In December 2017 a short story published in The New Yorker titled "Cat Person" caused a stir as it depicted the awkward, ugly realities of modern dating; it caught more notice, perhaps, because of the attention lavished on it by people (largely young women) who claimed it was a page ripped directly from their own lives.
My interaction with the hubbub was mainly through Instagram, as my cousin tagged me in The New Yorker's post and I read the thousands of too-similar comments exclaiming some version of "this is soooo true!!!" My cousin tagged me because it resonated strongly for her, and she knew that it would for me as well. I proceeded to read it, and it did.
"Cat Person" details one college student's misadventures in trying to get to know a patron of her movie theater where she sold him snacks. Because he was mildly more talkative than most boys her age, they managed to swap numbers and then for a few weeks engaged in dopamine-triggering text exchanges full of witty banter. But when it came time to be fully human - to go on a date, to fool around - everything changed. The guy who was so confident and funny via smartphone screen turned out to be just another socially-challenged disappointment who'd learned all he knew about sex from porn, and who claimed to have a bunch of cats she never actually saw.
In a weird trick of timing, several weeks after the fervor over "Cat Person," an article was published in Babe magazine detailing a young woman's abysmal date with comedian Aziz Ansari. There was even less to their connection than the ill-fated duo of the short story, as she and Ansari hardly knew each other, and the "date" quickly devolved into an almost shockingly comical imitation of shockingly bad porn. The hubbub surrounding this article, which was printed less than a week after Ansari won a Golden Globe for acting, involved a wide range of social factors: the #metoo movement, feminism in general, the racial implications that it was a hit piece (considering his incredibly recent accomplishment), the state of sexuality among Millennials, the increasingly embedded effects of a porn-saturated society.
Both of these events, and many, many more before them, have forced us to begin trying to figure out how sex, love, and companionship have become so very difficult and distant in a time when we should be reaping the multiple rewards of a sexual revolution now fifty years in our past. This is simply my perspective.
***
The most striking comparison, to me, between the fictional and non-fictional really bad dates related in this post are the way the traditional ideas of foreplay and intercourse are almost completely absent. I've already mentioned pornography several times so I'm just going to dive right in: I believe the proliferation and ultimately saturation of porn in our society is the culprit, and I will explain.
Nothing stays new. The more you engage in an activity, the higher the likelihood that, if the manner of engagement remains the same, it will fail to hold your interest or excitement over time. One way to combat this is to change and/or broaden the nature of the engagement. This is true of sexual activity. Many factors contribute to sex and sex-related activities losing their impact after enough of the same, which prompts us subconsciously to plot to somehow get fresher water from the exact same well. This isn't devilry or immorality; it's simply the nature of reality, and it impacts anything we do with enough frequency, from jogging to web design to churchgoing to social media interaction.
Readily available porn in capitalist print media is still relatively recent, and it was largely a societal taboo until even more recently. However, with slackening moral codes and the advent of the internet, porn became commonplace and available at ever-younger ages. I believe that for the average regular consumer of porn, it isn't long until that saucy glimpse of tits, ass and dick are nothing special.
And so as regular porn consumers demand increasing variety from the same piece of cloth, porn suppliers begin to produce the variety. By now you've surely heard the phrase if you can think of it, there's a porn for it, and by now, it is almost certainly true, and not just regarding fetishes and positions and locations and trends. From humiliation to criminality to torture to performances of death, all of humankind's worst instincts have come to the fore on an explicitly sexual stage and for what? To satisfy the cravings of consumers who can longer reach orgasm just by watching a kitten get stepped on in heels. (Yes, it's that bad)
What I believe this has resulted in is the deconstruction of the sex act. From the mystical concept of spiritual union we have fallen to the depths of not knowing how to connect with someone beyond robotic rituals of head, anal, and maybe choking just in case. And I believe we were guided to this point in our history by the proliferation of a medium in which no regular consumption can find final satisfaction.
In "Cat Person," the guy's idea of foreplay is tuning his laptop to a porn website. During their excuse for sex the protagonist is flipped over several times in her date's blind search for release within an act so hollow he struggles to keep his erection. This isn't the story of an old married couple trying to spice up their love life - it's two Millennials who are, convention tells us, in the prime of their sexuality, unchided by modern ethics and free to express themselves however they please. And it's this bad.
Not to let the protagonist off the hook - at more than ten years younger than her date, she is even more a product of the times, more unprepared by anything life has given her so far to accept intimacy and demand self-respect. Why does she insist on straddling him in the car and forcing a make-out session? Is that what people "do" nowadays? Is that the advice being handed down? Just plunge into the physical aspect and pray to whatever god is out there that later on a hot shower will wash off the shame?
Regarding Ansari's deeply regrettable date, his ministrations are even more fundamentally hollow, more compartmentalized in an attempt to somehow locate exactly the move or touch that will arouse him, and the strain of doing this with someone he absolutely does not know - and who, again, has not been taught to demand more for herself - is perhaps the most shocking thing. There is no greater indicator of the death of intimacy than the ability to completely expose oneself physically and receive no pleasurable feedback, only an awful mix of discomfort, shame, and role-playing.
What hits hardest is the fact that one no longer need be a regular consumer of pornography - a consumer at all, even - to live in a world such as this. This is now the moment we are all traveling through together; this is the dating world we share. Without a modeling of sex that unites deconstructed parts into a single body and then unites two bodies in a singular aim, we have nothing left but that desperate blind search for release in ever-more narrow acts of pseudo-sex, discrete units of pleasure-seeking that can be combined, taken apart, recombined - do I feel something yet? - all the while no one ever whispers that it doesn't have to be this way.
***
There are myriad ways to continue from here, but what fascinates me most is our rapidly changing definition of love, or rather, the increasing exposure of the true nature of what we call love.
One of the great artistic and intellectual achievements of this decade, in my opinion, is the near-perfect movie Her, in which the protagonist falls in love with a sentient voice. This has its immediate modern parallels in "catfishing," Twitter crushes, and the proliferation of texts over voice calls.
When someone is catfished, they fall in love with someone they have never met, and in many instances whose voice they have never heard, due to developing a relationship with a person who is purposefully hiding their true identity using fake photos and text messaging. A Twitter crush and its social media variants have essentially the same foundation: becoming interested in someone because of the cleverness, humor, and/or insightfulness of their tweets and eventually private communication via direct message.
What this exposes is the failure of traditional ideas of romance to hold true as society evolves away from its original constructs. We were able to believe for a long time that true love followed a single path, and when our institutions upheld this notion, we mistook this for not just truth but enduring, absolute truth. The most obvious part of this narrative was that you had to know someone in person, in the flesh, in order to fall in love.
The 2010s have destroyed that, whether or not the majority of people are paying attention (which is how beliefs become institutionalized in the first place). You can fall in love just skyping someone, seeing their face and hearing their voice but never touching. You can fall in love just speaking with someone on the phone, hearing their voice but never seeing them or touching. You can fall in love just exchanging words on a screen with someone, never seeing them, hearing their voice, or touching. Please understand what this means: you can fall in love with words on a screen. And people do. Every day. So you might then say to yourself, "Well, that's not love."
Who defines love? The ruling class? The mentally healthy? The gainfully employed? The intellectuals? The poets? Or is it a societal consensus, whether or not based in reality or reason? I believe it's the latter, in which case, we have expanded the definition of love to include falling in love with words on a screen. (For the sake of brevity in the face of not having a word for this phenomenon yet, I will henceforth refer to it as "textlove," though it encompasses phone calls as well)
Science generally backs this up, since we've long concerned ourselves with what happens in the brain when someone is infatuated or in love. What perhaps the studies didn't expect was that the various chemicals involved in becoming attached to, and emotionally dependent on, another person do not require contact or communication in the physical sphere. Our brain will release dopamine at the first sign of a crush reciprocating whether or not it's via googly eyes in the school library. Even more disconcerting as we crawl away from the age of romance is that our brain can continue the chemical dance on just the idea of a person - with just their words.
There are components of textlove that increase the success rate of nontraditional dating, the most important being that we can be someone via text and/or phone call that only reflects our best traits and greatest strengths. Just think of what happens after you receive an encouraging or flirty text - you smile and think of the perfect way to reply. This is not possible in live, face-to-face communication; we have to be our imperfect selves and hope that that is enough. This dose of reality, of vulnerability and of honesty, gets completely expunged while we whitewash ourselves in front of a small screen in the hopes of feeding our dopamine addiction forever. Remember the protagonist's disappointment in "Cat Person" once forced to interact with her crush in real life - he had been so witty, so amazing over text! What happened? Where did he go?
The implications of all of this are monumental, and are coming to fruition faster than we can conceive of them (like men dating anime characters). I'm grateful for the success of Black Mirror because it so often relies on the deconstruction of the physical world we take for granted, and this in turn offers up new pathways to understanding how humans really operate and what concepts like "love" really mean. Now, I don't mean that we shouldn't pursue love with a real, live person, or that it is in someway wrong or misleading or doomed, only that what we believed was incomplete and that it is only one way of engaging in the pursuit of chemical release.
It also kind of explodes the assumption that evolutionary ideas of mating still apply. We assumed that the human animal prioritized continuing the species, but now you can go through the whole dance in a sort of virtual reality and never procreate. To me, this points to social rather than physical evolution and the net result of attaining consciousness. As mere animals we behaved on instinct inside of a natural paradigm that was unalterable. With the dawn of consciousness came the ability to choose, to hold back instinctive emotions and drives in search of certainty, and perhaps it was inevitable that one day we would begin to choose the sterile, predictable, safe love of words and ideas.
We accidentally unveiled the unsexy, unromantic truth of why we bond in the first place - a trick of wiring, of unnervingly effective stimulants in the lizard brain that may even one day become obsolete.
"Ugh!" you're likely thinking. "So bleak! So nihilistic! #NotMyWorld!" I know. Because what we want is to believe that love is transcendent, a thing in and of itself, existing despite us as a perfect Form that we can only hope to deliriously imitate. We want to believe there is something special about the way we are drawn to another person, that there is fate behind it, or at least really comforting evolutionary science. We want to believe that we ourselves are just as loveable with all of our flaws. We want to believe love is inevitable, and therefore contains the meaning we seek so desperately in an otherwise vast and cold universe.
We are wrong.
***
About five years ago I began working on a sci-fi short story I titled "An Approximation of a Heart." (Never was good with titles) In it, a volunteer in a science experiment falls in love with another volunteer via chat while they both spend their days taking increasingly difficult intellectual tests. Eventually she finds out she has been chatting with a computer the entire time, and that the test was to see if the computer could make a believable connection, which devastates her. Then, of course, the great twist is that she herself is a robot, and the experiment is really in making two AIs, believing themselves to be human, fall in love. Spoiler alert, I never actually wrote the story, so I'm gifting you with its general premise here.
I often deal with complicated emotional states by creating narratives around them so that what is mysterious and chaotic to me becomes explicable via fictional characters. "An Approximation of a Heart" was my way of dealing with having fallen down the rabbit hole, and it set me on the road to peeling back the layers of what we so casually call love. In doing so, I discovered the end of Love and the future of Connection. (I will go further into that when I review the Black Mirror episode "Striking Vipers") I believe we will come to understand that the endgame in our minds is feeling good, no matter how that is achieved, and perhaps the only way to return to rugged, physical intimacy is to unplug.
The death of intimacy coincides with the rise of textlove because they ultimately spring from the same place. As society and technology continue to evolve, so will our ability to choose our reality for ourselves with the brain matter we've been given. Watching fake sex is easier than being vulnerable, when given the choice. Loving an idea of a person is easier than loving the real beautiful mess, when given the choice. This may not be the future anyone predicted or wanted, but it is the organic result of all the choices made since consciousness took hold. As such, we have no idea what the next future holds. The only thing we can do is be brave enough to interpret it.
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