When I receive a message on my mobile, a blue light flashes. The rest of the time, the light is green. Tonight, I am with friends in a cafe under my house. I speak, I laugh, I ask for a beer, I go out to smoke a cigarette. On the outside, it seems that I am present. But really, I'm obsessed with that light. That green light, again green, always green. Why doesn't he write to me? He, a man whom I have met through Tinder and that I like. He told me he would "keep me up to date" on what he was going to do tonight. "Write him and that's it," a friend tells me. It seems impossible. Illegitimate. Because I am on the side of the so-called "friends with the right to rub". Yes, it is a violent expression. Vulgar. Dehumanizing, almost. I know, and I'm sorry for the people you surprise. But I use it on purpose. To show how violent it is. And to turn that violence against society and not against those who suffer from it.
As a journalist specializing in love and social networks, at L'amour sous algorithme I investigated the operation of Tinder and its impact on our lives, including those of those who do not use the application. One of the main consequences observed by experts is that the separation between emotional and sexual life has worsened. The fracture line between the couple proper and the friends with the right to rub has been sharpened. The official partner in front of the one to whom we owe nothing. Almost as if it were a new class struggle: the bourgeoisie against the emotional proletariat. Because the problem of the relationship of friends with the right to rub is not that it is sex without obligations, no; is that it is sex without words. No right to speak. The friend with the right to rub is not authorized to express himself, he must remain confused, without clarity can reassure him; he is only authorized to wait, while pretending he expects nothing; You are not authorized to write messages. Does it seem anecdotal? It seems the opposite. I will never tire of repeating it: our digital life is our true life. Not having the right to write a message is not having the right to speak.
One of the strongest psychological mechanisms of addiction is the principle of random reward
I've spent three years hooked on Tinder because I pretended not to wait. Tinder, with its sliding and matching system, is designed to get us hooked; It is what specialists like the American professor Natasha Dow Schüll call the design of addiction. One of the most powerful psychological mechanisms of addiction is the principle of random and variable reward. It all comes down to not knowing if we are going to receive a reward and of what nature. A message? A coincidence? But from who? With each notification, there is a new release of serotonin in our brain, like when we beat the Candy Crush. It is the same mechanism that hooks us to Instagram or Facebook. If the mechanism has taken hold of me so much, it is because, to pretend that I did not expect, I would talk to other men. I preferred to start over with another rather than show myself vulnerable, dare to recognize that I was watching the green light.
I do not think that, in my case, it was a matter of pride, but rather a deep feeling of illegitimacy. Since I was not in a traditional couple, I had no voice in the matter. I didn't realize it right away. It was when I requested my personal data from the application and read all of my messages, one after the other, when I realized that I had been stuck. I was stuck in a loop.
It is not about writing a plea in defense of all sexual relations leading to marriage, with squirrels and a wedding dress, except for those who wish. Without a doubt, it is wonderful to be able to make love without necessarily forming a partner. But why separate sex from emotions? Why turn it into a product for immediate consumption, which slips and is forgotten next? On the other hand, is it humanly possible to separate sex from emotions? "As if we could truly caress the skin of a stranger without getting a little excited," Victoire Tuaillon writes in Les couilles sur la table .
In fact, is there sex for sex? During my research I have encountered dozens, hundreds of people who displayed enormous energies to force themselves to feel nothing. As if feeling nothing was an achievement. Why? Why make love if it is not to be seen, touched, sustained, embraced for being that person, precisely that person and not another? The American journalist Moira Weigel states in The Labor of Love that capitalism has robbed us of the sexual revolution. Converting sex into an object of consumption like any other benefits, for example, applications such as Tinder. While we slide kilometers and kilometers of emptiness, the application takes advantage of our data and becomes the most profitable application in the App Store.
Why make love if it is not to be seen, touched, sustained, embraced for being that person, precisely that person and not another?
I lived in Berlin for two years, considered the European capital of fun and sexual liberation. The city hosts crazy, magnificent and liberated evenings, with all the excesses that this entails. However, it seemed to me that it was also the capital of solitude. I participated in support groups dedicated to having fun in Berlin, attended by young people full of anguish. Because, in our society, choosing freedom and rejecting the traditional couple is joining the emotional proletariat. If the expression of emotional needs is only considered legitimate within the framework of the couple, how can we build a safe life when all our intimate relationships must be "light", "fun", "casual"? Of course, and fortunately, we have other sources of happiness and affection in our lives: friends, families, even animals.
But it is urgent that we refuse the forced separation of sex and emotions, that we invent new ways of connecting, apart from, on the one hand, the friend with the right to rub that can only shut up and, on the other, the official bond that has all rights, sometimes even too many (to isolate ourselves from the world, watch over us, read our correspondence). Reject this division between sexuality and emotions, which lowers the full human experiences and transforms them into semi-experiences, which tarnishes vacation loves, midnight kisses and the most delicious passions, and automatically converts them into relationship substitutes. This fight is fought everywhere, in the words we use to talk about our sexual experiences, in the movies, books and stories that are built. But I think it starts in each of us. When I wrote L'amour sous algorithme I realized that the fight should begin in the deepest part of my being. To begin with, in the face of the intrusion of the voices inside my head - what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, the internalization of domination. Voices that repeated to me that I would never be beautiful enough, funny enough, nothing enough to express myself fully. We all have those voices, men and women, because we have all grown up in a society that calls us to order brutally since we are children as long as we do not fully respond to the norms of femininity or masculinity and, later, of the couple. "It has taken me many years to throw up all the crap that had taught me about myself," wrote James Baldwin, the African-American poet, regarding what I had suffered from being black in the United States in the forties.
Without being able to imagine the horrors he suffered, I think we can be inspired by his struggle. Learn not to despise our emotions when they get out of the norm. Tell our truth. Write those messages. Raise the head of the mobile, stop obsessing with the green lights, the "seen", the blue V of WhatsApp. Does it seem anecdotal? I will never tire of repeating it: our digital life is our true life. Raising the head of the phone is raising the head, without more.
Judith Duportail is a journalist and writer. His latest book is The Algorithm of Love: A Journey to the Tines (Contra).
Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
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