This month’s Vanity Fair includes an article describing hook-up culture in terms of the new sortware programs. The idea is a pic, thirty words or less of self-description, and an address. Maybe it starts out a date, maybe it starts frankly with a question about whether things normally considered perversions are okay with you. It sounds like prostitution, but without any money.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating. “Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse” by Nancy Jo Sales. According to their own computer records, some of these men have slept with a hundred women a year.
What echoed in my head all the way through the article was San Francisco in the first wild gay freedom days after penicillin and before HIV. Someone asked, “How much sex would men have if they could?” The answer was “more than you can imagine.”
Close contact (I’m not saying “intimate”) is related to disease because the best vector for human diseases is another human. That’s sort of like the best food for humans, the one that includes all the basic elements, is other humans. But cannibals end up eating the other person’s diseases as well as their vitamins. So the brain disease called Kuru was not cured but was avoided when people stopped eating human brains.
Scientists are working hard to find ways to eliminate HIV virus from the human body. They can do it with monkeys’ parallel SIV virus. Well, some of the time. They’ve got a number of strategies going, some of them as ingenious as a chess game. But monkey behavior, when the monkeys are in cages, is pretty easy to predict and control.
The one element of every disease that can never be brought under control is the behavior of human beings. The people who are into serial shagging are adult, well-educated, gainfully employed, attractive, etc. etc. and they are destroying their ability to form relationships long enough and reliable enough to raise children. They know that. But they do it anyway.
I’m guessing that most places are not as dominated by glamour and status as Manhattan and it’s Manhattan or similar urban centers that seem to be “into” these hook-up games. I mean, there’s a certain amount of bed-hopping that goes on everywhere, but then the chief of Great Falls police says that drugs reach into every community in the state. He says that today he sees the arrests of the children of the people he arrested when he first started out. But it’s quiet and behind the scenes. The game of hooking-up isn’t so much fun if no one is watching.
Both of these are related to economics. In a money-based society where marriage or extra bucks for a really good car or house can make the difference between success and just-getting-along, sex is not just Tinder, but also illegal or legal tender. The question is, like the state of the environment, is it sustainable?
In a society as malleable by media as ours is, we come up to these sudden culture pivots every now and then. This one is much defined by the conviction of movie writers that a man/woman relationship is the center of the universe. They also believe that sex and love are the same.
The problem is that social scientists in the real world, as well as scientists working at experiment benches (who may like their work because they’re antisocial) are finding that sex, like most things, is a continuum. I was explaining to the Trash Roll-Off Lady who is generally “hip” but hadn’t yet gotten past the idea that male “homosexuality” is real and inborn and that there are only two options, like a questionnaire: M or F. Instead, research suggests that the desire dial evidently is set early in gestation of the fetus -- anywhere from male, to a mix, to female, to children all the way down to null. None. But that’s just a potential. Add environment, personality, circumstances, etc. Add the molecular influences on sex as one goes along: self-generated, purchased, by-products in food, recreational drugs, infections, gut bacteria.
Just now I read an article from Aeon.com about how cells form a film. It was about how adjacent cells attach to each other. In my simplistic version, there are potential sites for attachment spaced out along the surface of the cell. Inside the cell there are filament structures, sort of bones or frames. If the tip of one of these filaments contacts a point of attachment, then a connection is formed and the sheet of cells widens. It seems to me that’s a nice metaphor, because it relates the internal world of the entity to the many potentials for connection. But it’s still basically random.
What if a person ideally suited for a lifelong attachment full of joy and fulfillment is standing next to you at the bar in the illustration for this story, but you’re so busy hooking up on your iPhone that you never notice her or him. (Do these services include both sexes -- um, I mean the array of possible desire modes and genital configurations?)
Another new concept is that of the person as a process, a constantly renewing and developing entity, shaping according to the forces it meets, even defying or departing from the double helix, through the epigenome. What if this person is the love of your life, not because of decades shaping and being shaped by you, but because they happen in a random world to turn out just like you. But then along comes a major plot twist and neither of you is the same anymore. I guess you can’t blame a computer for that.
So where is the line between guessing compatibility by a flash on the tiny screen of a smart phone, and enough actual time together to discover whether you can make a real connection? I think it’s a moving boundary and it all depends and nothing is forever.
But the potential for real damage in this half-roulette, half cyber-game, sort of approach is pretty high. Naturally for the men and maybe even some of the women, that might be part of its attraction, flirting morbidly with the idea that this might be Jack the Ripper. Or that this might be someone who will give you HIV.
No comments:
Post a Comment