If the Western media presents these individuals as digital freakshows, in Japan the fictosexuality phenomenon is widely known: it has been a named trend since at least the Eighties. There, fictosexuals aren’t anomalies, but rather outgrowths of the otaku subculture, which attracts people whose interest in pop culture is so intense that they retreat from public life, becoming “hikikomori” or “shut-ins”.

Though sometimes described as “suffering” with a 2D complex, as they call it, Japanese fictosexuals see their proclivity as an orientation; in fact, some are fighting for legal recognition. In the fascinating Fictosexual Manifesto, the authors claim that they are “beyond the heterosexual matrix”, boldly stating that they must “denaturalise interpersonally oriented sexuality” — a conception of sexuality that privileges human-to-human attraction.

Academia has also been known to take orientations such as fictosexuality and objectum sexuality seriously — much more so than the media. However, the literature is sparse and concentrated outside of the Western world. In the West, meanwhile, a handful of existing studies have suggested that fictosexuals — and objectum sexuals — exhibit a few important qualities. One, they’re not crazy: they’re not like the delusional erotomaniacs who believe their objects return their affections. Rather, the “fictophilic paradox” is that you know your love is one-sided, but your emotions persist regardless. Two: preliminary data shows they’re more likely to have autistic qualities, suggesting a link between fictosexulity and difficulties with interpersonal relationships. And three, despite the traditional belief that romantic love revolves around personhood, even more important is the feeling that the object of one’s affection has a personality. In other words, there’s reason to believe that for fictosexuals, one-sided love is real love.

Some outspoken fictosexuals, such as the authors of The Fictosexual Manifesto and people on the r/fictosexual subreddit, have argued that their delegitimisation and stigmatisation, such as the claims that their partnerships “aren’t real”, is a form of bigotry. But it’s not hard to see why some people prefer to laugh at fictosexuality. It destabilises our most basic assumptions about love. Or at least what we think our most basic assumptions about love are. But what if those assumptions are worth revising?

Suggested reading

The sex coach is killing intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

The truth is that there is already some acceptance that you can feel attracted to someone who largely exists inside your own head. Centuries ago, it was common for mystics to describe ecstatic love after visions of divine entities. And Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he claimed to adore despite having met her only twice, is usually presented as romantic.

In fact, I suspect that fictosexuality is an extreme version of something we all experience occasionally, even if we are not used to naming it. Most people have experienced celebrity crushes; they are usually seen as a normal part of fandom. So many people love Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or a member of BTS, knowing they will never receive any affection in return — a dynamic very like the fictophilic paradox. And sometimes this love is extreme or even genuinely delusional, for instance, in the woman who recently went viral on TikTok for her belief that she is “in a relationship” with Enrique Iglesias. It is also not seen as pathological to feel attracted to, for instance, Mr Darcy. In Cassandra Clare’s 2003 essay, “Fictional Character Crushes”, she writes that such attraction is “one-sided, but strangely satisfying for all that”.

In some ways, all crushes begin as one-sided crushes on fictional characters. When we first meet a person, we imagine them to be a certain way, but they will invariably turn out to be someone quite different. Perhaps Janet Malcolm put it best in 1980: “The most precious and inviolate of entities — personal relations — is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.”

This dynamic becomes more dangerous in a world where we’re increasingly mediated by the internet, which allows us to postpone the clash of fantasy and reality. We author our identities online in a way that we aren’t able to in the physical world. Are there elements of fictosexuality in developing a crush on an anonymous tweeter? Is there a significant difference between feeling attracted to someone you’re chatting to on Tinder, but haven’t yet met, and being compelled to converse with a chatbot that speaks in the voice of your favourite fictional character? In both cases, you are imagining that the person is real.

The context of all this is that people increasingly see themselves and the people around them in terms of the media they consume. The phenomenon of “self-narrativising” has been much-discussed in recent years — in persistent conversations about “main character syndrome”, for instance. People have started to view their lives in terms of the “seasons” of television shows, with less important experiences being spoken of as “subplots”. If you walk around with a Spotify soundtrack influencing your emotions, and you’re already tacitly viewing your life through a narrative lens, how does that impact how you feel about other people? To what extent is listening to a Olivia Rodrigo song while you think about a recent event shaping how you feel about it?

We are also immersed in a crisis of intimacy, which has coincided with increased awareness of sexualities that involve a lot less sex, including aegosexuality — which, like fictosexuality, exists on a spectrum with asexuality. Aegosexuals are defined as people who “become aroused by sexual content (at times) without wanting to engage in sexual activities personally”. To me, that sounds like a recasting of two fairly common sexual scenarios. Could we call the “reply guy” who is sexually aroused by direct messaging people on social media with no intention to meet them an aegosexual? What about the incel who prefers pornography to the difficult pursuit of a human relationship? Whether or not we put labels on it, there is a rise in behaviour that involves a retreat from having relationships in the real world.

Suggested reading

Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

There’s a story in Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen that encapsulates the online dangers of this. A young man, Peter, falls in love with a woman in a multi-user dungeon — a text-based virtual world with no images. He describes his relationship as “intellectual, emotionally supportive, and erotic”. Their sex life, though mediated by a screen and confined to text, is “rich and fulfilling”. Eventually, he flies from North Carolina to Oregon to meet his Beatrice, and lo and behold, there’s no chemistry.

“Real life gave me too much information,” he later shares with Turkle. When he goes to review the chatlogs between him and his lover — a months-long affair — he struggles to find his relationship in them. “Where was the warmth?” Turkle asks. “The sense of complicity and empathy?” Peter doesn’t know, and consequently realises that he must have invented it. The relationship was closer to literature than real intimacy. Peter projected what he wanted onto “the text” of their companionship; he filled in the blank spaces left by the screen.

Yet what happened to Peter isn’t so strange when you think about it. How different is it from being excited to meet someone you’ve been chatting to on a dating app, only to find that you don’t get on? This blending of fiction and reality is something almost all of us, to varying degrees, engage in. We project details that aren’t there onto texts all the time. The novel we’re engrossed in describes the love interest as a charming Englishman; we see Timothée Chalamet in our mind’s eye and fall further into the story’s world. Somebody sends us a text message, and because they included a particular emoji — that smiley face — it reads as creepy instead of sweet.

Online, without body language, there is so much space for ambiguity, even if there is more time to craft a witty response. We may feel more in control of ourselves, but we are also more likely to be mistaken in another. And the more time we spend in the imaginary world, the harder it becomes to interpret the real one — and the more fictosexual we become, even if the objects of our affection are living, breathing people.

This is where things got hairy: with each selection, the rejected partners would exit past the person doing the picking, who would see their faces for the first time. The point was torment, obviously: behold the sea of beautiful people you just canned for totally arbitrary reasons. The potential for regret in this moment was so powerful that the show eventually introduced a new gimmick, whereby the featured contestant had one “golden lifesaver” that could be used to save a passing reject.

In the era of dating apps, users are of course spared the anguish of a physical confrontation with all the people they’ve categorically rejected; the algorithm is the man behind the curtain, mercilessly dismissing everyone who doesn’t fit your preferences, out of sight, out of mind. We tell ourselves it is more efficient this way, ordering a human being via the same box-checking exercise we use to build a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We tell ourselves, more importantly, that not doing this is a risky proposition, maybe even a dangerous one. Without the algorithm, who knows what you might end up with? He could be short. Or a Nickelback fan. Or, gulp, a Republican.

Everything’s Fine, a new novel by Cecilia Rabess, seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too-indiscriminate, non-algorithmic dating. The relationship in this story is between two people who would never have matched on Tinder: Jess, a progressive and professionally ambitious black woman who works as a Wall Street trader, and Josh, a pragmatic fellow trader who describes himself as a moderate, but who Jess insists (sometimes to his face) is the personification of conservative cishet white male privilege. As a complicating factor, clues littered throughout the book suggest Josh might actually be Jewish — or rather, this would complicate things, if Jess had an iota of curiosity about it, but she doesn’t. Her obliviousness seems to be shared by Rabess herself: the only definitely Jewish character in this book, the main antagonist, happens to be a grasping, greedy, tax-dodging hedge fund manager.

Where other people see humans, Jess sees stereotypes. She is obsessed with voting habits as a proxy for character. If she had a dating app profile, she would emblazon it with one of those “Republicans swipe left” warnings. In this, of course, she would only be doing what the media has lately identified as the sole sensible strategy for selecting a romantic partner: in our obsession with “red flags”, political beliefs have become the ultimate dating dealbreaker. Everything’s Fine has already been cancelled on Goodreads by people arguing that a progressive black character dating a conservative white one is a way to “excuse racists”.

More from this author

The Little Mermaid is Disney propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

A recent piece in the Atlantic reads out the writing on the wall, straightforwardly advising that politically heterogamous partnerships are a bad idea — “because research suggests that marriages across political or religious lines (when those things matter significantly to each partner) can be less happy, more conflicted, and more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses agree on religion and politics”. Note that the caveat appears only parenthetically, as if the eventuality that these things might not matter significantly to each partner is barely worth mentioning.

Indeed, to believe that politics is a mere drop in the bucket of multitudes that each human being contains is not only outré in elite circles, but often cited, contemptuously, as evidence in and of itself of a certain political affiliation. Jill Filipovic, in an essay responding to the Atlantic article, writes:

“There’s an impulse, especially among those on the moderate right, to talk about politics as simply a set of preferences, like what kind of shows you might select on Netflix. But politics, especially in the post-Trump era … reflect entirely different goals and certainly different values, as well as very different ideas about what our country and our world should be, and — perhaps most crucially for a marriage — very different ideas about the rights, rules, and opportunities for women, men, and children.”

It’s a bit of a Kafka trap: push back against the defining importance of politics, and ugh, that’s just what a Right-winger would say. Among progressives, it is increasingly an article of faith that the personal is, and always will be, political; if you don’t think so, well, you’re not one of us.

I suspect, though, that this extremism is less Trump’s fault than Tinder’s. Algorithmic dating is all about finding reasons to write off entire categories of people as undateable — and to be savage about it. If a certain type of human being doesn’t spark joy, then into the bin they go. For women, particularly, to be as discriminating as possible in one’s romantic life is positioned as an act of self-care: you are holding out for what you deserve, and what you deserve is a person who checks every box, meets every criteria. To give an unqualified man a chance represents a failure to respect yourself.

Suggested reading

Why is my chatbot hitting on me?

By Kathleen Stock

And yet, I’m not sure that intentionally ensconcing oneself in a silo of perfect-on-paper people — and, by extension, seeing the values of everyone who thinks differently as an existential threat — is the best thing for any of us. Filipovic’s essay unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of entrenching oneself in this mindset: how intolerance gives rise to caricature, how stereotypes creep in to fill the empty spaces left by ignorance. Conservative men, in this view, are not just unsuitable partners but actual monsters: “With the demise of Roe v. Wade,” she writes, “a vote for a Republican politician is a vote to criminalise abortion, which is a vote to force women to risk their lives in pregnancy … If a man is willing to vote for that, why would you trust him with your body and your medical decisions? … Is he the man you want making medical decisions for your daughter, or teaching your son what masculinity looks like?

As visions of romance go, this one is absurdly catastrophic, not to mention dehumanising to everyone involved — the conservative men, obviously, but also the women who are depicted as brainwashed traitors to the sisterhood for even considering marrying one. (What of the fact that many of the most fervently pro-life voters are, themselves, women?) Its proponents might want to imagine how they’d feel if the tables were turned — if liberal women were being similarly caricatured and dismissed as amoral, unmarriageable ogres based on their voting patterns alone. In fact, this has happened within living memory: in 1992, the recently-deceased Pat Robertson decreed that feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. This was news to the happily married non-witchcraft-practising feminists of the world, who rightly roasted Robertson for his ridiculous pronouncement. Had the man ever even met a feminist?

Suggested reading

Escaping American tribalism

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

At the risk of stating the obvious, even couples who vote the same way still have differences, political or otherwise; they still disagree, fight, and get divorced. The Atlantic article frets that “fewer than half (47%) of politically mixed married couples report they are ‘completely satisfied with their family life,’ compared with ‘61% of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55% where both are Democrats’.” That’s one way to put it; the other way, of course, would be to note that your chances of marital satisfaction are roughly 50/50 whether you pair off within your own political tribe or not, making it a pretty impractical criterion for deciding who to marry.

Of course, this is the type of pragmatic take that Josh is always offering in Everything’s Fine, which inevitably infuriates Jess. “It’s just a hat,” he says, when she discovers a red MAGA baseball cap, a gag gift from a fishing trip, stuffed in a storage bin in the home they share. “It can’t hurt you.”

“But it’s not just a hat,” the book sombrely intones. “It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings … and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings—”

That paragraph continues for practically a full page — there is apparently no malady in the world for which the hat is not an avatar — but you get the idea. It’s all about going to extremes: your Republican vote is literally killing women, your feminist book club is full of lesbian witches, your little red hat might as well be a KKK hood. Josh, of course, is the bad guy for thinking that none of this makes any sense: he’s the oblivious toxic white male who not only brought the hat into the house, but is so blinded by his own privilege that he cannot sense its evil.

More from this author

What kind of woman rides the New York subway?

By Kat Rosenfield

Because this is how Jess sees Josh, she treats him terribly, not that she treats herself much better. Her perpetual sense of victimhood, her certainty that she is at a permanent disadvantage owing to her race and sex and middle-class background, leads her to both take advantage of others and to sabotage herself. And while the book ends on an ambiguous note, her relationship with Josh is almost certainly doomed — not because she’s black and he’s white, or because she’s a liberal and he’s a conservative, but because he views her as a person while she views him as a collection of labels. Jess sometimes says she loves Josh, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even see him.

That inability to look past someone’s labels has always been with us, embodied by the concept of the dating dealbreaker. Sometimes it’s political (“I could never be with someone who votes Republican”), sometimes it’s practical (“I could never be with someone who hates dogs”), sometimes it’s utterly arbitrary (“I could never love a man who wears pants tighter than I do.”) But really, we have no idea who we could or couldn’t love. For all our attempts to plan and predict and control our romantic destinies, human beings have never been good at knowing what — or who — will make them happy. And god, isn’t that terrifying?

In a world where love makes fools of us all, red flags, political or otherwise, operate as a sort of fantasy: a story you tell yourself about what kind of person you are, or perhaps what kind of person you’d like to be, dressed up as a declaration about what kind of person you could never be with. The dealbreaker is a way of imposing order: I know where the line is. I’m in charge. These stories can be comforting. They can be exciting. But that doesn’t make them true.

So the ad I spotted in that Tube carriage, for the dating app Tinder, seemed particularly fitting. It depicted a smiling young couple in psychedelic clothing, with the caption: “Finally Having Kids”. They each rest one hand on a pushchair. In the pushchair is a dog.

If, given my recent experience, Londoners seem more partial to dogs than kids, this may not be the only way in which “fur babies” are on the up. According to last year’s ONS data, half of British women now reach 30 without having kids. And Pets At Home CEO Lyssa McGowen thinks some of these have redirected their caring urges toward pets. “They are taking all that time and energy and attention and putting it into fur babies, especially in urban areas,” she said.

McGowen speculates that this is happening because the classic milestones of adult life — such as getting your own place — seem increasingly out of reach to many, thanks to scarce housing, rising costs and stagnant wages. This feels plausible: in the US, studies show the stated desire for family size has remained consistent even as the birth rate has fallen. And one recent UK-based Rolling Stone investigation quoted many young couples for whom money is indeed the sticking point.

But is that all there is to it? Prospects for Gen Z are not as optimistic as for their Boomer grandparents, but in absolute terms human societies have lived through greater turbulence and gone on having kids. Birth rates remain buoyant, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which consistently makes the top 10 in the Fragile States Index of most unstable countries. So what else is in the mix?

Liberal feminist Jill Filipovic argues that if more women are opting to have fewer or no kids, it isn’t so much about the financial pinch. Certainly, among dog-walking acquaintances locally, I can think of several childless, younger millennial heterosexual couples who seem, on the face of it, pretty sorted: good jobs, comfortably off, often homeowners, sometimes even working flexibly from home. Ideally situated, in other words, for starting a family. And yet, they have no kids. For some in this situation, the dog is an object of minute, loving observation and care, and plays the central role in conversation that children usually do for young parents. Watching this, my sense is that although for some economics is a factor in choosing between human babies and the fur variety, at least some of the time it’s not just about money. It goes, rather, to the heart of what we think the purpose of life is — and thus what we are.

When I took our Tube-travelling dog for a check-up recently, the vet asked if we were planning to have her spayed. In discussing the pros and cons, the vet suggested one benefit would be that, once neutered, “she can just get on with being a dog”. It stuck in my mind: after all, isn’t the reproductive cycle part of being a dog? In what sense would neutering Saffy make her freer to be a dog? What kind of dogness is actively obstructed by the organismic urge to make more dogs?

If, as McGowen suggests, a great many young adults today are directing their parental instincts toward pets, I suspect a central reason is that we’ve embraced an equivalent understanding of humanness. That is, we’ve come to believe that the preconditions for realising yourself fully — especially in the field of sex and relationships — now actively foreclose becoming a parent, or at least radically reduce parenthood to one not especially appealing option among many. Given the pervasiveness of this message, the surprise shouldn’t be that many young men and women are pouring that caregiving urge into “fur babies”, but that anyone is bucking the trend and still making the human sort.

Fertility really started plummeting with the onset of the sexual revolution. While modernity consistently drives down birth rates, in the UK (with the exception of a wartime blip) the average number of children per woman remained above the replacement rate until the 20th century.  It was only in the Sixties, concurrent with legalisation of the Pill, that rates began falling off a cliff, dipping below replacement levels in 1975, the year after contraceptives were made available to everyone free of charge. Britain’s total fertility rate has remained below replacement ever since.

More from this author

The failure of lockdown localism

By Mary Harrington

People are not without agency, of course. My birth, toward the end of the Seventies, attests to the fact that women didn’t abruptly stop having kids just because they could suddenly control fertility. But if contraception acted directly on fertility, it also did so culturally, by making it possible for the first time to treat sex and reproduction as two separate things. This was a seismic technological and cultural change; and one consequence was, as the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale puts it, that it became increasingly normal to see sex not as a “procreational” activity but a “recreational” one. And I suspect it’s this shift, more than anything else, that’s done most to undermine the once-robust cultural association between parenthood and being a fully realised adult human.

Cultural changes take a while to percolate through, but half a century on from the original revolution, this worldview is so normalised that it’s hard to imagine things any other way. For example, in Let’s Talk About It, a 2021 educational book about sex and relationships aimed at teenagers, the procreational function of sex is acknowledged in passing but the overall emphasis is on sex as — in the book’s terms — a “fun physical activity”.

A great many things follow from viewing sex in this way. Firstly, if sex is primarily recreational it genuinely doesn’t matter what sex your partner is, provided they want to have sex with you. “Reproduction aside”, the authors of Let’s Talk About It assert, “your genitals exist to let you feel pleasure with yourself or others (no matter which genitals they may have).”

Secondly, if the principal aim is recreation, then relationship type doesn’t matter. Studies have long shown that where children are concerned, growing up with two married parents is associated with better outcomes. As long as there is a general cultural consensus that sex is associated with children, then, this is likely to be accompanied by a consensus that sexual desire should be generally pointed at marriage or at least long-term relationships. But if sex is mainly recreational, babies are emphatically not viewed as part of the story. Rather, as in Let’s Talk About It, they are discussed as a “risk” attendant on sexual activity: a negative event of the same order as catching a sexually transmitted disease.

It follows, too, that if sex is just a fun leisure activity, then you can have any kind of relationship you like. Accordingly, the book gives equal weighting to monogamy, polyamory, hook-ups, and abstinence, saying only that “Sexual intimacy is a powerful way to feel good and bond with another person, whether it’s for a night or a lifetime”. Taken together, this worldview presents embodiment, sexuality, desire and intimacy as coruscating, infinitely varied expressive options in which what anyone does should be limited only by individual preference and mutual consent. And if this is what being a fully realised person looks like, then by comparison, reproductive sex — the boring old heteronormative kind — is constricting in the extreme.

Suggested reading

The animals trapped in human bodies

By Michael Bond

Imagine you’ve grown up with this set of messages, or at least something like it. Now, imagine you detect in yourself a buried hankering to be a mother or father. In order even to reach the starting blocks for doing anything about this longing, you’d need to unlearn most of your culture’s ambient assumptions about the field of sex and relationships, beginning with the received view that babies are not a source of joy but threat. Then you’d have to question the taboo on connecting sexual desire with its reproductive end, which is to say accept that, if you’re trying to make a baby, it really does matter what genitals your partner has.

In the face of all this, it’s no wonder many who have absorbed some variant of this message simply embrace it, and set out to enjoy the panoply of expressive sexual and emotional options now presented, without judgement, for selection. And this means sidelining parenthood: for within that paradigm, the organismic urge to reproduce, with all the limits it opposes on those expressive options, presents itself not as an aspect of becoming fully human, but an obstacle to the infinite ways in which we might do so. Self-neutering is now, as the vet suggested of spaying Saffy, self-actualisation. And should some glimmer of the ancient drive to care for dependents nonetheless fight its way to the surface, Tinder’s latest ad campaign has the answer.

It’s well-documented that social media is playing a vital part in this conflict: Ukrainians with working smartphones are publicising the terrifying experience of having their home invaded. But in Russia, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram have all been banned, leaving all but the most determined with nothing but fake news and propaganda.

Tinder, though, continues to operate normally. Some in the West have passported to Moscow to talk with beleaguered Russians and find out what their lives are like now. But others are passporting with more explicit political aims. A Slovakian media agency has launched an initiative called Special Love Operation, which encourages Tinder users to bombard Russian singles with images from the war in Ukraine to show them what’s really going on. “The Russians do not know the truth about the war in Ukraine,” its website reads. “Putin ignores the whole world, but maybe he doesn’t ignore his own people. We found a way to bypass censorship on Tinder.”

The agency tells users to change their profile picture to a selfie with a picture of a war-torn Ukrainian city (it provides 12 images), and change their profile description to a paragraph in Cyrillic, which reads: “Please don’t turn away, don’t turn a blind eye — innocent people like you and me are dying in Ukraine. They too wanted love, [to] live and get acquainted — now they sit in basements … lose their loved ones and relatives, freeze.”

Tinder has also become a way to connect meaningfully with those on the ground in Ukraine. Many in the West are desperate to help Ukrainians — especially since the refugee schemes were announced, and then promptly descended into chaos. Tinder has become one way for those in the UK keen to sponsor a refugee through the government’s scheme to connect with someone in need of shelter, albeit a mode uncomfortably adjacent to sex.

Curious, I decided last week to revive my Tinder. I was reporting in Dubai at the time, so started by swiping past a warning that I was in a country that did not respect LGBTQ rights, into a sea of slick-haired men looking for, among other things, “nothing serious”. With a few taps, I had upgraded my Tinder account so that I could passport — not to news-bomb or refugee-seek, but to hear what people are thinking, doing and feeling in both Russia and Ukraine. After all dating apps, unlike Twitter, encourage people to share their thoughts privately.

More from this author

Why women are faking it

By Zoe Strimpel

I swiped in Moscow for a few days, and then in Kyiv and Odessa, sending messages that were as transparent as possible: I made it clear that I was concerned and curious to hear the perspective of individuals caught up in a hyper-reported crisis. I was friendly but non-flirtatious. I set my search to both men and women but got messages — and responses — only from men. The dozen or so from each country who I communicated with seemed content to converse without any sexual or romantic overlay, though a couple of Muscovites offered to show me around their city in the hazy future when this was all over.

For some Russians, everyday life has transformed since the invasion. With the mass exodus of Western companies, many connections with the outside world have been abruptly severed, along with options for getting out physically (flights to and from 36 countries, including the EU, the US and UK have been banned). My first Russian connection, a pale young call centre worker who remotely helps people fix their cars, messaged in under a minute after I swiped: “I would love to leave Moscow, from Russia. Maybe you can help me.”

He was translating his Cyrillic into English online and asked me to do the same. I enquired about the situation and what he thought of it. “I am very glad that I do not watch the TV that we have,” he told me. “I’m against. Now the sanctions this month are just beginning to feel them. We will feel them after April 1, when there will be nothing on the shelves, and in 3 months people will go hungry. Can we call on WhatsApp? I will show you a photo … Will you help me?”

I replied that I hoped he would be ok, and we should stay in touch, but I was unsure how I could help him. Still, his profile picture, in which he smiles wanly before St Basil’s, haunts me; I have checked in daily, getting ever-terser bursts of Cyrillic in response.

Most of the men I spoke to in Russia, though, didn’t share his negative view of Putin’s actions. Nikolay, 25, a cocky banking analyst, revealed a frankly sinister perspective. His profile picture featured a man’s silhouette licking a stiletto at the end of a long leg. He said sanctions had had little impact: his work “just reviewed our project pool from Europe to more domestic and east”. He added, “flexibility is key”, with an emoji of a smiling face with a halo. The fact that McDonalds has abandoned its Russian outlets, he said, has just made room for some “cool, a bit more expensive but tasty” Russian equivalent. “The only point is Instagram perhaps.”

More from this author

Why 50-somethings have the best sex

By Zoe Strimpel

As for the invasion: “Putin is the face of Russian community and basically nearly 85-90 per cent see eye to eye … Most Russians understand the reason of it and support our military and I as a former soldier but we regret that we are supposed to kill our ex bros as they were fooled by US.” I asked what he meant by that. “Do you believe US are willing to bring peace and prosperity to Ukraine and other countries they interfere in?” he responded. It’s a question that many Western liberals have posed.

But then Nikolay expanded, warning that the West, like the Roman empire, had become too decadent, and was in for a shock. “I would like my children to raise up healthy, know the history as is it, realize that boy is a boy and girl is girl and to fuck ur friend isn’t appropriate cos then ur nation will die … Western world lost when these things became normal.” And then came Hitler. “Except for the worst things Hitler did he got some good ideas concerning the concept of Europe.” Shocked, but pretending not to be, I asked what he meant. “He made Europe decide how to live, not States”.

Nikolay’s analysis was particularly wide-ranging, but his view of the West as corrupt and devious cropped up repeatedly among the men I chatted to. Alex claimed: “Ukraine bombed Donbas for 8 years, in fact, the US and London benefit from this conflict, since they always have tried to do meanness to the Russians.” “The sanctions spoiled life a little,” he admitted, “but not much.” He was one of the men who offered to show me around Moscow “when the crisis is over.”

Until I passported, the Russian perspectives I’d heard were mostly outraged, against the war, intent on protest and appalled by Putin. But Tinder revealed that a plenty of educated young people do not share that view, offering a depressing glimpse at how deep the Russian threat goes: this is not, after all, a question of one isolated ruler running amok. At the very least, it seems that Russian propaganda has been successful, where the young men I matched with — most of whom had good English and seemed middle class — were concerned. Alex told me, “we don’t really want to fight, it’s just that some countries don’t keep their promise, and so I like London, and people too.”

The Ukrainians I spoke to were less verbose, but didn’t shy away from the need to fight. Vitaly, in Kyiv, said, “the war is going on and we need to fight! It’s scary, but we’re strong and we’ll win!” Alex said some of his friends had joined the army, but that he was working on some “social projects.” I asked about mandatory universal conscription for all men of fighting age, and he clarified that it was “not really all, yet.” His project was “psychological help for Ukrainians and info project to show mental trauma civil people get while the conflict.” He was “also launching YouTube video soon.”

Suggested reading

Putin's toxic masculinity

By Jessa Crispin

Navigating a world of real disaster, peril, anxiety, and fear — all from a comfortable perch in the West — I had expected that the panic and misery communicated by the Muscovite car mechanic would be more widespread, particularly in Ukraine. But instead, the men I matched with seemed either to feel relatively safe, or keen to appear unruffled. The fact that they had time to be on the dating app, of course, suggests they weren’t in the thick of the conflict.

Except, as Russian troops have made clear, you don’t have to be on the sidelines to be on Tinder. There have been reports of Russian troops bombarding Ukrainian women with messages in towns they are about to literally bombard, giving away their classified locations as they go. Dasha, a young woman in Kharkiv, matched with a number of soldiers, including a bearded Chechen fighter calling himself Black. She ended up talking to Belgorod-born Andrei, whose picture showed him in full combat gear wielding a Kalashnikov. “I love travel to Asia, particularly Thailand,” he told Dasha. “But now it’s a difficult time … because no one likes Russia right now.”

Kyiv was also my first taste of Tinder as refugee-sorting tool. I matched with Tom, an Englishman in his 30s, whose profile said he was looking to find someone to sponsor to come and live in his house. There was not a trace of sexual innuendo on his profile. But surely the men using a dating app to find a Ukrainian refugee to house are at least partially aware that Ukrainian women are reputed to be the most beautiful and brainy in the world.

Tom’s opening message to me was all business: “Hi, are you interested in the room/visa sponsorship?” I replied with the truth, asking him how it was going. “It’s proving to be quite difficult as I don’t think the UK’s policy has been published very well,” he wrote, echoing the widespread criticism of those trying to navigate it.

Whether people like Tom’s intentions are entirely innocent is hard to know; humanitarian, political and sexual goals are difficult to distinguish on the battleground of Tinder. But this conflict has highlighted that dating apps can go beyond their basic function, even if the promise and dangers of sex lurk in the background. Where other social media are mouthpieces, possibly to a vast audience, Tinder offers a more intimate view. And so long as it’s used carefully, the app could prove to be one of many powerful yet non-violent weapons in this war.

What might be most remarkable about this document, and the cultural moment in which it exists, is that this final data point doesn’t necessarily make much difference. The spreadsheet in question belongs to an internet personality known as Aella, who views the physical act of love with the detached curiosity of a scientist and the strategic eye of a statistician. She’s a rare bird, not just in her approach to sex but in how she’s successfully parlayed it into a miniature empire: Aella is a former camgirl, now escort, and an elite member of the 1% on the amateur porn-subscription site OnlyFans, where she once netted six figures per month sharing self-produced photos and videos. 

But while it’s not unusual for someone in her line of work to be good at decoupling heart (and hormones) from mind, when Aella appeared in conversation with sex educator Laci Green at last week’s “Hereticon” thoughtcrime conference in Miami, the presentation revealed less about the niche mindset of the sex worker than it did about how ordinary people struggle to connect in a gamified dating landscape driven by data before passion. In the era of the algorithm, the personal brand, the Tinder marketplace, perhaps all sex carries a whiff of transaction, whether or not any money changes hands. And in a world where young, single people are increasingly taught to be frightened of any threat to their safety — emotional, not just physical — the prospect of true intimacy grows ever distant, ever more impossible.

What’s happening in heterosexual couplings now is also, crucially, about what isn’t happening: a sexual famine amongst Gen Z, who are upending the entire romantic landscape as they come of age. There is less sex, but also less dating, less social interaction writ large without the intermediary of a screen.

This isn’t the free love of the sexual revolution, nor the sex positivity espoused by the commitment-free hookup culture that reigned in the early Noughties. It’s something new, and also something post-#MeToo, and perhaps not entirely unrelated to our contemporary obsession with consent as the primary (sometimes only) framework for determining if a given encounter was good or not. Meeting strangers on the internet went in a generational spasm from being maximally unsafe to the only way to do things, as the existence of dating apps rendered the old ways of connecting not just quaint, but creepy.

Our pre-internet rituals were especially fraught with the risk of approaching someone who didn’t consent to be seen as a romantic prospect. Now, every interaction is preceded by the assurance that your crush has contractually agreed to be lusted-after, that no boundaries are being violated.

Suggested reading

The death of intimacy

By Freddie Sayers

At the same time, the idea of sex as something people do for fun seems faded from the public consciousness, perhaps a natural consequence of too many millennial women having discovered that the utopian promise of feminist sex-positivity was laden with hidden negatives; that being able to have sex free of stigma or slut-shaming still comes with costs nevertheless.

For years, women had been thrust into the role of the bad cop, assigned the unpleasant duty of forever resisting the advances of horny men who couldn’t be expected to exercise restraint or good judgment on their own. But having been released from the social obligation to say “no” lest you be labeled a slut, a new pressure emerged to say “yes”, lest you be tarred with the stigma of the sex-negative prude. The result was a generation of women engaging in sex that was, yes, consensual, but also not much fun, especially when it was happening at the behest of a generation of men whose idea of sex was heavily influenced by internet porn. Women cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually, of course.

When you consider how many women have been foundering around for years in the vast grey chasm of sex that is technically consensual but not remotely enjoyable, it’s no surprise that the act itself took a reputational hit. The emerging perception now is that sex is dangerous, dicey, probably not worth the risk — especially as concepts like “trauma” and “abuse” have expanded to include everything from the sting of a lover’s betrayal to the heartbreak when a consensual relationship ends. (See also: the increased use of the word “grooming”, once reserved for the sexual predation of children, to describe flirtatious relationships between consenting adults.) Under this rubric, the idea that someone might engage in physical intimacy for fun seems practically absurd. Young women in the post-MeToo era are taught that they can’t let their guard down for one single moment, while young men are told that they’re always just one misread cue or mixed message away from committing a rape.

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that this generation would take refuge in the safety of dating apps, or, for that matter, in the certainty of transactional sex. Whatever the pratfalls of subscribing to a freelance porn star’s OnlyFans the way some people used to do with Playboy, paying for intimacy outright at least eliminates the dangerous ambiguity that plagues an ordinary dating relationship, where the line between asking and coaxing, or coaxing and coercion, might shift at any moment and leave you standing with your pants down on the wrong side of the line.

Suggested reading

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

Whether it’s settling for an imperfect match or turning to OnlyFans to fill your needs, human beings have always appreciated the security and promise of a sure thing. And when an entire progressive messaging apparatus insists that prostitution is the new empowerment, there’s little to dissuade young women from leveraging the minefield of sexuality into a remunerative side hustle — or young men from gravitating toward it as a safer form of sex.

We may not have quite reached the point where making freelance pornography is a rite of passage akin to attending the prom (even if anecdotes from Green suggest that “Do you have an OnlyFans?” might soon become the new “Will you go out with me?” among the school-age set). But will anyone be surprised when some young, enterprising, self-identified male feminist suggests that subscribing to OnlyFans is the only way to ensure proper consent, actually? Are we, perhaps, already halfway there?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a radical shift in how we conceive of sex, sexuality, self. In the age of social media, sexual orientation is something you identify into, a public performance that requires no partner and no physical follow-through. (Consider also the odd proliferation of straight-married women who identify as “queer,” based on what seems mainly like a conviction that they’re just too interesting to be plain ol’ heterosexual.) It’s all identification, no action, a complete decoupling of sexual identity from the act itself. If this is a sexual revolution, it’s the chastest one we’ve ever had.

At the same time, the battle of the sexes has been arguably won by women, who are outperforming men in everything from education to investment. They best boys in high school and outnumber them on college campuses. They go to grad school in greater numbers and earn the majority of PhDs. And while they haven’t yet flooded boardrooms or executive suites, women are increasingly likely to outearn the men they marry — all of which adds up to a total inversion of the old dating dynamics wherein women with slightly less education or earning power made ideal mates for men with slightly more.

Instead, a whole lot of accomplished, educated, highly-paid ladies are competing in a dating pool that contains a scant few high-achieving men — and if they can’t land one, then their options are to date down, or not at all. In this reality, it’s the women jostling for position, optimising their dating profiles, trying to look good to the algorithm that will in turn serve them up to someone as a desirable catch. And the odds are stacked against them: for reasons that will some day make fascinating fodder for evolutionary psychologists, women are far harsher judges of male desirability than vice versa. Studies suggest that about 80% of women on dating apps are in competition for about 20% of the men.

Suggested reading

Remembering the Women's March

By Esther Manov

The whole enterprise highlights the distinction-without-much-difference between selling yourself in the dating marketplace and just, well, selling yourself. Maybe you’re trying to make money, or maybe you’re trying to get married, but it’s the same hustle, more or less. If you’re not keeping a spreadsheet yourself, you’re just a data point on someone else’s. Except here, the disposability is a feature, not a bug. If your OnlyFans affair bores you, you can just unsubscribe; if your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way and vanish behind a block. No fuss. No muss. No breakup. Tinder, like Twitter, is not a real place.

This might make women like Aella the smart ones: if they’re savvy (and lucky), they can work the system to their advantage instead of fumbling around inside it like blind supplicants. Making metadata of human beings will always be better as a business proposition than as a strategy for human connection — which might explain why, despite the lauded safety and convenience of the apps, Gen Z is not only having less sex but also suffering from greater rates of depression and anxiety.

Dating apps, social media, the sexual marketplace where you can pay for parasocial affairs: all of this has been an attempt to organise not just raw data, but raw humanity, to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy. If it’s all just a numbers game, if you’re getting what you paid for, if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

But they won’t get close enough to touch you, either.

And so maybe this is where the next sexual revolution will emerge: among young people who are tired of trying to connect with the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them. Who resent the hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs. Who would rather risk the pain of an old-school heartbreak. Who understand the difference between being empowered and being a control freak. Who know, in their bones, that they would rather be sorry than safe.

Those she went on dates with frequently turned out to be married, or single and committed to a polyamorous lifestyle. Most, like her, weren’t aiming for a conventional monogamous relationship. One man, around her age, had recently left his wife and two daughters to live in a bedsit and sleep with as many “girlfriends” as he could muster. Rana, a 47-year-old who tells men up front that she is only interested in having lovers, and will never again embrace monogamy, says that every last one of them has joyously accepted her terms.

Once, boomers’ sex lives were seen as an embarrassing topic; now, they’re exciting, worthy of attention from HBO, even. The remake of Sex and the City, And Just Like That, in which original cast members are now in their 50s, starts this week, and it has been heralded by some as the best instalment yet. “Let me tell you,” said star Sarah Jessica Parker in a recent interview, “there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.” As the series will make abundantly clear, sexual glamour is no longer the preserve of the young, although that’s partly thanks to technologies that keep people looking younger longer. Porn has also helped shift the relationship between age and sexiness, certainly for women, thanks to the rise of the Milf category.

Long a feature of the intellectual elite, the rich and the landed, sexual libertinism among the middle-aged is hardly new. It is newer for the middle classes, though, who became, in the West, less monogamous after World War Two. John Updike, in the Sixties, became known for a set of novels in which bored and angry married people, of varying degrees of affluence, took to sleeping with other people, including their friends’ wives and husbands. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote wryly in Couples (1968), set in 1963. (Working class morality before the Seventies was likely to preclude sexual and marital high-jinxery.)

But the picture of suburban, middle-class libertinism has changed. In the Sixties, the typical practitioner was younger, bored and miserable: the average age of couples getting married was lower, and women had fewer opportunities. But this stereotype has been replaced by a breed of boisterously exploratory 50-somethings in unashamed pursuit of personal fulfilment. This is partly because most moral strictures around sexuality have been eroded — including the final taboo of fidelity, which can now be dressed up as “ethical non-monogamy”, a phrase that now recurs on dating apps.

Suggested reading

Why women want sugar daddies

By Zoe Strimpel

We have the progressive young to thank for this: Sietzke, a 57-year-old divorcee with four lovers, tells me that “people my sons’ age” — they are 25 and 28 — have “also helped by making it easier to bring these things up, to talk about them openly”. But “ethical non-monogamy” actually leaves some young people, especially women, frustrated or worse in their quest to find someone to settle down with; it’s actually well-to-do older people who seem to be reaping the sexual fruits. Some of these are bitter: STI rates in the over-50s doubled between 2002 and 2012, and have kept steadily rising.

And so we are at a strange pass. As the olds are merrily fucking, rates of sexual activity in the young have dropped. The preoccupation with being ‘correct’ is perhaps to blame, as well as the sheer barrage of terminology evident on all apps, but particularly on Feeld, the “dating app for couples and singles”, which describes itself as “a space where you can explore your identity” and “start connecting with open-minded humans”. Scrolling through an account, I struggled to understand what the men were saying. “A Dom [dominant] looking for FWB [friends with benefits], etc etc, I don’t prefer ONS [one night stands]…” wrote one. Another, defined as a “Man Queer”, introduced himself thus: “Playfights, cuddling, kissing, lake swimming are all good things. Maybe you want to do them? Say hi, make me feel pretty J.” A pan-sexual 29-year old’s “interests” were “crossdressing, pegging, cum play, lingerie, eye contact”.

The men might have been lovely people, but the way they presented themselves romantically was alien and didactic, even to me, a fairly liberal 39-year-old. The rise of these highly specific demands come, I suspect, from the infiltration of an identitarian politics into the bedroom — one that prizes kink and the erosion of boundaries as ‘inclusive’. Living on the internet has also given many young people a sense of entitlement to instant, bespoke results. Schooled in getting exactly what they want, they’re met with the confounding reality that humans are messier and needier than is convenient.

Suggested reading

Mary Gaitskill teaches us to embrace complexity

By Esther Manov

Back in the over-50s pool, there seems to be less taxonomising of self and kinks, and those who have had children seem less phased by the complications of having ‘lovers’ rather than either casual hook-ups or a conventional relationship. Many are simply going for broke, hoovering up what sensual pleasures they can — because they can. “As you get older — it’s sort of an Eastern idea — you sort of think, all you’ve got is now, which is much more valuable than a future I really think,” says Sietzke. In other words, age is a freeing agent. “There’s a liberation that comes from being older,” says Rana. ”You know life doesn’t last forever, so there’s an added incentive to give anything a try.”

Rana also points to the fact that being “financially independent” helps. Young people, understandably, are more likely to be focused on the future, and with getting on the housing ladder out of reach for most of them, especially those in the south, the quest for a partner is also a strategy for accruing financial stability and property — and a basis for having children. After her divorce, in her early 50s, Sietzke recalls being constantly told by well-meaning folk that she would meet someone again. It irritated her. “Finding someone is such a construct — someone? What do they mean by that?”

When you’ve had marriage and kids, this perspective makes sense. But for the millennials yet to pull off financial stability and a family, the old, unsexy quest for ‘someone’ may feel more natural. Libertinism is perfect when your traditional romantic life, and its fruits (children), are behind you. Those with the desire for a family and a home in front of them may feel that the joys of free love are not theirs to enjoy. Yet.

Intriguingly, while reporting on the sexist horrors of Tinderland, Sales was using the app herself, by her own admission addicted to it. In her compulsive new memoir, Nothing Personal, she admits that as the proofs of her Vanity Fair article arrived in her inbox, she was messaging the young Abel, an exchange that would lead to his appearance at her Manhattan apartment a few days later — and a multi-year involvement that friends came to call a “situationship”. This description wasn’t to do with the age gap, but with the “casualisation” of dating. As Sales stresses, the barrage of choice offered by internet dating has “made marriage and committed relationships look less attractive and less necessary, especially for straight men”. Her entanglement with Abel was never going to be a relationship, then, to the dismay of a smitten-but-realistic Sales.

It’s become received wisdom that apps — the delivery devices of hook-up culture — encourage a kind of callousness that is particularly damaging to women, for whom purely transactional sex is more likely to be a downer. Tinder’s founders are archetypes of the Silicon Valley “tech bro”, who dress up poor treatment of women as sexual revolution. But despite this, something surprising is happening: the inversion of powerful truisms about women’s age and sexual desirability.

Until recently, it was a basic assumption that women age out of the fray, our peak time of sexual desirability being our late teens and twenties. This idea was sharpened by a raft of inaccurate studies in the 1980s suggesting that after 30, women’s fertility sinks like a stone. In Bridget Jones, published in 1996, the heroine ­is a “spinster” at 32. Even in 2014, dating and relationship “expert” Katy Horwood wrote that women in their thirties must “either compromise or dust down your spot on that shelf”. Just last year, Made in Chelsea star Ashley James told how she had a “meltdown” on the eve of her 30th: “I didn’t feel old enough to be… well, old. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t even in a relationship.”

James felt she had “run out of time” and remembered hearing people talk about women who were single at 30 as being “left on the shelf”, their “looks fading”. Part of the problem, perhaps, is the fact that older men have continued pursuing younger women.

More from this author

Why 'Labor of Love' is a feminist masterpiece

By Zoe Strimpel

Now, however, the middle-aged woman has become a prime target for younger men, not only for sex but in some rarer cases for relationships too. Sales never has trouble getting matches on Tinder, and the age difference between her and her lovers was dramatic: about 25 years. She’s not the only one. High profile examples include Kate Beckinsale, who at 43 was caught kissing 21-year-old comedian Matt Rife; at 45, she dated 25-year-old comedian Pete Davidson. This reshuffle has also become a trend among ordinary folk.

Why have young men switched the focus of their sexual energy on to middle-aged women? The most obvious explanation is that life is imitating porn, where the Milf (“Mother I’d like to fuck”) has seen a stratospheric rise. In 2018, Milf porn was the third most searched for category. As Sales writes, this is in part thanks to the “megastardom” of Lisa Ann, the 49-year-old porn actress who became “the world’s most famous Milf” after the release of her 2008 satirical video about Sarah Palin: Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? Lisa Ann combined character with beauty, and an upbeat image of the pornographic potential of mature female sexuality.

There is, of course, something empowering — even thrilling — in the age reversal; the sudden realisation that being a woman in your late 30s, 40s or 50s does not mean sexual invisibility, but rather its opposite. “It wasn’t only the swiping I was getting addicted to, but the attention of all these excited young men,” Sales writes. But when I interviewed her recently for a radio documentary I’m making about singleness, she was keen to stress that however many young men were desperate for sex with her, the experience should still be seen in terms of an overarching misogyny.

The examples offered in Nothing Personal certainly chronicle some appalling behaviour, from the rude to the threatening. As well as more respectful missives, men routinely sent messages — “I’m thinking we do a few tequila shots, I do some coke on your ass, pull your hair back and bend you over while listening to Zeppelin IV on vinyl” — and, even worse, desires — including for rape simulation — clearly influenced by porn.

Suggested reading

Do men love bitches?

By Louise Perry

Of course, older women have many obvious attractions: they are more likely to be confident and solvent, for instance. But the Milf idea thrives because it links to a kind of power-play integral to BDSM, which has become one of the most popular genres of sex. Older women are more likely to initiate sex, and in a kink-mad era in which the more transgressive something is the better, this role reversal no longer seems to challenge traditional masculinity. Instead, it is simply shifted into the category of “hot”.

The Milf figure also caters to complexes born of the chaotic conditions of the contemporary erotic-romantic landscape. Justin Lehmiller, who has researched the sexual fantasies of American men, found that men keen on Milf porn often suffer from relationship and attachment anxieties, and see a sexualised maternal figure as a source of comfort. “They’re worried that their partner might leave and they need quite a lot of reassurance,” says Lehmiller. Most young men on dating apps do not appear to be thirsting for a “partner”, but for men frightened of sexual rejection, which can be immediate, it’s not hard to see why an older woman — and especially a mother — might seem more sympathetic and more attractive.

When it comes to men their own age, then, young women seem to be drawing the short straw sexually (older men still prefer younger women). Their relative immaturity and inexperience seems to be held against them, and they are perceived as more likely to put the pressure on long-term commitment. Older women are (misleadingly) seen as lower-maintenance and more straightforward — or, Sales might add, as easier punching-bags. But if 20-something men are turning away from 20-something women, the feeling may well be mutual: young women are deeply frustrated with their counterparts, and seem to be looking to date older men instead.

Suggested reading

Is dating discrimination?

By Ralph Leonard

There is nothing romantic, or particularly feminist, then, about the sudden emergence of middle-aged women as sexual hot property on dating apps; older women are treated no better than the young. And all women are struggling to find long-term partners in the current landscape. Still, as an alternative to the complete invisibility, or worse, mockery, that used to surround single women over 35, being a 43 or 53-year-old with the option to be inundated with sexual attention from gorgeous 25-year-olds is surely preferable.

It makes a nice change from being pummelled by narratives about decline. In the Eighties, for instance, the apparent cliff-dropping of fertility was used as a way to jab at women pursuing careers. After the feminist gains of the Seventies, as Susan Faludi argued in 1991, the following decade saw a “firebombing” of women, and the “backlash” continued, more subtly, for decades. In the media, everything from the burned-out “superwoman” to “the spinster boom” and “the infertility epidemic” were, Faludi pointed out, held in opposition to the virtuous, happy, stay-at-home, married Mom.

Nobody much, at least on the apps, seems to be thirsting for a virtuous Mom now. And Milfs, especially older Milfs, are past their fertility peak, and in some cases their window altogether. This suits today’s young men, who, as well  being unschooled and uninterested in commitment, seem oblivious to women as potential mothers of their children.

Flexibility and the ability to move frictionlessly through the world have come to be prized in all areas of life. The direction of travel in romanceland, to some extent, reflects this — dating has evolved to offer maximum freedom and minimal cramping of style. In this sense it suits the Milf as much as the younger man. Many 50-something women, including Sales, are busy, with parenting commitments and demanding jobs. Young whippersnappers who can deliver sex on a plate and nothing more might therefore appeal.

The trouble is, sex gets complicated. Sales isn’t the first woman to catch feelings during a fling; as Erica Jong realised back in the Seventies, there is — for women anyway — no such thing as the truly zipless fuck. Today’s dating scene may be convenient but, like the fast food hurried to your door by Deliveroo, it’s also often unhealthy.

One such example was in 2018, when one of the housemates, India Willoughby, a TV journalist who was once a man but had transitioned into a transwoman, asked her fellow housemates whether they would go out with a transwoman.

“I believe it’s your choice… I would choose not to,” replied the RnB singer Ginuwine. Willoughby then asked: “You would go out with a woman?” “Yes,” Ginuwine replied. “But you wouldn’t go out with a transsexual woman?” Willoughby hit back. “No,” replied Ginuwine. As the awkward conversation rumbled on, Willoughby suggested that Ginuwine give her a kiss, but he leaned back and said “no”.

Suggested reading

No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

This encounter provoked a social media storm at the time. Some believed Ginuwine was transphobic for rejecting Willoughby. Others insisted he had a right to his preferences. Some even suggested that Willoughby was sexually harassing Ginuwine, by stepping over boundaries he made clear.

Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as “Is it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?” are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they ‘should’ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more ‘open’.

Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are) . But it’s worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or ‘corrective’ rape to “make them straight”. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?

This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, “dating is discrimination”. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?

Suggested reading

Can science ever debate trans issues?

By Jesse Singal

No one should dictate to others who they can or can’t date, love or sleep with. Historic attempts to do so  —  whether through slavery, arcane patriarchal customs or socially and religiously enforced ‘lifelong’ monogamous marriage  —  have led to oppression, trauma, unhappiness and neurosis. Think of the countless unhappy marriages many closeted gay people have had to endure — because they could not be honest about who they really wanted to love, because of the intense social stigma and shame attached to their sexuality. Without the freedom to choose who you date, the modern achievements of personal autonomy and individual liberty are negated.

That said, the question must be asked: are our dating and sexual preferences innocent? Where do they come from? Attraction is a biological impulse, but what lies behind it? Darwinists would say they grow out of our evolutionary origins. Since women are supposedly the ‘choosier’ of the sexes, they choose men who can ‘provide’ for them and protect them. Freudians would say our preferences originate from our childhood. According to the Oedipus complex, men unconsciously choose partners who reflect the most attractive qualities of their mothers (the Electra complex makes the same case about women and fathers.)

Frantz Fanon, meanwhile, would say that forces such as racism and colonialism play a big part in influencing people’s desires and attraction. A racist society constructs certain standards of beauty based on ‘whiteness’, which racial subordinates must conform to if they want to be respected as having any erotic worth. Whiteness equals desirability, so blacks must assimilate to gain recognition and respect. Historically, black women have bleached their skin and relaxed their hair to fit a Eurocentric image — which black men, in turn, have coveted it. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin White Masks:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man…Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Few people would need to read these theories to know that many of us have a ‘type’. You might prefer partners of a certain height, status, hair colour, body shape, and so on (there is even data to suggest that some people are attracted to those who look similar to them.) Such preferences may be oddly specific, and rather superficial, but they are mostly innocuous.

More from this author

Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

Some people seek a partner from a similar religious or cultural background — in the hope that this will make it easier for them to relate to one another, or out of a desire to pass on their heritage, traditions and values to future children. This is technically exclusionary for potential partners who lay outside this category — and may even be narrow minded — but such preference is not especially egregious. Still, can predilections mutate into something more sinister?

Because of globalisation, migration, social liberalisation and the rise of online dating, interracial dating has never been more prevalent; the stigma attached to it has mostly dissipated. In 2011 —  the last time such statistics were recorded — it was found that nearly 9% of people in England and Wales were living as part of an interracial relationship (up from 7% in 2001). Moreover, there is data to suggest a correlation between the rise of online dating apps and an increase in interracial relationships.

Yet, there is a paradox. Christian Rudder, co-founder of the dating site OkCupid and author of the 2014 book Dataclysm, which uses data trends to analyse human behaviour, has argued people’s use of online apps doesn’t match up with their professed attitudes. Most people will say, when surveyed, that they are open to dating someone from a different ‘race’; in reality, they tend not to be. According to Rudder’s data, collected between 2009 and 2014 from DateHookup ‘Let’s Meet scores’, women in particular generally preferred men of their own ‘race’.

More brazen are those who, on dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder and Bumble, nonchalantly state their racial preferences on their profile. It’s not uncommon to see caveats like, “Not attracted to Asian men”, “ I don’t date black women”, “I only date white girls” — and it’s difficult to argue that this has nothing to do with racism, which has historically played a role in influencing ideas of who is desirable and who is not.

White women  —  or a particular image of white women  —  have been placed at the top of this aesthetic hierarchy as the paragon of human beauty, with black women languishing at the bottom, portrayed as ugly, unattractive and overweight, and Asian men stereotyped as ‘sexless’, meek and less endowed compared to other ‘races’. American research seems to confirm this, indicating that Asian men and black women are more likely to be excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts as potential dating partners on dating apps.

Suggested reading

The ruthlessness of the sexual marketplace

By James Bloodworth

Herein lies the uncomfortable truth about our so called ‘dating economy’: discrimination is the name of the game. If you are considered attractive or ‘high value’ according to dating market logic, then you have myriad opportunities to meet new people, pursue novel erotic experiences and find romantic fulfilment. You don’t have to be restricted to people within your ‘community’. You can make your own choices and exercise your sexual autonomy to the fullest extent you desire.

But if you are considered unattractive and ‘low value’ then you will be excluded from what Henry Miller called ‘The World of Sex”, a place of freedom and adventure, erotic fufillment and pleasure, and love and companionship. To be deemed undesireable and ‘unfuckable’, of having no erotic worth at all is painful and soul crushing. This shouldn’t merely be sneered at as the delusional whining of losers drunk on entitlement. Human beings need to be loved by others, to pleasure and be pleasured by others, to develop intimate connections with others, to have fun with others. Being the social species we are it demands it. People are not wrong to want it and feel alienated when it proves extremely hard to achieve, because they are not desired by others for being who they are.

In modern society, our erotic selves and sexuality and our innate need for companionship are so intertwined with our personality that to not have the opportunity to fulfil them because you are a sexual minority rejected by the dominant culture, a racially stereotyped, or a socially awkward person is immensely alienating. These conditions will only be heightened even more with the economic decline and further atomisation resulting from Covid-19 and the restrictions meant to contain it.

Yet, discrimination is simply a fact of dating. It doesn’t matter if you are solidly monogamous, polyamorous or a promiscuous nymphomaniac: distinctions are made between those they are attracted to and those they are not attracted to. Dating is not a democracy and nor should it be. This is because choosing potential romantic and sexual partners is rather different from making friends or acquaintances, since these are people who become part of our intimate space, who we may share our bodies and the most personal aspect of our lives with. But, while we have a right to our preferences, we should also be able to critically reflect on why we desire what we desire and what influences it.

Nearly 60 years since the dawn of the sexual revolution, we find ourselves in a frosty romantic hinterland of wants and taxonomies, animated by power-play rather than passion; kink rather than personality, and in which only the most callous can survive.

Since it’s all become so much work, it’s no wonder nobody much can be bothered to have it anymore. The British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) — one of the world’s most thorough sex surveys, conducted once a decade since 1991 — released its latest findings for the period up to 2012, showing that British sex lives are on a long downward drift. The numbers of both men and women who had not had any sex in the past month rose to nearly 30 per cent; in 2001 it was 23% of women and 26% of men.

What’s most striking is that sex is dropping off among what was traditionally the horniest demographic — young men. The proportion of Americans aged between 18 and 29 who reported having no sex in the past year more than doubled between 2008 and 2018, to 23% — a bigger proportion than among the over-50s, according to the 2019 University of Chicago General Social Survey.

Over this same period, the share of men aged 18 to 29 who had not had sex in a year nearly tripled to 29 per cent, while the rise among women was a modest eight percentage points, to 18%. The male pullback from sex in America echoes well-documented trends in Germany and Japan. In 2010, Japan’s population of herbivores — men apathetic towards sexual relationships — accounted for 61% of those in their 20s and 70% in their 30s. And as any number of British women repeatedly flummoxed by male apathy or disregard will tell you, it feels the same here too.

The state of gender in a given society can always be read through the sex lives of its citizenry, and in that regard we are in the grips of a paradox. On the one hand gender differences are being eroded by warriors of woke, who see them as oppressive social constructions. And away from identity politics, the gulf between men and women has never been smaller, by technical, legislative, cultural, professional and social measures.

Yet as they encounter each other in the chambers of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and OkCupid, the climate between men and women is frosty. Everyone is cross and fed up with everyone else for being so rubbish that they have to keep swiping.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

In 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones helped women realise that half the human race (men) might usefully be called “fuckwits” when it came to dating and romance. The dynamics of internet dating, with its illusion of graspable sexual paradise, has either created a new tsunami of apparent fuckwits, or it has made the sheer extent of them inescapable.

Meanwhile, the boredom and jadedness stitched into heavy use of apps (“nope”, “like”, “nope”, “nope”, “nope”, “like”) has produced a ubiquitous undercurrent of queasy unpleasantness. The result is that men, formerly seen as an alternating source of fun, trouble and heartbreak, become “men: ugh”. Women, once the promised land for many a Romeo, become bitches, gold-diggers, game-players, and, most significantly, for a depressing bloc known as “women: meh”.

This sexual stand-off, characterised by simmering distrust and putrid fatigue, oozes off internet dating portals. I’ve often found myself, after a night of binge-scrolling, surprised to remember that dating is filed under “romance”, which is supposed to be — at least at the start — a little about positive, fuzzy feelings or the potential to develop them.

Rather than sought after, one feels lectured, harangued and responsible for doing something terrible simply by existing. Anxiety levels rise, one feels nervous and in trouble. I remind myself, as if waking from a nightmare, that it’s ok; I never have to even meet these men, and never have to speak to them.

Here are some examples of the different types of anger a woman will encounter on a casual swipe-fest: explicitly cross, jaded, and wearing up front the belief that we are all too often more trouble than we are worth. It’s a style characterised by commands and bullet points.

So Joe, “27, entrepreneur” advertises as such
“- No drama (deal with your insecurities before we can engage in good convo)
– Similar morals (which we’ll more than likely suss out in person)
– Good head on your shoulders and is a pure grinder (someone who gets the essence of hard working from the ground up)
– NATURAL HAIR (colouring is cool)
– And most importantly, can dance
– If I’m not your type then do not swipe right’
– DO NOT WASTE OUR TIME WITH DEAD CONVO. BRING SUSTENANCE TO THE TABLE”

Why am I being shouted at? “No drama!” Sometimes I’m dramatic. And dancing — I can’t dance! Stressful scenes flit across my mind. Wellbeing plunges.

Suggested reading

A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

Then there’s “Alo”, 23, who goes down the line of total mockery of the process (and by implication, those they expect to meet). Alo had stated as his profession “prime minister” (funny enough) and in the personal info section simply put “I downloaded this as a joke”. Right then. And there are countless more Joes and Alos.

These men were young — but things don’t necessarily improve with age. Among those old enough to remember the more earnest, excitable world of print personals, there’s still that telltale trace of aggression and of having been burned before by all those terrible women out there. Take Craig, a 41-year-old American who barks terrifying facts and veiled warnings at the women foolish enough to dawdle:

“Neuchatel 3/10-3/12
Cambridge 3/12-3/15
Vienna 3/16-3/19
Brussels 3/19-3/23
Non-monogamous Dom.
Old luddite; I don’t Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. I will meet in person and buy you a drink. Furthermore, single dad, career, travel, etc. I have a complex schedule and place a high value on my free time’”

How you get from here to any encounter that relates to what was formerly considered erotic, intimate, loving or even sexy, beats me. Women have held out more than men against the end of sex — rates of female sexlessness have risen less — but in the end, even we will give up.

Suggested reading

I have seen the damage cannabis does

By Peter Hurst

A number of us already are, with women simply coming offline, choosing friendship instead. In 2017, the Canadian writer Sarah Ratchford wrote a piece called “Why I’m Giving Up Men and Just Staying Home” which explained the disillusionment with modern, digitally-enabled masculinity. “Alongside the wage gap and the emotional labour gap, the antics of softboys, f-ckboys, fading and ghosting constitute a pronounced communication gap,” she wrote.

She describes her choice to pack the whole thing in and focus on friends, and discusses the similar choice of a friend called Paola. “Now, because men can’t seem to hack interpersonal relationships, Paola identifies her friendships as her primary relationships — and she doesn’t see that changing.”

Getting laid has never been so complicated — nor so chilly a business. Attempts to pretend gender binaries don’t exist, the obsession with kink and labels, and the belief that you can gorge as much as you want, in just the way you want, from a digital cornucopia of sexual options, has spelled doom. It’s the end of the affair — with sex — at last.

A controversial new film, The Rise of Jordan Peterson, is full of testimonies such as this one from vulnerable young men who have found something — peace, solace, direction, perhaps? — in the work of Canadian professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson.

Back in 2015, when filmmakers Maziar Ghaderi and Patricia Marcoccia began making a film about Peterson, he already had a sizeable following on the back of a series of YouTube lectures. The filmmakers had originally intended to look at this, but mainly on the professor’s close friendship with indigenous artist Charles Joseph, a Kwakwaka’wakw carver.

Then, in 2016, halfway through making the film, Peterson exploded into the mainstream for quite a different reason.

He posted a YouTube video critiquing Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code which added gender identity and expression to the act’s protected categories. Within a month of being posted, the video clocked up half a million views, propelling him to intellectual superstardom. Ghaderi and Marcoccia decided to change tack and explore the subsequent controversy.

In his response to Bill C–16, Peterson argued that it was wrong to force university staff to address students by their preferred pronouns – ‘they’, ‘ze’, ‘zir’ – on the basis that the path to authoritarianism begins with “attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory”, as he phrased it at the time. The video provoked a furious backlash, as documented in the film, with some students and trans activists at the time calling his comments “unacceptable, emotionally disturbing and painful”.

Suggested reading

What's so unethical about my Jordan Peterson movie?

By Patricia Marcoccia

The film navigates this controversy with nuance and sensitivity. It is a thoughtful examination of why his fans love him and his critics detest him. The filmmakers spend time with Peterson, his family and the young men (though there are woman too) who find solace in his work. At one point, a man rushes up to Peterson in the street to thank him for pulling him out of his depression. Such occurrences happen frequently. But the filmmakers – who describe themselves as left–of–centre politically – spend equal time with the trans activists who feel hurt by Peterson’s objection to Bill C-16.

The film is not a straightforward narrative of good versus evil; you come away with no sense of being browbeaten by the directors into taking a particular point of view. And it is this which appears to have angered the film’s most rambunctious critics, who worry that someone may watch the film and conclude that Peterson is not entirely wrong about everything after all.

Peterson’s superstardom is, to a large extent, built on the wrath of his opponents. At one point in the film, a rabble attempts to use white noise to drown out a speech Peterson is making. To them, Peterson’s opinions are ‘literal violence’, a contorted intellectual rationalisation that the radical left uses to shut down disagreeable opinions.

I’m not the biggest Jordan Peterson fan in the world. I found his reluctance to use the pronouns favoured by trans students to be churlish and petty. I also found his conflation of alternative pronouns with Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism hysterical. There may be something sinister about the trans lobby’s insistence that biological reality must fall by the wayside in order to accommodate something as vague and poorly-defined as gender identity. But it is not the road to the Lubyanka.

Moreover, Peterson comes across at times in the film as narcissistic and conceited, at one point relaying a dream he had in which he appeared to save the world from totalitarianism.

In my opinion, the film pretty much skirted over the real story: the story of his audience. What explains his runaway success within a certain demographic? It’s something that lies at the root of much that is disrupting society at the moment.

Peterson appeals to young men who lack direction. His work is replete with admonitions to “set your house in order” so as to live a meaningful life. “We require routine and tradition,” Peterson cautions readers in his hit book 12 Rules for Life. “That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown – and that is also not good.”

The self-help side of Peterson’s work has brought him massive success, even though much of his oeuvre is unexceptional. Underpinned by a folksy Christian conservatism, the videos deal with mythology, Jungian philosophy, anti-totalitarianism and self-help, with a strong emphasis on personal responsibility. They have titles such as ‘How to stop procrastinating’, ‘Advice For People With Depression’, and ‘Jordan Peterson on the meaning of life for men’ and have racked up tens of millions of views between them.

Suggested reading

Why won't Jordan Peterson heed his own advice?

By Tom Chivers

But the advice he hands out also goes some way to explaining his unpopularity among the bien pensant Left. His YouTube content is very much of the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ variety. Such a message has obvious limits (for an idea of why, see my own book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain). But more significantly, it does not sit well with a culture that increasingly valorises self-flagellation and performative outpourings of self-pity.

Peterson’s lower–middle and working-class followers, who naively take to heart his folksy injunctions to better themselves, are an affront to the notion that real change only comes about through political activism. Left-leaning intellectuals detest self-help, which to them reeks of aspiration. A person should focus on changing the system and not personal betterment, they argue – which is easy enough to say when you aren’t the one languishing in financial and spiritual poverty.

Peterson, though, speaks powerfully to those who find themselves adrift at a time when traditional institutions and structures are increasingly viewed as suspect and even tyrannical. There is a generation of men who were born into fatherless and chaotic families, bereft of stable jobs and meaning, who are being told to stay put and focus on ‘changing society’ by the affluent Left. Their masculinity is impugned as ‘toxic’, while hypergamy (turbocharged by social media) makes it increasingly hard for them to find a date.

Is this burgeoning male resentment really just a thwarted sense of entitlement, as Peterson’s critics suggest? To a point it is. There was always going to be a reckoning for white men once women and other ethnic groups were empowered. We are living through that backlash.

Peterson may be right to dismiss the social constructivist nonsense which concludes that gender is entirely a social construct (a wealth of evidence suggests otherwise), a view he shares, ironically, with trans activists. Yet he would do well to empathise with women’s fears of this being used as a trojan horse by chauvinists and misogynists to justify and entrench inequalities in the workplace and the home. Peterson has also come out with some disturbing remarks around ‘enforced monogamy’, remarks which seem to imply that life was better when women could not access birth control and divorce their spouses.

But regardless of his shortcomings, Peterson is tapping into a genuine phenomenon, the effects of which we cannot ignore. There’s a problem brewing for a generation of men. They are angry, directionless, and, perhaps most important, sexless.

Our promiscuous culture increasingly bends toward the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule whereby 20% of men date 80% of women. Women compete over the most desirable men, while the rest are increasingly turning towards porn and – before long, no doubt – sex robots.

From the same author

How the Left lost all purpose

By James Bloodworth

In just a decade, there has been a three-fold increase in the number of men who have not had sex in the past year. The rise in online dating — encouraged by corporations with a financial interest in keeping people glued to their smartphones — has exacerbated the trend. To quote a recent study of the popular dating app Tinder, “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men”.

This kind of thing was ameliorated in the past by the type of socially enforced monogamy that is romanticised by Peterson. Yet it produced legions of unhappy women who were pressured into ‘settling’ with a man who was by all intents and purposes their inferior. The sexual revolution turned the tables. And invariably, there are men who resent this and believe that the world owes them intimacy.

And this is where I part ways with Peterson. Is it not for the men left behind by the dating market to up their game, instead of complaining about it on Reddit or longing for a halcyon era of obedient wives?

Easier said than done of course. But Peterson counsels precisely this model of self-empowerment when it comes to economics — he rallies against the “aggrieved victimhood” of those living in poverty — however he appears to shift responsibility to women when it comes to sexual inequality.

Peterson’s desire for a return to monogamous norms also contains within it a set of contradictions. Romantic idealism — which continues to prop up our (still broadly) monogamous culture — must shoulder some of the blame for the mercurial rage of many isolated men. From an early age, society bombards both sexes with unrealistic expectations around romance. Individuals are conditioned by Hollywood movies, popular magazines and soap operas to let ‘fate’ take care of their love life. “Just be yourself and it’ll happen eventually,” runs the advice.

For men, who are still expected to initiate most romantic encounters, this is atrocious advice. What if  ‘being yourself’ hasn’t worked in the past? What if women on dating apps find you unattractive? What if crippling anxiety prevents you from even starting a conversation with a woman?

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

Men are expected to understand these things automatically. When many do not, society shows little sympathy, dismissing them as pathetic losers – the word ‘Incel’ has itself become an online insult in recent times.

Insofar as Peterson provides young men with an alternative to the bottomless despair of the Incel movement, he does so by encouraging them to see beyond their own solipsistic rage.

Stop whining on the internet. Stand up straight. Leave the house. Join a gym. Learn how to hold eye contact. Start small (tidy your room) and build momentum on the back of every seemingly insignificant victory.

It is easy enough to sneer at this sort of folksy advice from the lofty heights of a job and a relationship. Yet it seems a better bet for some than the idealistic alternatives provided by the mainstream (‘be yourself and you’ll be fine’) and the fatalistic despair of the Incel movement (‘you will never be good enough’).

Had the film looked at some of the issues outlined above, rather than just focusing on an argument over pronouns, The Rise of Jordan Peterson would have been a more compelling prospect. It is male resentment that is driving much of the populist tumult that is shaking democracy, and it is male resentment that underlies the runaway success of Jordan Peterson. The film features quite a few clips of fans relaying to the camera how Peterson’s work has helped them, but a more in-depth look at this aspect of Peterson’s appeal would have been welcome.

For those who are tired of the usual polemical attacks on Peterson — which for the most part deploy bucket-loads of conceit and sarcasm in order to avoid engaging seriously with anything he says — it was refreshing to watch a film which laid things out in a straightforward manner.

The viewer is given room to make up his or her own mind. Though as evidenced by the rowdy protests against the film, we live during a time when even this is considered revolutionary.