girl interrupted 1

I didn’t think straight women lived dramatically different lives from gay men. I saw two cultures with distinct stories about the right way to act and to be, with differences in what they were willing to declare about themselves. Grindr had presented an idea. Tinder had modified that idea according to another culture’s concepts of propriety. The gestures toward the two mythologies were very banal: a black screen background versus a white one; photos of body parts versus photos of people doing adventure sports. Two sets of symbols and gestures that would end the same way, with two people in a room together and no guidance.

My timidity not only concerned ideas of sexual “safety” (especially since most such ideas were ruses that gave women a false sense of control in an unpredictably violent world). My avoidance of sex also had a lot to do with an equation, a relationship of exchange around which I organized my ideas. I saw sex as a lever that moderated climatic conditions within the chamber of life, with a negative correlation between the number of people I slept with and the likelihood of encountering love. Being sexually cautious meant I was looking for “something serious.” Having sex with more people meant I privileged the whims of the instant over transcendent higher-order commitments that developed over long stretches of time. I equated promiscuity with youth culture and thought of longer monogamous relationships as more adult, and it seemed depressing to still be having casual sex on a regular basis for an interminable number of years. The arbitrary nature of these correlations had not occurred to me.

“When you fill out their questionnaires the questions that a woman would ask a man when she’s looking for someone to marry, like ‘How much money do you make?’ ‘Do you want children?’—these are ridiculous questions. A gay man could not care less how much money you make, could not care less about wanting children. They want to know your physical attributes; they want to see pictures; they want to know what you’re into.” It was not that his clients did not seek long-term partnerships and families, said Crutchley. Many of them did. The difference between the two approaches was in the process of evaluation. For a significant number of men, sex had its own intrinsic value and quantitative metrics, independent of the qualifications that determined whether you wanted to live with someone and adopt babies with him. Sexual attraction was not a mysterious chemical accident but something that could be researched and described in language. Sexual desires were not ineffable wisps of the imagination; they could be named. Someone like me, in contrast, believed that if I enjoyed going to a museum with a man the sexual attraction would just follow, without anybody having to talk about it.

Even though I felt certain I would eventually meet someone, I consumed many theories about why I was alone. The books and magazines I read supplied an ongoing and detailed investigation of female malaise. All over women wondered what had happened to the adult life they had imagined as children, and whether to blame its elusiveness on material changes or personal shortcomings. The old-fashioned theory that a woman might be unlucky and had not met the “right guy” no longer satisfied them. Books urged the single woman to “settle” and marry the imperfect suitor, or to accept that “he’s just not that into you.” The literature counseled behavior modification, telling her to follow “the rules” or to temper adoration because “men love bitches.” Another set of ideas reassured the woman that she was not to blame—her problems were caused by the Internet: porn had encouraged a culture of loveless, aggressive sexuality or had drained men of sexual animus; the “marketplace” of Internet dating made consumer products of humans and overwhelmed them with choices. Fake-sociology journalists explained to her that she lived in an unfortunate era of societal confusion caused by unclear postfeminist gender roles. This literature could be helpful. It recognized a situation. But it never found a way out.

Instead, these theories compressed the life of “woman today” into a single, unhappy narrative. It began with accounts of how technology was ruining things in high school, how teenage girls had now assimilated ejaculate in the face and Brazilian bikini waxes, how blow jobs were the new kissing, and how girls used social media to send boys pictures of their breasts to be popular. These young women would progress to college, where, after initially thinking that having sex with a man meant committed monogamy, a woman would first suffer disappointment then shift her outlook to “try not to get attached.” Absent the intention of finding love as she pursued sex, the story went, love would never arrive for her. The young woman would then arrive at university, where men don’t pay for dinner anymore, and romance is only so many text messages sent while drunk at two a.m. The men were listless dilettantes, the women gym-toned and frantically successful. The confused heroine was often counseled to withhold sex, in exchange for what wasn’t exactly clear. As she aged, the articles shifted to stories of regret, how at one point she thought that marrying young would be detrimental to her career, and now she worried about her attractiveness and fertility, as if every woman is presented with a clear choice between career and family in her mid-to-late twenties. By the age of forty the single women, tired of waiting for commitment from men, were using technology to get pregnant by themselves. Babies equaled the fulfillment of a great destiny, although women who had married and had children sounded extremely busy and unhappy, suffered in their careers, and lost interest in sex. The narrative of married life culminated in a hazy binary of male politicians who cheated on their middle-aged wives versus happy couples who settled into gardening, fitness, and conversation about television shows over dinner. Researchers were hard at work trying to invent a pill to incite sexual desire for married women who loved their husbands but did not love having sex with them.

The stories all became one story, documenting a long series of contemporary threats to the ideal of “the committed monogamous relationship,” that managed to include every expression of female sexuality that happened outside of it. The only way a woman could keep from undermining this version of love was by saying no to sex, never pandering to male desire, and never expressing any overt sexual interest in the new channels of photography and text. Critics would lament that if a person were to design a fantasy world based on the whims of a young man, its rules and ethics would look much like the social world of the contemporary college campus. What men wanted from sex was assumed to be sex; what women were described as wanting when it came to sex was not sex at all, but rather a relationship in which one had sex, a structure in which sex happened. The consensus about what young men were said to want from sex—lots of it, perhaps with a number of different partners—had no female corollary. “What kind of sex do you like?” was a question the Internet dating apps did not ask.

If a woman thought she would most likely sabotage her future happiness through her sexual choices, it followed that it would be difficult to plainly state one’s desires, or even to describe in explicit language the sex she wanted to have. Every sexual expression raised the question of false consciousness: women were described as “objectifying themselves,” “degrading themselves,” or “submitting unthinkingly to contemporary pressures.” They were accused of succumbing to “the pornification of society” and altering their bodies to please men. Rather than following the natural impulse of an adventurous young person a woman was “adopting the sexual behavior of the most opportunistic guy on campus” or “masquerading her desperation as freedom.” Once married, a woman who became a swinger was accommodating the desires of her philandering partner rather than acting on her own free will. A woman could not even give a blow job without a voice in the back of her head suggesting she had been “used.”

I saw that it was taken for granted, or asserted by books of biological determinism such as Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain, that the monogamous relationship made women the most happy, was where they most enjoyed sex, and that this sort of commitment brought women both freedom and security. This line of thinking forced me into a gendered role that I resented. If every expression of free sexuality by a woman would be second-guessed, it left men as the sole rational agents of sexual narrative. The woman was rarely granted the heroic role of seducer. If a woman pursued a strictly sexual experience, she was seen as succumbing to the wishes of the sovereign subject. If the sex she had with no commitments made her unhappy, it was not simply bad sex but rather proof of her delusion that it could be good. Male sexual desire was the overwhelming constant, the chemical imperative, and female desire either a concession or a taming influence, whose achievement was not in the act of seduction but in wresting a man’s interest from the wider field to her alone. What a stupid way to live, where the pure force of sexual desire could never be trusted. Casual sex, abundant and plentifully available to any woman willing to announce her interest in having it, always came second to this precious and rare thing, the loving relationship. Very few people questioned the worth or desirability of this denouement. I didn’t question it either.

Even if I rejected the books and magazine articles, which forecasted a range of consequences from the simple decision to have sex or not, they colonized my mind. Experience indicated that love would not be more likely to arrive if I rejected sex, but I read articles that spoke of a woman’s “choice” between casual sex and serious relationships. I learned about an “economic” theory of sex, wherein if women make sex more readily available (never mind wanting it) its “price” drops, and men have to “do less” to get it. “She struggles with him in the effort to uphold her independence, and she battles with the rest of the world to preserve the ‘situation’ that dooms her to dependence,” wrote Beauvoir. “This double game is difficult to play, explaining in part the disturbed and nervous state in which many women spend their lives.”

Unlike school or work, the amount of effort and thought we put into it had no correlative result, because the outcome depended on the behavior and complicity of another kind of person. “It is agonizing for a woman to assume responsibility for her own life,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, first published in 1949.

I had a friend who began pursuing casual sex as a declared intention in her twenties. She had a system: first, an exchange of photos. Then a phone call. She is deft and decisive, and these traits gave her an advantage when it came to casual sex. Every phone call, she would lay out a list of rules. She would get a real name. She would say that everything they did would be consensual and that if she said “no” or wanted to stop that all sex would stop. They would use condoms. If she liked the man, and he agreed to her conditions, she would go to his place. She would meet him outside and then they would go in and have sex. She understood all of the risks. Sometimes the encounters would be depressing, but even the worst ones would give her stories to tell. When the encounters went well they could be powerful sexual experiences. Some of the men who used Craigslist to seek out casual sex, she said, were really good at sex. They were people for whom sex was an end in itself, who had a lot of experience, who tended to have an ardent fascination with and interest in the body and in pleasure. When I spoke to her about it, she was now in her thirties, and more interested in having a monogamous relationship. I asked her what her Internet sex experiences had given her. The most important thing, she said, was learning that if she overtly expressed interest in having noncommittal sex with men who also seemed interested in sex, they almost always responded positively. They would delight in her willingness and affirm how much they desired her. This affirmation was not, as perhaps she had been led to believe, “cheap” for being readily available. (Or rather, as another friend once put it: “Yeah, it’s cheap—it’s free!”) She learned that even if she never found love, she would always find someone who would want to have sex. It made her feel good about herself and her body, it made her more confident, she grew in her awareness of her own agency and had more control than she was used to experiencing in the confines of the traditional view of dating, where the idea remained that sex was to be withheld until some indication of emotional commitment was revealed. When a woman wanted casual sex, and not a boyfriend, the old gender roles were often reversed. She was the one who could choose; she was the one to whom men would clamor to reply. These lessons outweighed what she saw as the downsides: the depressing encounters that were really depressing, the fact that her partners in the future would have to reckon with the extent of her sexual history, the risks. Also, she said happily, “now I’m really good at sex.” By which she meant, I supposed, that she had overcome the idea of good sex as a chemical accident, as rare as falling in love.