{"id":1080,"date":"2015-08-17T15:36:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2015-08-17T15:36:41","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:36:41","slug":"teaching-victorian-romance-in-the-age-of-tinder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2015\/08\/17\/teaching-victorian-romance-in-the-age-of-tinder\/","title":{"rendered":"TEACHING VICTORIAN ROMANCE IN THE AGE OF TINDER <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tinder is not only easily combustible material but also the name of a very popular dating app, launched in 2012. Its use involves swiping photographs of possible matches on your cell phone: right for those you like, left for those you don\u2019t. If someone swipes you back, then you can text each other, set up a date, etc. In an inspired feat of social engineering and personal psychology, Tinder does not communicate to you the rejections. The right-hand swipes, on the contrary, are duly noted which, I\u2019m sure, must be a great ego-booster. <\/p>\n

The rational behind this dating system is not only the classic chance to pre-select a date companion, already provided by any dating service, but the ease with which it can lead to a face-to-face meeting, as it also based on geo-location systems (you can see which Tinder users are close-by). As of today, Wikipedia informs, Tinder processes one billion swipes a day with twelve million matches\u2013the actual figure for dates is unknown, but the phrase \u2018Tinder date\u2019 has already entered English. 50 million people all over the world use the service in 30 languages.<\/p>\n

Why am I interested? Well, I am not. What called my attention was the article by Nancy Jo Sales for Vanity Fair<\/em>, \u201cTinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse\u201d (http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/culture\/2015\/08\/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating<\/a>). So much so that I have decided to set my teaching next autumn of Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em> (1848) against it as background to discuss how human mating rituals have altered (recently). My point is that for my students to understand a novel from the \u2018remote\u2019 Victorian past first they need to be made aware of how the debate on similar topics stands today. Also, I need to explain to them that romantic fiction about love must operate within the personal, social and legal constraints of its time. Hence, I need to test what they know about those applying to their own generation. First, then, here are some points of Sales\u2019 lengthy article\u2013a piece which made me feel positively Victorian if not Jurassic.<\/p>\n

Sales does not clarify how compulsory having a Tinder account is in the twenty something American urban middle-class culture she explores (Manhattan, basically). Reading her piece I got the impression that not having an account in this or similar dating services is little short of a social aberration, rather than a personal choice. She, subtly but firmly, exposes the persistence of the double sexual standard despite the apparent growth of sexual freedom (for this what Tinder is for\u2013getting sex partners). <\/p>\n

Although, obviously, hetero men could not get hetero girls to have sex with them via a Tinder \u2018come on\u2019 unless the girls were willing, the picture Sales draws is one in which men get all the (promiscuous) fun and the girls get constantly frustrated because a) sex does not lead to regular dates, much less a relationship and b) in the end the endless succession of lovers is unable to provide them with orgasms. Remember that in the Victorian texts I teach couples get engaged without even exchanging a first kiss (and in the girls\u2019 case it is often the<\/em> first kiss). Now try to make sense of this to the kids born in the mid 1990s.<\/p>\n

Before I ramble on… Here are a few selections from Sales juicy report:
\n*a male Tinder user explains he\u2019s organizing several dates at the same time as \u201cThere\u2019s always something better\u201d (call that the channel-hopping effect)
\n*the same guy adds that \u201cYou could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day\u2014the sample size is so much larger\u201d. He aims at sleeping with 100 \u2018Tinderella\u2019 girls in a year. Hot ones.
\n*this serial Romeo further explains that although he clearly announces he is not into relationships, most girls accept having sex \u201cexpecting to turn the tables\u201d (he might also be kidding himself rather than admit that girls see him mostly as a disposable sex toy)
\n*average texts from guys (i.e. total strangers) often include unsolicited photos of their genitalia or explicit phrasing such as \u2018Wanna fuck?\u2019 or \u2018Come over and sit on my face\u2019. And worse. Girls also send pics, boys claim, but mainly of breasts and bottoms, not vaginas.
\n*Tinder users highlight the similarity of the service with ordering food or shopping online. Or having a hobby. Or meeting for sport.
\n*the overall impression is that today men have the power to decide whether a one-night stand (or a one-hour stand…) can develop into a relationship, whereas women have the power to grant men sex (isn\u2019t this old as the hills?)
\n*a college girl explains that for her generation the anxiety about intimacy comes from having \u201cgrown up on social media,\u201d so \u201cwe don\u2019t know how to talk to each other face-to-face\u201d. Not even in bed.
\n*very restrictive dating rules have turned romance into \u201ca contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less\u201d; nobody wants to appear to suffer for love.
\n*not only is the double standard real and inalterable; a guy claims he does not want to be in a relationship because \u201cYou can\u2019t be selfish<\/em> in a relationship\u201d (his italics)
\n*afraid of giving girls the wrong idea, guys tend to be quite insensitive; a girl recalls a lover using Tinder while she dressed up after sex… Men are not, Sales writes, \u201cinspired to be polite\u201d.
\n*as a girl points out, despite the aloofness, \u201cSome people still catch feelings in hook-up culture\u201d\u2013as if they were a disease.<\/p>\n

Several caveats here:
\n*Sales does not take into account how Tinder works in different cultures and neglects to see the identity factors conditioning her informers.
\n*Second, as a man told me, if girls feel uncomfortable with any point of the Tinder-date process they just need to refrain from using the service, which, let\u2019s recall, is not compulsory.
\n*Apps like these, as the internet did in the early 1990s, have opened up the potential number of sexual and romantic partners, yet most people still marry in fairly conventional ways and try to raise families.
\n*Neither the idea (for hetero women) that you need to sleep first with a guy or with many before you find love is new; it\u2019s been around for decades now.
\n*As for hetero men, they seem to be imitating dating models typical of gay culture whereas a good number of gay men are vindicating monogamy (serial or otherwise) thanks to the legalisation of gay marriage. <\/p>\n

In the end it\u2019s the old story: men try to get as much sex as the personal, social and legal constrains allow while women are divided into those who want to follow genuinely a similar inclination, those who tells themselves they do but actually don\u2019t, and the post-Victorian ones who value long-lasting romantic intimacy above sex. I\u2019m not saying that this third vital stance is not attractive to many men. And I have not said a word about the bodily fascism of the whole idea of app or online dating.<\/p>\n

A few years ago a group of eight Californian girls who enrolled in one of my classes, all beautiful and intelligent young women, told me that dating was over\u2013and this was long before I-Phone and Tinder. Men, they complained, get too much sex and, hence, they make no effort to be in a real relationship. They were truly upset by this. All this leads me to wonder whether, unlike what Victorian novels suggest, men and women like each other at all. It seems that given the chance and at least until they decide to form a family, current young men and women are using each other mutually for sex but without true enjoyment in each other. The taboos on sex that the Victorians suffered have this advantage: you need to talk<\/em> in order to communicate. Victorian couples (and many others more recently) might spend years this way in long engagements which possibly explains, to a certain extent, why sex mattered less to them than to us (this IS a sweeping statement, I know).<\/p>\n

In all this I am commenting on here, what irks me most is men\u2019s (alleged) aloofness. The guy using Tinder while still in the same bedroom with his new lover… Ugh… If, as it seems, misogyny is the basis of the \u2018hook-up\u2019 system then there can be no real progress\u2013and no real fun no matter how many lovers a girl gets. And the other way round: I have no doubt that Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s hero Gilbert is erotically incensed to despair by Helen because she is not sexually available. Ah, the Victorians and their erotic unavailability… how hard they are to explain in the age of Tinder.<\/p>\n

PS (added 13 September 2015). Here’s a very interesting piece with a man’s view of the article (judge for yourself what kind of man):
\nhttp:\/\/verilymag.com\/2015\/08\/dating-apocalypse-hookups-casual-sex-modern-relationships-dating-tinder-commitment<\/a><\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
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