The Lust Frontier

Disposable Dating and The Great Isolation

Something has gone terribly wrong with relationships. Don’t you feel it? And I’m going to go further and name it: love between women and men. Intimacy. Closeness. Flirting. Banter. Risk-taking. Romance. Jokes. Dancing. Stolen glances. Drunken kisses. Even broken hearts. Don’t you miss them?

Instead what we’re left with are low investment hookups. You got dumped? No wait, that’s a thing of the past. You got ghosted. Swipe right and spin the wheel of virtual fortune again … if you waited that long. The dopamine rush of likes is an addictive drug, one you can pop while she’s in the bathroom on that first meet n’ greet. Why not? She probably is.

developing your online dating skin

In my video on Edward Snowden, where I explain tax havens, financial derivatives, and money creation through mortgages, I start out talking about pole dancing. His now-wife, who first opened his eyes to what was happening in the world, was a famous pole-dancer and I’m not sure for which of these I admire her for more.

I walk past a pole-dancing studio on my way to my aerial class and several of my fellow aerialists—all more agile than I am—have tried it. The word is that it’s really, really hard and it hurts. Tender body parts not typically exposed, like the inner thighs, are places of stress and friction. You have to literally develop your pole-dancing skin, a tougher thicker epidermis, in order to grin and bare it.

Likewise, online dating is a series of micro-abrasions, micro-rejections that are almost subperceptual but require growing a thicker emotional skin. The vast majority, 99% of the rejection, happens by omission—you are simply not liked. Let that phrase sink in a little. YOU ARE NOT LIKED. Ouch.

judge, jury, executioner

In my life, what I try to get away from is judging other people. But with online dating, that doesn’t work very well. In fact, studies show that those most successful at online dating are the most ruthlessly judgmental—they know what they want and are not confused by an impulse to be nice.

Another word for being judgmental is discriminating, and the word for a woman who isn’t discriminating is not very nice. In real life, rejection is tempered by subtleties, signals and nuances between acquaintances or with the higher stake risk of friends. With online dating, the express intent is to go from being absolute strangers to having sex within one to three encounters. More than that is leading a guy on. So your decision-making window is already closing by the second date—better be a quick judge of character!

This is so bizarre. This is so unnatural.

from torch singers to take-out

Let me tell you a sweet story about my parents’ era. Both of my parents died in their 90’s, so their heyday was after WWII. Groups of men and women would go out dancing and drinking until late late late and walk home together singing. My ex’s Croatian aunts were torch singers by night, NY nannies and garment factory workers by day. They knew Billie Holiday. They would pin their hair up and wear glamorous dresses they’d made and sing at the local ballroom, where their dance cards were full before they ever sat down. Dance cards! Singing! Imagine this world!

Now let’s go to my daughters’ era, in which I will include their friends to keep things anonymous. The rule of thumb is not to date someone you’ll run into again, like from your gym, because that could get awkward. It’s best when you can put your rejects back into the recycling bin so there’s no guilt, no jealousy, no resentment. It keeps things clean and compartmentalized. And it’s good to have your own friend group when you find yourself put into that recycling bin. Online success stories do happen, but what choice is there?

Pre-Covid, college students were surrounded by a society of their exact peers every year of their lives up to 22. No one else really mattered. Then, unless they worked in a restaurant with their debt-won degree, they were thrust into an adult world overnight. Not that this was healthy but now both school and work may be online. There’s no alternative way for a maybe to come into focus, to find someone who makes you laugh and makes you think.

transactional relationships

One of my male friends expressed that he felt relationships were transactional and he’d rather have the terms explicit instead of unstated. I asked if he meant hookers but it wasn’t about sex. The male wallet is the female breast. The unspoken transaction could be dinner or a place to live; he’s in San Francisco where that’s the Holy Grail.

The straight white male is both the provider and the eternal perpetrator. All the problems of the world are ultimately his fault. Whatever he’s accomplished is due to privilege, and whatever he’s done wrong has no excuse. When met on a dating app, he has no context, no one to vouch for him, no one who’s fond of him and wishes him well. He’s just another guy playing the game.

In my dance community, we’ve joked about starting a non-sexual male escort service called Real Sweethearts. I’ve thought it should have no photographs but only testimonials from women friends, “Here’s what we love about Bob…” “This is what’s so cool about Khristian…” “If you love burpies, you’re gonna love Daniel…”

They could advertise their specialties: scalp massage, cocktail mixing, living room salsa dancing. Adept at the analysis of geopolitics in Shitts Creek. Can imitate every character in Bob’s Burgers and The Simpsons. Handyman with benefits. Certified in listening and the art of the good question. Gives killer compliments.

At the end of the appointed time, an envelope is discretely exchanged. Transaction complete with no further obligation. Polyamusery.

fear and loathing and craven snitches

I started thinking about this from an old index card I’d scribbled in college that said, “Write a story called The Lust Frontier.” But it was also prompted by an article Matt Taibbi wrote about Laura Kipnis, author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis. Matt writes:

This country doesn’t just have a narrow civil liberties dispute about speech. We’re in a crisis of communication and intimacy, compounded by a uniquely American terror of sex that probably dates back to the days of the Puritans, and seems at the core of what Kipnis calls the “carceral turn” in her world of higher education. Atop legitimate and necessary mechanisms for identifying and stopping campus predators — Kipnis stresses that “sexual assault is a reality on campus, though not exactly a new one” — we’re building new bureaucracies to prosecute an array of social or even just intellectual offenses….

We’re a nation that’s not just cramming desire back into closets, but becoming obsessed with prohibition and punishment generally. In the same way we seem determined to define sex as inherently predatory — “extractive” as Kipnis puts it, with sexual participants divided into takers and survivors — we’re defining political reality as violent by nature, a world of repressors and victims, where the line between political and sexual perversion is fading….

baby boom and baby bust

I keep coming back to the question, is this part of the plan? As I’ve said in other videos, there’s only one war—empire vs. sovereignty, which can also be said as empire vs. community. We’ve reached the logical end-point of that war with an international cabal of oligarchs taking apart every community in the world at the same time. It’s happening at breathtaking speed, it’s a breathtaking time to be alive, and I recommend you stop and take some deep breaths often.

Is turning love into a commodity the final step in The Great Isolation? I first wrote ‘making love’ but that seems like an antiquated, nostalgic word for sex as a market-driven asset class. Do Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and Bumble have charts for how much of the love market they’ve captured? Do their investors trade shares in longing and loneliness?

If community is distilled to its basic elements, the heterosexual couple is the H2O, the water that’s the basis of life and regeneration. It’s the oasis of sanity when it feels like the world is gunning for you. It’s emotional security, kindness, the deep knowledge that you are lovable, worthy, desired and loved.

My advice to the next generation: Don’t accept the substitute of swipebait, single-use sex for the relationship you deserve. Have all the sex you want, the love-making kind, but don’t give up on the baby-making kind. You deserve the stability of owning a home, of devoting your time to caring for your children, of providing them with security and happiness, and of having a spouse—not just a partner—committed through thick and thin, through household chores and teenage angst, through pandemics and pandemonium.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. It breeds family.

Other videos you might like:

From FOMO to JOMO: the Joy of Missing Out

The Three Biggest Conspiracies in Plain Sight on Edward Snowden