I like Jarryd, but Unherd has a weird fixation with modern life being 'de-eroticized'... a few years ago when I wrote something for them on Tim Dean's critique of new 'consent' norms they for some reason gave it the sub-title 'all our erotic tension is being deflated' (like some reverse penis-pump)--https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-to-save-sex/ and like, the particular sexual encounter I open the essay with was, uh, 'de-eroticized', but I don't get the appeal of sweeping claims about modern life and sex as such... if anything, my experience is that grindr is much better for having genuine connections with people than the dating apps--there's a possibility of being surprised by the character of the other person and not presented on the front-end with a socially acceptable/sellable false self as one is on Tinder, Hinge etc (I have made friends from grindr hookups--and met my partner in a poetry seminar--but nothing from the dating apps lead to anything)....
As for Byung-chul Han (and likewise Badiou's book on love), this is the terminal stage of critical theory, becoming a kind of sad-sack queer theory for straight people! (and no offense to your friend Rothfeld, but it seems like she's doing likewise Leo Bersani for heteros, who are just now getting around to sex being self-shattering I guess)
I don't know if you can trace the "modernity is de-eroticized" thing directly to Houellebecq, but that's one place it appears, in the way his books are full of graphic sex but almost deliberately anti-erotic. I think this is one of the poses these 'post-liberal' types that populate UnHerd have adopted to give their essentially reactionary positions an edgy, contrarian cachet. A certain kind of right-winger loves the "conservative sexual mores are what's ACTUALLY erotic" thing.
Being "against" Grindr is, to me, one of the stupidest things one can try to make into an intellectual argument about contemporary sexual culture. Which is not to overstate its importance or greatness, it's just something that *is*, and I don't think we can draw huge conclusions from its existence in any direction. But I don't think it's any worse--and it might even be better!--than the tragic, sordid dimensions of gay bars and bathhouses of the past.
I don't think I've seen anyone write intelligently about the experience of using grindr tbh--for whatever reason, as 'cruising' and anonymous sex attract a certain kind of voluble effusion of celebratory non-thinking in a lot of gay writing (Bersani at his worst, Dean, Delaney--down to Parlett's Poetics of Cruising and Greenwell's bathroom scenes), Grindr also attracts a lot of dumb, although more 'critical' ambivalent/negative writing in popular media and academia (for the latter, see J Logan Smitges writing about Grindr in 'Queer Silence'--embarrassing!).
But there seems to be little analysis of what using the apps is actually like, what it makes possible and not, writing that isn't just scurrying pseudo-analysis running around in one's own head, but actually working through in the simple and difficult way what one is doing on there. So much supposedly 'smart' writing about sex seems just to perform anguished nuance in the mode of Amia Srinivasan, which I guess at least is better, if less entertaining, the unselfknowing smugness of Agnes Callard. Which means there're plenty of room for you to write something better--you should!
Idk if you've read Rechy's novel Rushes btw but although terrible as a novel, it's a good sort of panorama of the range of views people might have about seedy leather bars in the late 70s (each character woodenly represents a possible perspective).
Agree! The 'smartest' thing I have read about Grindr is Srinivasan's right-to-sex essay, and that is just a highbrow version of woke handwringing about Grindr as a cesspool of discrimination. OK, agreed, I need to write that.
I like Jarryd, but Unherd has a weird fixation with modern life being 'de-eroticized'... a few years ago when I wrote something for them on Tim Dean's critique of new 'consent' norms they for some reason gave it the sub-title 'all our erotic tension is being deflated' (like some reverse penis-pump)--https://unherd.com/2022/07/how-to-save-sex/ and like, the particular sexual encounter I open the essay with was, uh, 'de-eroticized', but I don't get the appeal of sweeping claims about modern life and sex as such... if anything, my experience is that grindr is much better for having genuine connections with people than the dating apps--there's a possibility of being surprised by the character of the other person and not presented on the front-end with a socially acceptable/sellable false self as one is on Tinder, Hinge etc (I have made friends from grindr hookups--and met my partner in a poetry seminar--but nothing from the dating apps lead to anything)....
As for Byung-chul Han (and likewise Badiou's book on love), this is the terminal stage of critical theory, becoming a kind of sad-sack queer theory for straight people! (and no offense to your friend Rothfeld, but it seems like she's doing likewise Leo Bersani for heteros, who are just now getting around to sex being self-shattering I guess)
I don't know if you can trace the "modernity is de-eroticized" thing directly to Houellebecq, but that's one place it appears, in the way his books are full of graphic sex but almost deliberately anti-erotic. I think this is one of the poses these 'post-liberal' types that populate UnHerd have adopted to give their essentially reactionary positions an edgy, contrarian cachet. A certain kind of right-winger loves the "conservative sexual mores are what's ACTUALLY erotic" thing.
Being "against" Grindr is, to me, one of the stupidest things one can try to make into an intellectual argument about contemporary sexual culture. Which is not to overstate its importance or greatness, it's just something that *is*, and I don't think we can draw huge conclusions from its existence in any direction. But I don't think it's any worse--and it might even be better!--than the tragic, sordid dimensions of gay bars and bathhouses of the past.
I don't think I've seen anyone write intelligently about the experience of using grindr tbh--for whatever reason, as 'cruising' and anonymous sex attract a certain kind of voluble effusion of celebratory non-thinking in a lot of gay writing (Bersani at his worst, Dean, Delaney--down to Parlett's Poetics of Cruising and Greenwell's bathroom scenes), Grindr also attracts a lot of dumb, although more 'critical' ambivalent/negative writing in popular media and academia (for the latter, see J Logan Smitges writing about Grindr in 'Queer Silence'--embarrassing!).
But there seems to be little analysis of what using the apps is actually like, what it makes possible and not, writing that isn't just scurrying pseudo-analysis running around in one's own head, but actually working through in the simple and difficult way what one is doing on there. So much supposedly 'smart' writing about sex seems just to perform anguished nuance in the mode of Amia Srinivasan, which I guess at least is better, if less entertaining, the unselfknowing smugness of Agnes Callard. Which means there're plenty of room for you to write something better--you should!
Idk if you've read Rechy's novel Rushes btw but although terrible as a novel, it's a good sort of panorama of the range of views people might have about seedy leather bars in the late 70s (each character woodenly represents a possible perspective).
Agree! The 'smartest' thing I have read about Grindr is Srinivasan's right-to-sex essay, and that is just a highbrow version of woke handwringing about Grindr as a cesspool of discrimination. OK, agreed, I need to write that.