Future Sex (3 page)

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I went on my first Internet date shortly after I bought my first smart phone, in November 2011. Tinder didn’t yet exist, and in New
York my friends used OkCupid, so that’s where I signed up. I also signed up to Match, but OkCupid was the one I favored, mostly because I got such constant and overwhelming attention from men there. The square-jawed bankers who reigned over Match, with their pictures of scuba diving in Bali and skiing in Aspen, paid me so little attention it made me feel sorry for myself. The low point came when I
sent a digital wink to a man whose profile read, “I have a dimple on my chin,” and included photos of him playing rugby and standing bare-chested on a deep-sea fishing vessel holding a mahi-mahi the size of a tricycle. He didn’t respond to my wink.

I joined OkCupid with the pseudonym “viewfromspace.” In the “About” section of my profile I wrote, “I like watching nature documentaries and eating
pastries.” I answered all the questions indicating an interest in casual sex in the negative. I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on my last boyfriend and wanted to stop thinking about him. Many people on the site had this problem. People cheerily listed their favorite movies and hoped for the best, but darkness simmered beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurked
behind even the most well-adjusted profile. I read
The Red and the Black
to remind myself that sunny equanimity in the aftermath of heartbreak was not always the order of the day. On the other hand, I liked that on the dating sites people hit on each other with no ambiguity of intention. A gradation of subtlety, sure: from the basic “You’re cute,” to the off-putting “Hi there, would you like to
come over, smoke a joint and let me take nude photos of you in my living room?”

I found the algorithms put me in the same area—social class and level of education—as the people I went on dates with, but otherwise did very little to predict whom I would like. I seemed to attract, in both online and real-life dating, a statistically anomalous number of vegetarians. I am not a vegetarian.

I went
on a date with a composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on Fifty-seventh Street. We couldn’t find it, but he told me how Bartók had died there of leukemia. We talked about college, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. We both liked the novels of Thomas Pynchon. We had all this in common but I wished I were somewhere else.
As we drank beers in an Irish pub in Midtown, I could think of five or ten people with whom I would have rather spent the evening drinking beers. But the object, now, was to find a boyfriend, and none of the many people I already knew were possible boyfriends.

For our second date we went out for ramen in the East Village. I ended the night early, on the way out lamenting what a long day it had
been. He next invited me to a concert at Columbia and then to dinner at his house. I said yes but canceled at the last minute, claiming illness and adding that I thought our dating had run its course.

I had hurt his feelings. My cancellation, he wrote, had cost him a “ton of time shopping, cleaning and cooking that I didn’t really have to spare in the first place a few days before a deadline…”
He punctuated almost exclusively with Pynchonian ellipses. I apologized, then stopped responding. In the months that followed he continued to write long e-mails with updates of his life, and I continued not responding until it was as if he were lobbing his sadness into a black hole, where I absorbed it into my own sadness.

I went on a date with a furniture craftsman. We met at a coffee shop.
It was a sunny afternoon in late February, but a strange snowfall began after we arrived, the flakes sparkling in the sun. The coffee shop was belowground, and we sat at a table by a window that put us just below two chihuahuas tied to a bench on the sidewalk outside. They shivered uncontrollably despite their fitted jackets. They looked down at us through the window, chewing on their leashes. The
woodworker bought me a coffee and drank tea in a pint glass.

He showed me photos of furniture he made. He had callused hands and was tall. He was attractive but his blue eyes shifted restlessly around the room and he looked bored. We discovered we had been born in the same hospital, Allentown Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania, except that I was seven months older. In another era, the era when
marriage was dictated by religion, family, and the village, we might have had several children by now. Instead my parents had moved halfway across the country when I was three years old, he had stayed in Allentown until adulthood, and now we both lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and were thirty. He thought of himself as defiant, and loved being a craftsman only as much as he had hated working
in an office. After drinking his tea, he went to the bathroom, came back, and wordlessly put on his coat. I stood up and did the same. We walked up the stairs into the February wind. We said goodbye.

I went on a date with a man who turned out to be a hairstylist. “A nod and a bow, Ms. Space,” he had written. He arrived late to our appointment in Alphabet City, having accommodated some last-minute
clients who wanted unscheduled blow-drying for their own dates. On either side of his neck he had tattoos of crossed scimitars. I asked him what the tattoos meant. He said they meant nothing. They were mistakes. He pushed up his sleeves and revealed more mistakes. As a teenager in Dallas he had let his friends use him as a training canvas. To call the tattoos mistakes was different from regretting
them. He didn’t regret them. He said it was just that his sixteen-year-old self was giving him the finger. “You think you’ve changed,” the sixteen-year-old version of him was saying through the tattoos: “Fuck you, I’m still here.”

None of the careful self-presentation in the OkCupid profiles ever revealed what I would discover within several minutes of meeting a person: that I never seemed to
want to have sex with anybody I met online. In real life, casual sex was straightforward. I would meet someone at a party. One of us would ask the other out. Then we would have a date or two and have sex, even when we knew we weren’t in love and the relationship wouldn’t “go anywhere.” Sometimes we would skip the dating part. I told myself that my celibacy on OkCupid was because I thought of Internet
dating as a “project” I was undertaking, where I would apply a “seriousness” that was absent from my actual social life. I had an idea about “standards” that had to be met before I would consider having sex. The truth was that when I met with these men, most of whom superseded my “standards,” nothing stirred in my body. I felt that it was usually clear, to both parties, that while we could have
had sex it would have been more out of resignation and duty than real desire. If Internet dating made me feel like I was taking control of my life in some way, having sex with people I didn’t really desire would just remind me of the futility of trying to engineer a relationship into existence. Sex, when it was the result of an accumulation of energy between me and another person, really did make
me feel better, but to pretend that feeling was there when it wasn’t was more dispiriting than going home alone.

The body, I started to learn, was not a secondary entity. The mind contained very few truths that the body withheld. There was little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. The epistolary run-up to the date only rarely revealed the
truth of a man’s good humor or introversion, his anxiety or social grace. Until the bodies were introduced, seduction was only provisional. I began responding only to people with very short profiles, then began forgoing the profiles altogether, using them only to see that people on OkCupid Locals knew how to spell and didn’t have rabidly right-wing politics.

Still, I avoided any mention of sex
in my profile. I also avoided all men who led with explicitly sexual overtures. My avoidance of any overt reference to sex meant that Internet dating was like standing in a room full of people recommending restaurants to one another without describing the food. No, it was worse than that. It was a room full of hungry people who instead discussed the weather. If a person offered me a watermelon,
I would reject him for not having an umbrella. The right to avoid the subject of sex was structurally embedded in the most popular dating sites. They had been designed that way, because otherwise women would not have used them.

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The man generally held responsible for Internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen. In 1992, Kremen was a twenty-nine-year-old
computer scientist and one of the many graduates of Stanford Business School running software companies in the Bay Area. After a childhood as a pudgy Jewish misfit in Skokie, Kremen had decided upon two goals for his adult life: he wanted to get married and he wanted to earn money. In pursuit of marriage, he went on lots of dates. He soon developed a habit of calling 1-900 numbers—not the phone-sex
kind, but the kind that were listed with classified personal ads in the newspaper. As a standard practice at the time, newspapers charged readers two dollars a minute to leave a voice-mail response to a personal ad. Kremen had run up a lot of bills by making such calls. He was, in his own words, “kind of a loser.” One afternoon at work at his software company Kremen had an idea: what if he
had a database of all the single women in the world?

Kremen and four male partners formed Electric Classifieds Inc., a business premised on the idea of re-creating on the Web the classifieds section of newspapers, beginning with the personals. They found an office in a basement in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco and registered a domain name, Match.com.

“ROMANCE—LOVE—SEX—MARRIAGE
AND RELATIONSHIPS,” read the headline on an early business plan Electric Classifieds presented to potential investors. “American business has long understood that people knock the doors down for dignified and effective services that fulfill these most powerful human needs.” In deference to his investors, Kremen eventually removed “sex” from his list of needs.

Many of the basic parts of most
online dating sites were laid out in this early document. Subscribers completed a questionnaire, indicating the kind of relationship they wanted—“marriage partner, steady date, golf partner, or travel companion.” Users posted photos: “A customer could choose to show himself in various favorite activities and clothing to give the viewing customer a stronger sense of personality and physical character.”
The business plan cited a market forecast that suggested 50 percent of the adult population would be single by 2000. By 2008, 48 percent of American adults were unmarried, compared with 28 percent in 1960.

Electronic Classifieds suggested that “many people feel freer when talking electronically than they do face to face.” Kremen drew on the experience of early Internet chat rooms and bulletin
boards, which one newspaper article from the time described as “an antiseptic version of a 70s singles bar.” Online, “people who meet in crowded chat rooms often create their own private chat rooms where they engage in cybersex—the keyboard equivalent of phone sex.” But the Internet was most prevalent in sectors that had historically excluded women—the military, finance, mathematics, and engineering—and
the new World Wide Web and its online predecessors had acquired a sexist reputation. “The brave new interactive world is still a club for white male members,” lamented a 1993 manual called
The Joy of Cybersex
. “It is by no means politically correct.”

Knowing that a successful heterosexual dating site had to have roughly equal numbers of women and men subscribers, Kremen hired a team of women
marketers led by a former Stanford classmate named Fran Maier. Maier learned that women were more likely to use the site if it emphasized traditional dating rituals and presented sex as a secondary question. If the Internet chat rooms were the equivalent of online singles bars, Match, Maier said, would be like “a very nice restaurant or exclusive club.” The company forbade sexually explicit content
and photographs. They modified the questionnaire to include questions about children and religion to emphasize that while any kind of encounter could be had through Match, the site would favor the impression of being a place for people who were looking for lasting relationships. They published editorial content about courtship, as in a dating column about how to use emoticons to “e-flirt,” and offered
guidelines about safety, suggesting that women arrange their dates at public places and not give out their addresses to strangers. They banned any mention of biological clocks, which might have made the site look like a place for desperate people. They gave the interface a clean, white background and a heart-shaped logo. All of this was for women; recruiting men had never been a problem.

Match
set a template for the industry, which grew as the World Wide Web did. As the databases multiplied, they became more specific, tailored to ethnicities and religions. Then came the era of matchmaking science and algorithms, then Internet dating for free, and finally the era of the mobile phone. Each dating technology looking to attract an equal number of women and men, no matter the business strategy,
had to ensure that a woman could join the site without having to make any sexual declarations. The more an Internet dating site or application led with the traditional signifiers of masculine heterosexual desire—photographs of lingerie-clad women, open hints about casual sex—the less likely women were to sign up for it. When hackers stole user data from the website Ashley Madison (tag line:
“Life is short. Have an affair.”) they revealed that only 14 percent of user records belonged to women, half the percentage that had been advertised by the company’s founder. Of this number, thousands of profiles appeared to be female “bots” programmed to send automated messages to men.

The Internet dating business was the place where I first encountered a popular marketing concept called “the
clean, well-lighted place.” This phrase, divorced completely from its origins as the title of an Ernest Hemingway story set in a bar in Spain, came up often when businesspeople spoke about creating a “woman-friendly environment” for sexuality. Cleaning and lighting a place usually meant the removal of pornographic or sexually explicit imagery. “A clean, well-lighted place” was the motto of the pioneering
feminist sex-toy shop Good Vibrations in San Francisco, which had taken vibrators and dildos from their porn-laden packages and placed them in denuded simplicity like art objects on pedestals. At first the idea had stood for a reclamation of sexuality, an aphoristic amulet against the lingering specter of 1970s movie houses, hot tubs, singles bars, and abused porn stars on quaaludes, but
the concept applied equally well to the age of unsolicited dick pics and “Meet hot singles in your area who want to fuck you now!” In online dating, the clean, well-lighted place meant a sex-free environment in which to consider people with whom one might eventually have sex. For some women, even acknowledging that they were on OkCupid with any sort of intention, let alone a sexual one, was undesirable,
so it benefited the dating sites to be as anodyne and blandly enthusiastic as possible. Sam Yagan, one of OkCupid’s founders, told me that one of the unexpected advantages of being free was that the service allowed women to tell themselves that they were not actually looking for a date. “Like, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, I just met a boyfriend on OkCupid. I didn’t even sign up for dating!’ Okay.
You’re right.” Yagan rolled his eyes. “Literally about a third of the success e-mails we get from women have a disclaimer in them that says ‘I didn’t sign up for dating.’” And success, of course, was defined as love. According to another OkCupid founder, Christian Rudder, the numbers of heterosexual women who explicitly stated they were on the site for casual sex was disproportionately low, only
0.8 percent, compared with 6.1 percent of straight men, 6.9 percent of gay men, and 7 percent of gay women.