I got an email from a friend linking to a Vanity Fair article "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse.'" http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating. My friend, who is 15-20 years younger than me, ended his email by saying "I find what's described in the article below rather difficult to comprehend."
My response in full:
"This is disgusting" was my first reaction. I've only read the beginning so far and I'm shocked. It is surreal. I had heard of hook-ups, reddit parties, Ashley Madison. Never heard of Tinder and had no idea that this was going on. We're getting to be the Orgasmatron society, just step into a booth, a machine gives you a quick "O" and you're done. I never picked up a whore, never "swung," never even had many one-night stands. Never, or very seldom, had sex for sex' sake, purely. I guess I WOULD, I just haven't. As you say it is difficult to comprehend.
I'm thinking...What bothers me about this? The anonymity? It's not really anonymous. The "game"? Maybe. A game is not quite real, it's sort of palimpsest. The sex is not the point, or the only point, or the main point, something having to do with point, here, it's the game, seeing if you can do it, the "competition" as that guy says, with other guys. The Orgasmatron aspect: sex as a bodily function, like taking a crap. It's like [another friend] and that one whore, he got a blowjob and she wanted to snuggle afterwards and he pushed her away. It was a bodily function. "What? Am I going to talk to the urinal?"
My response in full:
"This is disgusting" was my first reaction. I've only read the beginning so far and I'm shocked. It is surreal. I had heard of hook-ups, reddit parties, Ashley Madison. Never heard of Tinder and had no idea that this was going on. We're getting to be the Orgasmatron society, just step into a booth, a machine gives you a quick "O" and you're done. I never picked up a whore, never "swung," never even had many one-night stands. Never, or very seldom, had sex for sex' sake, purely. I guess I WOULD, I just haven't. As you say it is difficult to comprehend.
I'm thinking...What bothers me about this? The anonymity? It's not really anonymous. The "game"? Maybe. A game is not quite real, it's sort of palimpsest. The sex is not the point, or the only point, or the main point, something having to do with point, here, it's the game, seeing if you can do it, the "competition" as that guy says, with other guys. The Orgasmatron aspect: sex as a bodily function, like taking a crap. It's like [another friend] and that one whore, he got a blowjob and she wanted to snuggle afterwards and he pushed her away. It was a bodily function. "What? Am I going to talk to the urinal?"
We are all so "wired" now--We are required to be.--and the wired, cyber world is abstracted away from reality. It gives us the illusion of reality and sometimes we fall for it: the illusion of privacy in email, the illusion of safety and security. Girls met guys who gave the appearance of being "nice" on Craigslist and ended up dead. The cyber information they received was fatally flawed. Cyber communication all but removes our instincts which we use in face-to-face interaction to sort the real from the fake and the creeps from the genuine.
We're all familiar with this annoying "captcha" tool, a variation of Alan Turing's test to distinguish a machine from a real person.
We have to prove to a machine that we're not a machine in the only language the machine understands. It's a tool of abstraction, one degree removed from reality. And that is our reality now.
