Thomsen - Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men

Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces both physical and cultural are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

Ive noticed that many of the women who date online prominently require their potential suitors to be willing to lie about how they met. Dating is embarrassing, especially when youve got to pitch your best romantic qualities to an anonymous rabble using only a series of Rorschach questionnaires and a thoroughly censored handful of photographs. Its alarmingly shameful to encounter these demands, admonishing any future intimate to never reveal you once stooped so low as to advertise the otherwise quite discriminating charms of yourself as a lover over the internet. Why would a woman want a partner to be an accomplice to her shame?

I first considered the idea of online dating at a friends wedding in 2006, where I was surprised to learn, over toasts and dirty asides about the moral flexibility of certain bridesmaids, that most of my male friends had started dating online. In my early 20s Id never considered the internet as a necessary tool for meeting people. Theres something magical about the dating life during this period. You dont need to send winks and come up with clever email one-liners to disincarnate phantoms, and instead allow your minimally employed friends to talk you into going to the neighborhood bar on a Wednesday night, inadvertently drink four shots of tequila, and, by the time network television has shifted to infomercials, youre naked in a strange new bed.

Dating online should ideally be a less stressful and more efficient way for a man to go about meeting people. You dont have to fret about approach anxiety or competition with other lurking mammals in the proximate range of your beloved. You only just put up a metaphysical storefront that says what kind of television shows you like and those interested will respond. Instead of a night out oozing money on drinks and tossing around one-liners to women in bars, you can send out ten come-ons in ten minutes. If men are doomed to be the formal pursuers, then online dating does for their needs what the advent of the computer did for secretaries.

Women are not, by culture and habit, pursuers or rather the things theyre regularly inclined to pursue are quite different than the fleshy suggestions that incite a mans curiosity to take a few steps forward. I imagine for many women the upper-class, over-thirty group, judging by the demographic of people whove listed this particular requirement on their profiles theres some social vertigo in acknowledging their availability. Knowing that youre pursuable must be a fantastic boon for the ego, and, likewise, there must be a bitter vulgarity in having to solicit pursuit as age sets in and more of your peers begin to disappear into the quicksand of marriage.

I dont see why meeting someone online should be any more or less embarrassing than meeting someone after four shots of tequila. The world is a big and overwhelming place and theres no need to feel ashamed about the impulse to find companionship with someone outside of the normal grasp of your own social circle or visible surroundings. All the stories of how people first met wind up being silly and innocuous in the first place. You meet someone by accident or through some carefully crafted sequence of pick-up lines, then decide you want to spend more time with that person. Feeling embarrassed about having met online is like feeling embarrassed about the line your partner used on you the first time you met.

I remember the first time I met N. We met through friends and wound up spending a whole day together until we finally found ourselves alone in a deserted corner disco on a Sunday night. I knew from the second I saw her earlier in the day I knew something. What is it, exactly, that happens when you see someones face the first time? Love is an inadequate description here. Love is a practice of giving over time, not an encounter with a face. She seemed instantly familiar before she even turned around. Oh, I thought to myself as I saw her back and shoulders, her whirling brown hair pinned in loose bun atop her head, held in place by a big pink flower. There you are. It wasnt those words that were in my brain, but their shape, the way one feels a glove from the inside, knowing by touch the shape of the thing that surrounds the hand.

We spent the rest of the day trapped in a rictus of small talk. I remember at one point sitting next to her on a couch with a People magazine and wondering how I was going to come up with something interesting to say about a random celebrities caught leaving Starbucks without makeup. How are you supposed to be honest and intimate with someone who is, objectively, still a stranger? I slid across the surface of our conversation like a foal on ice.

Then we wound up sitting on a long vinyl bench against a wall, staring at a red and silver strobe light as it bounced off a disco ball and intermittently lit up the empty cement dance floor in front of us. A Motown song was playing. She asked me if I believed in theme songs, and said that if she had one for her life this would be it (Is this a line, I wondered). I told her my favorite song, which I decided when I was nineteen should be played at my funeral, is This Must Be the Place (Nave Melody) by the Talking Heads. She nodded. I wondered if she knew the song. No one under 30 knows that song, at least not by name.

I looked at her. I was terrified. We had been drinking all day, but I was sober now and adrenaline was making my body feel like a slowly inflating helium balloon. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked down again when she saw me looking. I looked away too, my palms breaking into a cold sweat. It wasnt the idea of rejection that was so scary. I was dizzy because I sensed this was the last moment I would look at her without anything else between us. These were the last few seconds without expectations, semantics, complications, or heartache. This was an embarkation point, a blind leap onto a vessel whose course was unknowable. There you are, I thought. Its you.

I looked back at her. She leaned toward me and half raised her head from her lap. The music had changed, it was all bass and silver lights across the coarse cement and cheap vinyl. Then we kissed.

I was arguing with a married friend at a bar one weekend when I found myself blurting out, I could be in an open relationship. I wasnt expecting that statement to come storming out of my mouth. Its something that sounds like it could be true. But Im not really sure if I could manage it without imploding, and so I said it as if it were true. Earlier that week N had set her internet chat status as Monogamy is for quitters. Shed been in New York for close to a year, and had just broken up with someone. Shed already committed to moving when I met her the year earlier and our affair lasted only two months before she left.