on Fire Island, young commentators with HIV looking fetching on Sunday morning political talk shows and older commentators with HIV moving into their third decade of Aids activism, their strength apparently undiminished. The visible wasting and deaths have moved down the social scale (to the poor black neighbourhoods) and overseas. Death doesn’t come — visibly — to “our” flirtatious parties any more; “our” HIV infections seem to let us live for ever.
Finally, technology has moved forward at last in the realm of contraception, which used to be so messy, ugly and low-tech you wouldn’t want to deal with it unless you were with someone you liked and trusted. Now contraception has been eroticised: “the patch” is a sexy little tattoo-like thingy you place on your hip or backside and voilà — no more fertility. Even the evil old intrauterine device has undergone a makeover — Mirena is the new name, and the marketing highlights the spontaneity it provides.
There are stores all over Greenwich Village, where I live, with names such as Condomania devoted only to the wild and tasty varieties of condoms. The access and the safeguards to casual sex, in short, have been buffed and revamped and the fear has receded.
The internet has created for many women in the city what a gay male friend of mine has called “inventory” — a back-up supply of not necessarily ideal but plausible erotic possibilities. And women are going for it.
If you have read Norman Rush’s brilliant book Mating, you will be familiar with his suggestive theory of “assortative mating” — ie that you seek out and most likely end up with someone roughly as physically attractive as you are. The internet has radically democratised the sexual access that used to be restricted to the wealthy-and-plain or the beautiful. In short, before the internet, if you were an unattractive man or woman without great wealth, you were restricted in terms of sexual access to the people you knew who were willing for whatever reason to sleep with you. Now the net has expanded the pool of people who are not wealthy and only moderately attractive — or even unattractive — that you can choose from.
You don’t need to risk or give rejection by inching too far above or below your “assortative mating” range. You don’t have to bump into someone in your attractiveness range in a bar in order to get laid; like looking up a car you can afford, you can look your sexual peers up online. This expands the sexual options for ordinary lustful mortals of both genders.
Several studies — one financed by the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing think tank — establish that “drunken hook-ups” are the regular interaction of choice on certain American college campuses. They are right wing, but they are right.
At a big university recently I talked with the undergraduates about the deadening effect of pornography on sex. It became clear that after a decade of having access to the internet they were intimately familiar with porn, but intimacy — and the hearts of the opposite sex — were more of an elusive mystery than ever.
A heated conversation ensued in which young men and women wanted to talk about soulless sex. One young man described how he and everyone he knows has sex right away with the person that in our day they might have dated — “to get the awkwardness out. I mean, it is going to happen anyway”.
“But,” I asked, dumbfounded, “isn’t the ‘awkwardness’ as you get to know each other a huge part of the fun? I mean, doesn’t that do away with the thrill of, like, progressive unveiling . . . the sexual tension? The mystery.”
He and all the young folk around him, boys and girls, looked at me as if I were speaking a dead language. “Mystery?” he gave me a blank look. “Sex has no mystery.” It was not a bold, provocative statement — merely an assertion of something everyone knew.
“We are so tightly scheduled,” one young woman explained. “Why get to know someone first? It is a waste of time. If you hook- up you can just get your needs met and get on your way.”
For these kids, sex is like going to the gym; an outlet, a body function, “a way you can assure yourself you’re attractive”, as one young miss said, a way to stay in shape.
In the language of the new sexual revolution, the word “release” comes up a lot. A friend my age was describing the twentysomethings in her poetry workshop — luscious young women in tight jeans and plunging necklines — and how many poems they wrote in the class. Their writings were not critical, but direct — about “booty calls”.
“What’s that? What is a ‘booty call’?” shouted a slightly deaf 80-year-old poet who had known WH Auden.
A booty call is, it turns out, what you do when it is late at night, you have been drinking and you have not found your “hook-up” yet. So you call around to your friends to see who will go home with you and get the job done.
There is, it seems, for all the bravado and sexual equality in the chase, less of a thrill now for these young men and women. They need more amping up, it appears, more videos and lap dances or “cake” as they call it — to get the kind of charge we used to get just from rolling around on a sunny meadow in our Grateful Dead T-shirts and our peasant blouses.
How distant from this techno-world our first sexual revolution seems, especially in its early days. Even in the pornography of the era you see the actors, albeit inadvertently, start to “make love”. That’s certainly not what the kids of today have grown up watching.
The first sexual revolution, while it had its sweaty businessmen leering, was also a humanist movement that made room for people to grow into their own souls; the gay liberation marches made a claim for love, not just for an equality of orifices; the women’s movement marched for the pill not so we could coldly, mechanically leap from bed to bed but so that we could become the people we were meant to be without being forced into the mechanics of unwanted baby-making. For a brief shining moment, the self — the freedom to be a self, a soul in a body — was still in there with the sexuality.
Is this sexually egalitarian mechanoworld liberation? Is it for this that people smuggled Tropic of Cancer into America? To replace hypocrisy and prudishness with full-access, full-frontal mechanics and clinical detachment? And when it comes to women — is this what we had a sexual revolution for? Is it a feminist victory to have young women without shame if they also have no depth to their erotic sense of self? It depends on what you thought the goals of the feminist and sexual revolution were supposed to have been. Underneath all this right-on forthrightness, I sense a kind of sadness and numbness.
New York magazine also reported on a rise in the lack of desire among young professionals in the city. I think these are related. How paradoxical. As one Yiddish proverb has it: “Be careful what you ask for — you might get it.” Maybe now that we have won, and are granted, the right to do whatever the hell we want with our bodies, we can see how that alone is not the end of freedom.
Maybe the real revolution is when you set not just the body free in the marketplace, but also the soul in the body.
Regards, Ivan
Indeed. Which is worrying. If someone like that is appalled by the immorality she found then how appalled would us lot be?
Regards, Ivan
Ludicrous Rationalization of the Week.
Here's the original, by the way. I haven't read it, and don't intend to. New York is not a very good magazine.
Actually she's not. Immoral perhaps - she's a leftist, after all. And damn cute...
They're into "meaning" even if it revolves around their zippers, you know. Those nitwits are deep, man.
Instead of sexual Nirvana, we got teen pregnancy, epidemic rates of VD, and divorce levels that dissolved the traditional bonds of family.
Then AIDS set in and a few harsh realities began to be whispered in the chic set. Maybe random casual sex was a biological Russian roulette. Maybe sex was better with something more than just biology behind it. Maybe a knobber in the cloakroom wasn't a good way to say "hello."
Now we're being liberated right back into hell again. Thank goodness for "progress!"
"If you are ruled by mind, you are a king; if by body, a slave." -- Cato.
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