- This video is brought to you by Keeps.
(upbeat music)
What's up, guys?
Michael here to talk about the main cause
of carpal tunnel syndrome in 35 and unders:
swiping on dating apps.
If you're looking for love online,
chances are you've racked up a fair share of heartbreak,
or at least mild disappointment.
While offering a seemingly infinite supply
of potential suitors,
dating apps can feel like an endless cycle of swiping,
forced witty banter, awkward coffee dates, mutual ghosting,
and, ultimately, going to bed alone.
So how did we get here?
Is online dating a unique techno-sexual dystopia,
or the natural culmination
of centuries of courtship rituals?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition
"Online Dating: Is Love Just a Commodity?"
But before we dive in,
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Now, back to the show.
To contextualize the modern dating scene,
let's look to history.
For much of dating history,
heterosexual courtship was all about getting a ring
on that finger.
Most women weren't allowed to work,
and thus sought financial stability via marriage,
while men were incentivized by that sweet, sweet dowry.
- What's wrong with her?
She's beautiful, she's rich, she's got huge
tracts of land.
- [Michael] Courtship was largely a private enterprise
arranged between families,
with women essentially functioning as bartering tools
to solidify social alliances.
Potential candidates were evaluated based on class
and social status.
Sociologist Eva Illouz also notes that most young people
were pressured to accept their first reasonable option.
Love was nice if it happened,
but this was mostly a regimented transaction.
- Not all of us can afford to be romantic.
I've been offered a comfortable home and protection.
That's a lot to be thankful for.
- Charlotte. - I'm 27 years old.
I've no money and no prospects.
- [Michael] But then, in 1840, Queen Victoria
and legendary Wife Guy Prince Albert entered the chat.
- For me, this is not a marriage of convenience.
(dramatic music)
- No.
I think it will be a marriage of inconvenience.
- [Michael] They were famously head-over-heels in love,
a romance that got only more legendary
when Victoria publicly mourned Albert
for 40 years after his death.
Royals, as you may know,
were basically the original influencers.
So this romance, coupled with the mainstreaming
of Enlightenment ideals about personal fulfillment,
helped make marrying for romantic love
start to seem important, and even noble.
For upper-class women, this era of courtship
meant suitors leaving calling cards
and arranging chaperoned meetings.
Like Bumble, but your frowning step-mom is also there,
just sitting and judging.
What's important is that courtship now entailed
assessing compatibility between families,
personalities and so on,
rather than just settling for the first Joe Schmo
who threw a stone at your window.
Working-class women, somewhat empowered by the wage economy,
were less bound by ceremony,
and often lived in apartments too small
for men to come calling anyway.
They met men on their way to work, in shops,
or at music halls.
They dated, had sex, juggled a bevy of admirers,
and it wasn't uncommon to be pregnant on your wedding day.
Dating around wasn't just a fun time,
it was also considered essential to finding the right match
in what Illouz calls
the, "Emergence of a self-regulated market of encounters."
But here's the thing.
In the dating culture that emerged
at the end of the 19th century,
money became even more central
to the direct interactions of the couple,
because now dating meant going on dates,
and going on dates tends to cost money.
As scholar Beth L. Bailey explains,
"Courtship was largely construed and understood
"in models and metaphors of modern industrial capitalism."
As dates moved from living rooms into dance halls and bars,
money was what Bailey calls
a, "Symbolic currency of exchange,"
where men needed to pay to gain access to women's company.
By the 1920s, she notes, "Dating provided a new frontier
"for public competition through consumption."
As a result, young people
started defining themselves as commodities:
men by how much they could afford
to spend on theater tickets,
women by how much they were worth spending on.
This fittingly coincided with the explosive growth
of the consumer economy,
which transformed ideals of romantic love.
If men now needed to have money to burn on vaudeville shows,
women now needed to look like pre-war Kardashians.
That's in large part due to the increased sexualization
of women in the media and advertising.
Industries like cosmetics relied on enticing imagery
to create demand for new products.
As Illouz notes, before the 1920s,
the word sexy was actually considered derogatory.
It was more preferable to shack up with somebody who was,
say, super moral or reliable.
But as mass media began pumping out images
of eroticized female bodies, and, soon enough, male bodies,
sexual attraction began figuring into people's choices
in a much bigger way.
As marital selection became increasingly less based
on your social status and more on subjective things
like sex appeal, the ability to land a regulation hottie
started factoring more into people's conceptions
of individual self worth.
As Illouz puts it, under modernity,
"Sexuality thus becomes closely intertwined
with social value."
But of course, nothing spoils the sex party
quite like a pair of world wars.
Couples were split apart,
with courtship relegated out of the dance hall
and back to the post office.
But it went beyond these basic logistics.
The idea of a chaste woman who stayed home
loyally awaiting the troops' return became hugely popular,
especially during World War I.
And that chaste woman became something
of a commodified trophy for men down in the trenches
to fantasize and sing about.
♪ My girl back home ♪
♪ I'd almost forgot ♪
♪ A blue-eyed kid ♪
♪ I liked her a lot ♪
- While the fellas were away,
working-class and middle-class women also spent more time
in the public sphere, doing man stuff like going to job
and sometimes wearing trousers.
But especially after World War II, the return of the troops,
plus rising pressure to marry early, pushed a lot of women
back into the home.
Some of the rush to get married was out of anxiety
about the scarcity of eligible men post-war,
which reinforces a marketplace vibe.
But this also had other important economic implications.
Whereas married women had once been treated
like pure commodities,
housewives were now the main consumers of commodities.
Men went to work, produced goods, accumulated capital,
and their wives spent that money buying more goods.
Thus, the marriage industrial complex became vital
to keeping the consumption-driven 1950s economy humming.
Meanwhile, for the burgeoning youth
consumer culture of the 1950s,
going steady became a coming-of-age dating ritual
in its own right, complete with varsity pins
and a sexy game called Two Straws, One Milkshake.
♪ Did they really get pinned ♪
♪ Going steady ♪
♪ I was hoping they would ♪
♪ Going steady ♪
- By the mid-1950s, 1 in 10 middle school students
would go steady at least once before turning 11.
Of course, I better than doubled those stats myself.
Going steady is essentially the origin
for how we conceive of dating today,
in all its serial monogamy.
And make no mistake, just as it was for their parents,
consumption was inextricable from this boom in young love.
Shopping and investment became metaphors for dating.
You needed a car to neck in, a class ring to exchange,
a letterman jacket to drape over your date's shoulders,
records to dance to and turntables to play them on,
meals at the malt shop, and so on.
And dating remains a consumption-driven activity
to this day, even if we've swapped banana splits
for charcuterie boards,
and class rings for Netflix passwords.
Now, the 1960s and '70s, as you probably know,
brought varying degrees of free love and rebellion
against the previous decades' sexual
and romantic constraints.
But by the 1980s, we saw a return to conservative values
in pretty much every element of American society.
It's around this time that the 1950s were reimagined
as a nostalgic utopia of happy families
born from people who'd just lost their virginity.
The free-market-obsessed '80s also saw the ascendancy
of dating technology,
like computer-based dating services,
or the truly heinous video dating boom.
- Hi, I'm Maurice.
I'm an executive by day, and a wild man by night.
- These companies promised to help you, say,
"Do comparison shopping of potential dates
"from the comfort and privacy of your own home."
Again, we see the language of capitalism
continuing to permeate dating.
And then, came the internet.
Now, technically, the earliest version
of computerized dating came from Harvard in 1965,
when some students created Operation Match
a half-century before your favorite sunscreen enthusiast
would start your least-favorite social networking site
in hopes of getting laid.
This 75-question-long survey helped
tens of thousands of people
learn about well-suited potential new mates
in its first year alone.
And its algorithmic match process has since been emulated
by modern dating sites.
These companies also used the knowledge
gained from those questionnaires to mine consumer data,
a practice that would only grow in the years to come.
As the internet entered more homes, companies like AOL
funneled people into chatrooms, bulletin boards, and so on,
based on mutual interests, which inevitably led to dating.
The first dating site, Kiss.com, launched in 1994,
followed shortly thereafter by Match.com in 1995.
And by 1998, Nora Ephron made the world a better place
with the film "You've Got Mail."
Side note: we actually made a video
about how that delightful film is secretly fascist,
so check it out.
Now, early online daters encountered plenty of stigma
and were often painted as desperate.
But the more online our lives have gotten,
the more mainstream online dating has become.
By 2007, Americans alone spent $500 million
on online dating services,
making it the second-most-profitable sector
of the internet economy.
And we all know what the highest industry is.
The one you have to open up the anonymous browser
to go look at so it's not in your history
so that if your mom uses your computer
that things doesn't happen again like it did that one time.
So it comes as no surprise that online dating services
are expected to rake in over 3 billion dollars this year
in the United States alone,
especially in light of how a cornucopia of new dating sites
and apps have cropped up, boasting new innovations
like Tinder's gamified swiping interface
or Bumble's women-led dating model.
A benefit of online dating
is the way it creates opportunities for people
from specific communities to connect with each other:
LGBTQ+ folks, people in rural areas,
elderly or disabled people, hell, even fly fishermen.
It can also be a relatively unthreatening way
to meet new people,
and sometimes to screen out potentially-bad matches.
But we see something else going on
that we think does a lot to explain why online dating
can feel so hard, and occasionally, pretty depressing.
Now, we've talked about the intersection
between dating and economics, from dowries to theatre dates
to the consumer demand for engagement rings
that cost a month's salary.
But we'd argue that online dating basically takes
the commodification of the actual act of dating
that cropped up around the turn of the century
and turned it up to eleven.
- Put it up to 11. - 11, exactly.
- How?
Well, as scholars Rebecca D. Heino, Nicole B. Ellison,
and Jennifer L. Gibbs note in their article
"Relationshopping," dating sites are typically designed
like online shopping platforms,
evoking the sensation of literally window-shopping
for a match.
They write that, "The functionality and design
"of online dating sites encouraged participants
"to adopt a marketplace orientation
"towards the online dating experience."
Now, that doesn't necessarily make Tinder sinister,
but it could have real implications
for the kinds of relationships you're most likely to find.
In "Relationshopping," the authors write that online dating
may encourage an attitude where prospective partners are,
"Commodified as products to be sold,
"assessed, purchased, or discarded."
Being discarded is probably fine
if you were only looking for a one-time hookup,
but it lends a depressing air
if you're in search of a long-term relationship.
Illouz notes that it also leads
to hyper-critical assessments
that render, "Potential partners commensurable, measurable,
"and comparable with each other."
And if sexual attractiveness became a big deal in the '20s,
it's only been magnified in importance,
because these apps facilitate a lightning-fast
superficial decision making process
typically based on a few flattering photos.
Online dating also massively expands
your pool of potential matches,
creating a sense of interchangeability.
How many Daniels can you match with
before they all blend into the same guy in cargo shorts?
And this replicates the overall sensation
we have as consumers today,
where we're similarly empowered to choose
between a dizzying array of 125 toothpaste brands.
What's more, in the logic of online dating,
potential matches are reduced and scrutinized
by isolated attributes,
making them easier to reject or discard.
Research has found that the ease of discarding
online dating partners may even continue
into a relationship.
That's partly because of the lack
of an integrated social environment,
i.e. shared friends or communities,
which makes it feel easier to ghost.
Overall, Illouz argues, "Internet dating sites
"display the consumerist logic of increasingly narrowing,
"defining, and refining tastes,
"and comparing among alternative possibilities."
While it's obviously good to be picky
when it comes to choosing a long-term partner,
applying consumerist logic to actual human beings
seems less picky, more icky.
And it's not just your potential dates
that are being commodified here.
The authors of "Relationshopping" also note
that online dating encourages self-commodification
via a, "Tangible and explicit assessment
"of one's own perceived desirability
"in ways less likely to occur
"with traditional face-to-face communication."
That is to say, participants in online dating
are constantly receiving reams of data
that cause them to assess their own objective value
in the dating world.
Which can feel pretty harsh.
So what does this all say about us?
Well, modernity, Illouz explains,
has been all about the rise of the rational
in just about every aspect of life,
from psychology to weight-loss fads.
Online dating reflects the rationalization of love,
where we're encouraged to assess potential dates
as laundry lists of attributes
rather than messy, complex human beings.
The endless supply of consumer choices
that defines late capitalism has been effectively mapped
onto human relationships.
While some of us may romanticize
the 1950s model of going steady long-term,
the tech we're using to find relationships
may be counterproductive in achieving that goal.
Think about it.
After World War II, women settled into marriage quickly
due to the scarcity of eligible men.
In contrast, the seeming abundance of matches
provided by online dating might incline us
to not settle down at all, or to discard a potential mate
simply because there might be a shinier object
just a click away.
Don't get us wrong, exploring your options is great.
But when it's treated like the same process
as finding the right Netflix show,
it starts to feel a little cynical?
And the commodification of human beings
on dating sites goes even deeper.
Hinge might brand itself as the,
"Dating app designed to be deleted,"
but it's actually in all the apps' best interests
to keep you scrolling through face after face.
And their casino-style interfaces make it all too easy
to waste an evening doing just that.
Ultimately, these companies make a great deal of money
by collecting super valuable data
about some of the most intimate aspects of your life.
After all, these aren't old friends
interested in helping you find love,
they're tech platforms interested in earning a buck.
Or a billion of them.
So it seems that dating has become more complicated,
and more commodified, than ever before.
Finding a mate, a prospect once simply determined
by your family's financial capital,
is now an important means of affirming your worth,
of broadcasting your individual social
and/or cultural capital.
Qualities like your sense of humor or your great hair,
Illouz says, thus start to become,
"Indexes of your inner value."
In other words, if you used to be able to blame
your bankrupt dad for hurting your chances
of landing a wife, now you're implicitly told
to blame yourself for not being witty enough
in your About Me section.
So what are we supposed to do?
We're years off from designing our perfect partner in a lab,
free-love communes are harder and harder to find,
and sex robots can be hacked and turned into murder-bots.
So are we stuck as self-aware commodities
in an ever-expanding marketplace
of increasingly disposable romantic products?
Well, barring some kind of cultural backlash,
online dating will probably keep becoming
increasingly intrinsic to our courtship rituals.
We can't change that.
But maybe recognizing the unusual historical moment
of dating that we're in can help us be a little less hard
on ourselves when the process feels hopeless.
And maybe thinking about how weird it is to treat yourself
like a commodity can help us be a little less judgemental
towards men who post photos of themselves with tigers.
'Cause at the end of the day,
we're all looking for some iteration of the same thing:
human connection, whether for a night or forever.
Well, that and romantic partners
who look like they're auditioning for a Tiger King biopic.
But what do you guys think?
Do you wish your romantic life
was still determined by dowries?
Is online dating killing romance?
Or is shopping for dates fun and empowering?
Let us know in the comments.
Big thanks to our patrons for all your support,
and be sure to check out our podcast.
Hit that subscribe button like it's a Superlike on Tinder,
and don't forget to ring that bell.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(cheerful music)
Shout out to all my soldiers online dating actively.
It sounds rough.
Bring back arranged marriage.
Okay, here we go.