20 March 2015 "Media Analysis--This Is How We Date Now"

Written as a media analysis for a Thought Catalog post that can be found here: http://thoughtcatalog.com/jamie-varon/2014/12/this-is-how-we-date-now/ 

When I learned that this assignment would be to find something in the media about sex or sexuality, I was at first a little overwhelmed. Lately it seems that on social media sites, especially Facebook, there is a never-ending stream of articles from various sites like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Thought Catalog, and so many more. And more than a fair share of these articles center on sex, dating, relationships, and how all of the above affect our current generation. After taking a little time to think about it though, one specific article from my Facebook newsfeed came to mind.

            To be honest, normally I don’t read half of the articles that I see on social media. A select few will draw me to click on the link to the website, but very seldom do I read the entire article and even more seldom do I pay close attention to what I’m reading. But this article caught my attention from the very beginning. Perhaps it was because of who posted it, or what she said about the article. Or maybe it was the title that drew me in (I am after all, a child of my generation, and I am distracted and attracted by the same things as most anyone my age).

            The article was titled “This Is How We Date Now”, and I had remembered it because of my Facebook friend’s glowing review. “The best article I have read in a long time,” she claimed, “the flaws in dating for our generation.” (Or something like that.) I had to scroll through a few months worth of postings on her page, but it was worth it to dig this article up again.

From the artsy version of BuzzFeed and the teenage angsty version of Huffington Post, (otherwise known as Thought Catalog) the article starts with an enormous picture of two 20-somethings sitting on what appears to be a dock in a beautiful, nature-y place. They’re slightly tattooed, which signals an immediate connection to my generation, since we are one of the most heavily tattooed in the history of North America. The girl is sleeping peacefully as the guy lovingly admires her. It’s a serene, romantic scene. Really sets the tone for what I could only imagine was going to be a critical and nostalgic account of dating in today’s society.

What I expected this article to say was only slightly different from what it actually said. I expected something that would heavily support Paula’s England’s studies on hooking up culture and sex in my generation. I expected such declarations as “we don’t get to know each other anymore” and “sex doesn’t carry the meaning for us the way it used to”. It is these articles that are typical and extremely prevalent in my social media article reads, and what’s so interesting is that they re-affirm almost everything England’s study of hooking up culture sought to prove. We are children of a very specific generation, and try as we might to separate ourselves from sex and separate sex from romance, what we really want is to combine romance with a non-judgmental sexual freedom. And as children of our generation, we have found a thousand and one ways to say that. (Hence the thousand and one articles.)

One thing that made this article different was its heavy mention of social media’s impact on dating in my generation. The article claimed that we no longer date because we treat people with an attitude of consumerism. And how could we not? Internet dating sites like Tinder and OkCupid let us treat people that way. Picking them out if their pictures or profile information is what we are looking for, and more often than not, we seek to use these people in a material way. We have adopted the attitude that we can discard our dates whenever we are finished with them because the promise of new ones is never too far away.

The article claimed that this social media revolution took a major toll on romance. In a classically nostalgic and dissatisfied-with-my-generation tone, it explained with a certain sadness that what we consider “romantic” is no longer chivalry and courting, but emojis and good morning texts. And though the article does adopt a positive attitude when it offers the solution of “reinventing” romance, the suggested ways of reinventing feel eerily similar to the collective call of the adult generation telling us to “unplug”.

Two more important themes in this article come in the form of the words “commitment” and “comparison”. Coming back to the idea of the social media revolution and the vast diversity of the dating pool, the article chastises my generation for refusing to commit, for no longer even having to. Though the world seems limitless, and is today the most limitless it has ever been, this article claims that this globalized world without borders is what is killing us. When we have everything at our fingertips, how could we be expected to feel satisfied with something steady and seemingly boring? This I vaguely agree with. While I don’t at all believe that a more globalized world is a bad thing, I can admit that it certainly does take a toll on relationships and appreciation for what one already has.

In its criticism of the constant comparing habit of our generation, the article finds its strongest and most accurate argument. I can provide examples of my own relationships that were ruined because of issues I found only through comparison to others. And this comparison habit is definitely aided by the advancement of social media. We compare prospective dates on dating websites, we compare ourselves to our Instagram idols, we even compare employers on LinkedIn. We have managed to connect every aspect of our lives to social media, and the article addresses this point well. To my generation, nothing seems good enough because what we strive for is far less achievable than ever. We are no longer threatened by just magazines and television, we have an entire library of Kim Kardashians with us all the time in our pockets. It is no wonder we are terrified of being labeled as inadequate and yet always find ourselves feeling that way.

Though a little cliché and stylistically quite liberal, I think this article did have a good message. It attempted to draw us together as a generation, and in some ways it certainly succeeded. There is a lot of relatable material in this article; certainly I can see it as a child of the generation for whom it was written. So in this regard, I agree with my Facebook friend in her glowing recommendation.

But what I didn’t like about this article is all that it was missing. To me, it felt like the stream of consciousness of a 20-year-old who just got dumped by the boyfriend she thought she would be with forever. Yes, it was relatable, but only because it drew on extremely wide-ranging cultural norms. It is the social media revolution, but social media is an issue with which we as a generation are extremely familiar, and we have found ways to keep love and romance alive despite the odds.

Where was the research? Why didn’t the author draw on studies like Paula England’s or Donna Freita’s? Instead of defining all the difficulty of sexuality and romance in our society as the outcome of social media and globalization, why didn’t this article look deeper? Why didn’t it, instead of attempting to describe today’s romance in terms of lack of commitment and over-comparison, look into what makes our sexuality so difficult to grasp?

I wish this article gave researched information about why we try to separate ourselves from sex, about why it appears that adolescents are treating dating with an attitude of consumerism. Perhaps then it may have realized that romance isn’t dead because of the technology we have to communicate with each other. Perhaps then all those reading this article would understand that we may be children of our own generation, but we are also children of all the generations before us. There is a history at work here, even in as personal a field as human sexuality. In our attempt to separate ourselves from the generations before us and the constraints of our parents’ sexualities, we have gotten ourselves a little lost.

I suppose I have too high expectations for an article on such a general artsy angsty website. Maybe I have been a little spoiled by the knowledge of the history of human sexuality. If so, I’m unapologetic.

Perhaps what all this means is that people of this generation are easily influenced by slightly relatable articles. If so, maybe tomorrow I will submit my own critical analysis poetic article of this generations sexuality to Thought Catalog.

Source:

Varon, Jamie (December 19, 2014). This is how we date now. Retrieved from http://thoughtcatalog.com/jamie-varon/2014/12/this-is-how-we-date-now/