I’ve put off writing this essay for a long time—and I will keep it short. I despise cultural commentary on sexuality and dating. It’s the worst, most arrogant and dull brand of upper-middle class journalism possible. You could take every commentary on the topic ever written, burn it—and then gulag its authors. The world would be better off for it. However, the birth gap crisis has forced some unusually thoughtful reflection on the matter.
I should start by asserting that the reason these commentaries are so unbearable is because they talk as if there is a ‘crisis in sexuality’: people aren’t screwing each other to the quantity and standards that are set by an expert class who have, for some reason, assumed that sexual activity is a marker of status or health . This dogma would require a whole other piece to deconstruct. The point I wish to simply make here is that there is no crisis in sexuality. There is no longer sexuality, proper. Most people today have never had sex but have simply engaged in pharmacologically protected co-masturbation. For the first time is history technology has allowed one to be a whore and virgin at the same time. But how is this possible, you might ask?
I will begin by reiterating my point about co-masturbation. My thoughts on the matter are actually quite extreme for today’s standards. In general there hasn’t been such a thing as sex since the wide spread adoption of the birth control pill. This is a slightly longer area of discussion. For now, we can assert that there is an almost ontological distinction between sexuality when the risk of reproduction is involved compared to the situation where we can almost totally avert and control the risk. The main crisis here is the break up of sexuality from the body. Yes—from the body! ‘But what do you mean from the body? Do people not still use their bodies to have sex?’ Actually no—they don’t.
We have no standard or definition of what it means to be ‘embodied’; to be and act in a body. Simple physical touch in this regard does not suffice as the body is altered. All embodied experience is under threat of being technologically undermined by the very people who are supposed to be enthusiasts of the sexual ‘revolution’. One might be surprised that the progressive elements of modern society were so radically in favour of the Covid lockdowns. This was because the Covid lockdowns were social engineering in distance creation and dis-embodiments: the control and distance-management of bodies. After WW2, the left has consistently been in favour of pharmacological and later digital forms of disembodiment at every turn.
Once the birth pill was invented, one could have sex in a manner which turned off the body. Yes, the body was still involved in the experience of pleasure—but it became less involved in the act itself. Studies have shown desire has been affected by these technologies— and partner selection incrementally altered towards androgenization. (female selection of less masculine traits on the pill and more masculine off the pill).
This tells us something. It reveals that when something other gets replaced through body-distributing technologies, it becomes replaced by something of the same. (androgynous selection is the desire for the same). Androgynization reveals as sort of masturbation culture—on a situation where pleasure it attached to something of the same instead of something distinct.
Further to this, a world of virtual (disembodied) stimulation and pleasure seeking has emerged. Digital capitalism could be defined as something like a dis-embodied marketplace of pleasure; or perhaps a series of consumption practices which cause distraction, titillation and comfort, increasingly without the body. The dopamine hits and hypnotism of screen technologies reveal how much we can actually manage the pain/pleasure economies of our mind and bodies without having to eat, drink, snort or touch anything at all. Screens fall within the realm of the pleasure principle. Freud would have asserted that—we can be sure.
Modern pharmacology and virtuality are the conditions for disembodied pleasure principles. Once we grasp that axiom, the rest of the story will begin to make more sense. The difference between promiscuous relationships of pharmacology-mediated, risk free interaction—no matter how perverted or orgasmic they were—to the alienated, sex doll/toy, pornographic masturbatory society which has followed it, is a distinction of quantity not quality. It is simply the gradual separation of pleasure from the physical interaction with anything embodied and external.
This didn’t come about because a sect of totalitarian Gnostics took control of the deep state and forced us into it. It came about because it fitted the primary character trait of liberal middle classes going back to the early modern period: risk aversion. Risk aversion—not reason, or even acquisition— is the primary character of any time whereby an expansion of secular middle classes takes place. The post-war (war is risky and traditionally embodied) expansion of the middle classes from the 50s onwards in the west, created a technological conspiracy within the dominant liberal character of risk aversion. War has its own history of disembodiment (guns, air strikes, drones) and for sexuality, the disembodied technics expressed themselves primarily through the birth control pill and later with dating apps. These were the two major disembodying revolutions in the world of sexual relations. In fact, the entire history of sexual revolutions is simply a series of revolutions—ironically—in disembodiment.
Almost no effort has ever been made to separate sexuality historically, before and after these revolutions of disembodiment. As I have stated, I don’t think there is anything called sex anymore. We need an entirely different category of activity. The problem is that an honest label for current sexuality would not be very sexy. The intelligentsia that comes up with cultural linguistic codes are attempting to present their implicit ideal human as a worldly, cosmopolitan, open, self-fulfilling subject. As embarrassing as that subject was, even in its legitimate reality, the current model-citizen of digital consumerism is closer in character to the fat people who get carted about the spaceship in that kid’s film Walle; that is, if the Walle space cadets had access to Ozempic and SSRIs.
If one is looking for anymore evidence that sexuality has been fully disembodied they needn’t look further than a recent study done in Japan whereby they found two-thirds of relationships (between romantic partners) are now ‘sexless’. I’m not sure how they define the term sexless but it must be enough to motivate a study; which these days means it must be quite bad.
So for all the Walle-world trend setters, furiously typing their greasy fingers over Huffington Post Op-Eds, repeatedly using words like ‘incels’, we should be assured that—if two thirds of actual relations in Japan are now ‘sexless'—this means that the call is coming from ‘inside the house’. This is akin to somebody taking out a loan to buy a fancy car just so they can drive around town making fun of poor people. This is also literally the best definition of contemporary journalism to have ever been penned.
So here is my Pod-architectural, theory-cel explanation to what has gone wrong and why dating apps mark such a catastrophic and socially damaging chapter to this timeline of disembodied technological innovation. The absolute axiom is this: Distance creates safety. As with other areas of life, digital technology creates safety through the control and distance of other bodies. Controlling the body through pharmacology and controlling the body through distance and virtual representation are acts of security, not health and certainly not freedom.
Despite being technologies of disembodiment, social media also offers the protective power of creating social currencies that inflate the value of people by exaggerating certain traits and concealing other traits. It empowers every person to be their own public relations specialist, filtering out what they don’t others to see. This is a bad enough state of affairs as it is. However, if we think about how much young women locate their social value based on looks, then we can see how the power to conceal and exaggerate, acts to create a social currency and technology based on total insulation(and self deception). Men can be undesirable on dating apps, and most of the time they will be practically annoyed, but morally and symbolically not too bothered. Very few men, young or old, value themselves based on how photogenic they are. However, failure for young women in this regard is obviously far more catastrophic because young women really do value themselves based on how photogenic they are. Again there are basic observations in distinct gender psychologies that we are not allowed to acknowledge, so it makes sense that these conversations never get off the ground.
Dating apps are sold as another step in the empowerment of adult-individuals who have the freedom to pursue new horizons of social choice. This is literally quite the opposite to what has happened. We now have a generation of the most therapeutically managed and anxious people to have ever lived. This isn’t to say that we should blame freedom itself. It’s to acknowledge that those who were happily free(at least to some extent) never asked for and never liked these technologies to begin with. I’m old enough to have experienced social relations before and after the use of dating apps, and I can tell you that when dating apps first came out it was common to make fun a friend who used one because this was seen as something a middle aged divorcee would do.
It was seen an unauthentic and desperate. It’s peculiar how within such a short period of time it was people who don’t use them, who became the weird ones. The people that were happier in their embodied freedom were transvalued as ‘behind’ or ‘over cautious’. Those who embraced the power of distance and personal perception management were falsely labelled as brave embracers of a new frontier of personal freedom. I’m not for personal freedom as primary goal of politics or culture. But it should be acknowledged that it was inferiority and fear that motivated these technologies, not a desire for freedom(personal or otherwise). It was the power of perception management and distance that motivated their use; and psycho-politically this was a revolution of the insecure.
Genuinely confident and free people like being in the world unprotected from the anxious obsessions and fixations of constant self-perception management—and enjoy the challenge, distinction and otherness of their relations. One of the reasons that people have become sexless is that there’s nothing uglier than obsessive self-perception management. I don’t mean this metaphorically—as in the inner soul of Dorian Gray when he looks into his private mirror—but quite literally people who carry themselves in this anxious obsessively, scrolling, filtering, obsessing and fooling posture, come across genuinely (in the flesh) as unattractive people. This has been particularly disastrous for attraction towards men because these technologies give the power of perception insulation which is akin to a dark-fantasy best suited to an insecure teenage girl. Yet, the entire app almost demands that you behave like a teenage girl, almost as an entry fee(obsessing over what people think of you, changing your looks, and pictures constantly, trying to look approachable (which means castrated) and never being able to take the risk to disregard the assumed judgements of others). All of these masculine traits which jar with the social media user ideal are unacceptable on dating apps; they are considered unhygienic, arrogant and out of place.
Secondly, the risk of meeting up with strangers you meet over the internet has forced men to avoid being deselected on the basis of unfamiliarity and insecurity(a hard task when meeting strangers on the internet). This is done by signalling one is less masculine and more approachable; signalling security and familiarity instead of signalling distinction and unpredictability which are actually the attraction creating polarities.
Given we are forced to pretend that women are equal to men in every regard and given the fact that we have to pretend that they pursue their own interests and inclinations in the same way, we have forgotten that women tend to have higher levels of threat detection ingrained into their psychology, likely on a somewhat genetic level due to being the physically weaker sex. Dating apps are designed to mitigate the threat of meeting up with strangers for the weaker sex by compensating by encouraging the stronger sex and rewarding(through selection) the approachable, predictable (again—castrated) risk-mitigating participants of the security architecture we call ‘dating apps’. On every level technologies of distance and perception management are designed around security and re-assurance.(for women).
What I wish to assert in this short piece is that these technologies are not about freedom—but security. They are not designed for the fantasies of the strong but the weak. Many of us were happy in our luddite, embodied freedom. Many have been hoodwinked into acting like shameful, predictable and indistinct social media participants in order to gain social currency that allow social access. It’s a perverse game and the rates of isolation and childishness simply show—empirically —how self-defeating it is.
This stupidity lies in the fact that liberalism unleashed a technological innovation that always conflates security and freedom (constantly); and this is the central reason why it ends up favouring and standardising the psychology of its most insecure by offering them an indefinite array of social and technological securities. Perhaps it has never needed to make a conscious distinction. But now it increasingly seems like civilisation depends on it; especially when we cannot reproduce.
Conservatives like to moralise over giving freedoms which can be dangerous. But what about handing out social and technological securities that can be dangerous. The empowerment of the insecure and the creation of infrastructure that decides important social relations such as relations of reproduction, are now determined through the empowerment of infantile fantasies of social approval and the constant need for re-assuring perception management and social predictability. (not sounding very sexy is it?) This tends to, at all turns, lead towards the short sighted appeasement of insecure women(medically, socially and psychologically). Men certainly have their own versions of insulation and fantasy but these are not empowered and standardized like social media has done with women (who are the biggest consumer of all image-centric social media platforms, after all).
Birth control pill and dating apps are security-technologies designed for new era of gendered ‘equality’. The entire social infrastructure and morality then began to build itself from this market place of socio-technological security systems whereby pharmacology and virtuality would screen these anxious new hyper-individuals from—well, everything. The economic boom seen after world war two was also driven by the inclusion of women into the job market. It also discovered them as an entire new territory of consumers, as Edward Bernays found out with his ‘torches of freedom’ campaign to get women to smoke, doubling the revenue of tobacco industry almost overnight. All of this has been thoughtlessly, of course, given the bottom line was suitable to it.
Modern societies create entire economies that are built on re-assuring insecure people by lying to them, initiating them as economic and medical subjects, creating social expectations for everyone else to participate in this lying—and rewarding and universalizing the psychology of those who are now empowered to lie to themselves. This is the ethos of the pharmaceutical and digital industries— and if ‘the customer is always right’ as they say; then in digital capitalism, why not standardize the pathologies of your most loyal customers? Why not turn us all into into little girls?
I provoke because it’s necessary. Yet, in more serious terms, we have passed a threshold whereby by a number of social catastrophes are occurring which have forced us to radically re-evaluate these non stop torches of freedom campaigns. After all, if a society cannot even reproduce itself, it may be time to finally revoke the technological securities that have indulged civilisation into a its own self-destruction.