Scientific sanction to love (1 Feb 2008)

John Tierney wrote a piece in the NYT about the pseudoscientific algorithms online dating services use to help people meet the one. Arguing that computers do a better job than people themselves at picking from prospective mates, this is how the story concludes:

Until outside scientists have a good look at the numbers, no one can know how effective any of these algorithms are, but one thing is already clear. People aren’t so good at picking their own mates online. Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.
“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”
The new matchmakers may or may not have the right formula. But their computers at least know better than to give you what you want.

It's not surprising that shopping for a mate would turn out to be less effective than having a computer more or less randomly select one. This is not a testimony to the effectiveness of the algorithms but an indication that spontaneity and unpredictability are important ingredients in launching a relationship -- perhaps more important than liking the same music and reading the same books and professing to have the same sort of hobbies. What would-be lovers want is not so much to see Godard films together but to share a sense of destiny.

No matter what the methodology, the idea that some particular person was scientifically chosen to like you is likely a strong argument in that person's favor, so the proposed matches probably go into their dates feeling fairly confident of being charming. After all, this person has to like you or else the computer wouldn't have spit their name out, right? It's a sanction to love, trusting to the almighty power of Science. Whereas when you pick a person yourself, based on some fantasy of what you wish appealed to you, you become responsible for the choice (as opposed to Science) and are obliged to second-guess yourself and to wonder whether you might have done a better job -- the person's shortcomings become a comment on your own inability to shop effectively. That responsibility can lead to self-doubt and an unwillingness to trust that anything will work out. "It's not that I haven't taken the time to get to know this person," one might think, "it's just that I didn't think hard enough about making my selection." There's always one more profile to look at before making a choice anyway. Shopping for a person based on your own personal preferences seems to lead to an illusion of control over the object sought after, turning the date partner into a kind of commodity and generating an expectation that you should be able to return it if it doesn't completely satisfy. That's probably why the online dating thing seems to work better for people who want only sex. There, pragmatic calculation is welcome and necessary.

In general, we tend to define what is romantic in terms of the absence of the sort of rational calculation processes we use to strike good bargains. Romantic feeling is typically set in opposition to that kind of thought; the feeling is residual, what's left over after everything that has been purposely sought after is accounted for. It only feels like love when we can't quite account for it, and it doesn't seem to have been manufactured by our cleverness or practicality. When a relationship serves some pragmatic end, it doesn't seem like love, and hand-picking a partner according to a laundry list of expectations is far too pragmatic. Instead, our love stories tend to be framed in terms of overcoming obstacles, rejecting the protests that loving some particular person makes no sense.

Here's a sweeping generalization: In coming to reject arranged marriages and the like, our society has strongly shifted in the other direction, and we balk at any whiff of instrumentality in the procurement of intimate partners. So we have to play elaborate tricks on ourselves to avoid accusing ourselves of being calculating in our love, of loving for the "wrong" reasons, which is to say, for any reason other than a blind willingness to be in love. This we call chemistry or sympathy, the force of attraction that can't otherwise be explained rationally. Computer-assisted dating is one trick for masking our own intentionality, transferring the calculation to the computers and absolving ourselves of the pettiness of actively deducing what we should want from another person and scheming how to get it, leaving us to blithely and passively react to the suitor supplied, just as we are used to, incidentally, from consuming entertainment.

Slackers, hipsters (1 March 2007)

Last week Marisa Meltzer had an essay at Slate about the recent slacker-film renaissance in which she points out the suspicious gender politics:

Slackers are always childlike men, and the objects of their affection always women with their acts together, as if slacking is a uniquely male vocation. Women in these movies are never equals; they may be able to parse the finer points of Josie and the Pussycats, but the issues that really occupy them aren't pop culture ephemera, but marriage, money, and babies. If male slackers are stuck in a permanent state of adolescence, all deep thoughts and long talks and sleeping in, then women are agents of growing up and getting a grip, two things that could harsh any slacker's mellow.

This seems indisputable, and it's not limited to movies about slackers; it applies to most romantic comedies as well. Men need to stop being adult children and assume the mantle of family guy; women are emblems of adult responsiblity and objective correlatives of established success, sort of McMansions with boobs (to adapt Laura Sessions Stapp's metaphor).

Whatever interests a man before he falls in love is shown as having are redefined as provisional surrogates for what he really wants, which is to be a dad and a provider. His passions -- the slacker tropes Meltzer lists (conspiracy theories, used bookstores, amateur musicianship) -- are revealed to be juvenile hobbies, only compelling enough to seem like a meaningful sacrifice on the altar of wedded bliss. And many men probably enjoy this theme; it celebrates a decision that men actually make -- they can see marriage as a sweet surrender, a good-bye to ambitious striving and personal betterment. They want an excuse to give up on the challenges presented by their youthful dreams, and a devoted woman is there to be the scapegoat. Because the man is sacrificing his former pleasures, the woman must compensate by doing all the emotional work in the relationship. He's done his part just for consenting to be in the relationship at all. Here's how Meltzer sums up the message of these films: "The new slate of slacker movies is retro not just because they imply that women can't properly hang with the guys; it's something far more nefarious and old-fashioned than that. Essentially, they're saying that women have to be there to care for and motivate a man—and in that responsibility, there's no room to slack off." If she does enough of that relationship labor, he might still be able to pursue some of his hobbies and remain an adult child.

Reading this piece reminded me also of how the slacker manqué figure was essentially for the evolution of the hipster as a cultural type -- the hipster takes the slacker's idiosyncratic hobbies, their "different standard of achievement," Meltzer refers to, empties them of their specificity and transforms them all into signaling mechanisms, into the currency of cool, and a pseudoachivement of self-importance. Slacker indifference to what the outside world thinks becomes a kind of desperate quest for recognition of how important one is by the measure of the "alternative" value system of youth culture. The slacker ideal of a kind of authentic solipsism and overinvestment in the useless becomes in hipsterdom all too useful as a means of establishing your personal brand, of self-marketing. Thus slacker movies had devoured themselves.

Bonus hipster-hating: Here's what I wrote before about adult children and the etiology of hipsterdom:

The instinctive revulsion kids feel towards suburbia--its materialism, its intellectual poverty, its cabin-fever cloisteredness, its reactionary politics, its complacency and xenophobia--is inevitably co-opted by the same capitalist value system that produced these dreary phenomena to produce hipsterism, a homogenized and codified form of superficial reaction to a stultifying life of empty entitlement. This entitlement derives not merely from economic privilege but from the insistent right to be entertained that suburban kids instinctively feel, a product of having watched too much flattering media that announce constantly that it is made just for them and sycophantically pleads for their approval. They will usually develop apolitical aesthetics (politics is "beneath them" because it will ultimately come around to the source of their entitlement, and their ultimate guilt) preoccupied with surface charms and "universal" themes of self-realization, as though that can occur in a socio-political vacuum. When it does, the hipster is what is produced.

Hipsterism is a quaint, neutered form of rebellion that allows post-teens to fret endlessly about how they come across, worry constantly about their individuality quotient, preparing them for a successful life as a middle manager or a functionary in one of the glamor industries, where such self-involvement is de rigeur. Hipsters are a plague of locusts on any scene in which young people are trying to figure out new approaches to life; they swarm in when word gets out and obliterate those new approaches, turning neighborhood sidewalks into catwalks for preening contests, ushering in trendy bars and restaurants, encouraging the sense that one is perpetually a tourist within the hallowed aura of one's own lifestyle. They imagine themselves fellow travelers but they are more like a bomb squad, defusing revolutionary potential and reestablishing the status quo motives of the pursuit of fashionable positional goods, status in the form of cultural knowledge, and a vaunted sense of one's uniqueness that always needs bolstering from serially acquired identity goods, the T-shirts and DVDs and such that remind you who you are. Hipsters, though frequently sneered at as ironic, are never actually ironic. Ironic is not synonymous with hyper self-awareness. Irony requires a detachment, a negative capability, a lofty perspective. The Wall Street Journal exhibits far more irony than does The Village Voice.

Hipsters are typically nostalgic for childhood, which is the idyllic time when total self-involvement is not marred by the more pernicious aspects of intense self-consciousness, when no critical consciousness yet exists to question or resist the way the media flatters and seduces. So they pursue the tchotchkes and retro junk of their youth, from the time when they were already consumers against their will but not savvy enough to have an opinion about it. The trauma of discovering you're already a consumer, that your consciousness was limned by consumerism, is such that it must be obsessively repeated, and the hipsters bray for those same things they cried for when they were six.

Hook-up culture (22 Feb 2007)

Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked seems like a ludicrous book (it's about the shocking fact that girls these days seem to enjoy sex rather than using it as relationship bait), and it's good to see scorn being heaped on it appropriately. Zuzu at Feministe parses some of the book's repugnant imagery. Stepp writes: "Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn’t want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?" To which Zuzu responds, "I dunno about you, but if someone throws a rock through my window, it’s a safe bet I didn’t give them permission. I let my guests in through the door. And it’s not going to fall off the hinges if I let more than one person through (even at once!)."

Julian Sanchez is skeptical about the insistence that sex and love always be joined:

"Is it excessively cynical of me to think that the first casualty of an insistence on love and sex always going together might be your criteria for being "in love?" As in: "Holy hell, I'm 25 and have never had sex... You! SOUL MATE! NOW!"

Matt Yglesias links to a Washington Post review that makes the fair and self-evident point that "both males and females should work hard to gain another's affection and trust. And one's sexuality is not a commodity that, given away too readily and too often, will exhaust or devalue itself." At Slate Meghan O'Rourke suggests the problem isn't that girls are hooking up but that they have such a joyless approach to it:

The hookup culture is part of a wider ethos of status-seeking achievement. As one girl puts it: "Dating is a drain on energy and intellect, and we are overwhelmed, overprogrammed and overcommitted just trying to get into grad school." So they throw themselves into erotic liaisons with the same competitive zeal they bring to résumé-building: "If you mention you think a guy is hot, your friend may be, 'Oh, he is hot. I'm gonna go get with him,' " Anna, a high-school student, reveals. The combination of postfeminist liberation and pressure from parents to "do it all"—as one kid puts it—has led girls to confuse the need to be independent (which they associate with success) with the need to be invulnerable. Thus, they frame their seemingly explorative sex lives in rigid, instrumental terms, believing that vulnerability of any sort signals a confusing dependence. The result? Shying away from relationships that can hurt them—which includes even fleeting obsessions that can knock them off balance.

I'm a little skeptical of that analysis, if only because it's not only girls but adolescents in general who confuse independence with invulnerability. (That's why my auto insurance rates were so high when I was 18.) Not that teenage girls are not under unique pressures -- just look what society does to celebrity teenagers (the Lindsey Lohans of the world) as they verge closer to adulthood. Female sexuality obviously evokes all sorts of hysterical responses among those who want to lock it down and control it.

I think Echidne is more on the right track with this: "Sessions Stepp does have a point in worrying about the increasingly early sexualization of girls, a sexualization that comes from outside and has very little to do with what ten-year old girls, say, actually think about or want to do, and much more to do with the popular culture and the porn world. I also think that it is hard for women to understand their own sexual needs in a world which blasts them with messages about how best to service men for the pleasure of the men, and I think that the real sexual liberation of women is a very unfinished business." For much more on how sexualization harms girls, here's a comprehensive report from the American Psychological Association -- it's obviously a problem, but it seems the Session Stepps of the world draw the wrong conclusion and think girls must be convinced to be nonsexual, or to treat their own sexuality like a precious valuable commodity, as was mentioned above. Perhaps superficializing sexuality may be a way of retaining control over it as the problem it poses for every one else becomes more apparent. But ultimately the point is that whatever young women choose to do sexually needn't be pathologized automatically; it seems that the search for explanations for whatever sexual behavior a woman exhibits is ultimately an attempt to wrest it from her.

Echidne also notes that "Session Stepp's point is naturally that it is the women who are supposed to do the relationship-work. Men can just do whatever they always have done in the past, and if that happens to be exactly what the author worries about, well, who cares. It's not a guy thing." This sounds a lot like sociologist Arlie Hochschild's analysis of the extra burden of emotional work women are expected to assume. This work is alleged to come naturally for women, but it is really one of the more insidious patriarchal exploitations, to keep women performing this arduous and self-abnegating work of relationship preservation with no reciprocity.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen reprocesses Unhooked into a rational-choice model here.