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As Weigel tells it, dating is an unintended by-product of consumerism.
Nineteenth-century industrialization ushered in the era of cheap goods,
and producers needed to sell more of them. Young women moved to cities
to work and met more eligible men in a day than they could previously
have met in years. Men started taking women out to places of
entertainment that offered young people refuge from their sharp-eyed
elders—amusement parks, restaurants, movie theaters, bars. “The first
entrepreneurs to create dating platforms,” Weigel calls their
proprietors. Romance began to be decoupled from commitment. Trying
something on before you bought it became the new rule.
Then as now, commentators fretted that dating commercialized courtship.
In the early 20th century, journalists and vice commissioners worried
that the new custom of men paying for women’s dinners amounted to
prostitution. Some of the time it surely did—just as today, some dating
websites, like SeekingArrangement, pair “sugar babies” with “sugar
daddies” who pay off college debts and other expenses. “Ever since the
invention of dating, the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating
has remained difficult to draw,” Weigel writes. Well before app users
rated potential partners so ruthlessly, daters were told to “shop
around.” They debated whether they “owed” someone something “in exchange
for” a night out. Today, as Weigel notes, we toss around business jargon
with an almost transgressive glee, subjecting relationships to
“cost-benefit analyses” and invoking the “low risk and low investment
costs” of casual sex.
full:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/dating-disrupted/501119/
I answered a personal ad myself once. The woman who had placed it was
Kerri Jacobs, a high-profile journalist who wrote for Metropolitan
magazine on architecture. She has moved on to New York Magazine, where
she is a regular columnist on the same topic. New York Magazine is one
of the prime locations for personal ads, especially for conventional New
Yorkers. She had placed her ad in the New York Review of Books, a locale
for the more intellectually pretentious. Since she was an extremely
good-looking young woman, I couldn't exactly figure out why she had
placed an ad. After a few moments, I figured it out completely. Nobody
was good enough for her. The ads were supposed to help weed out
"losers," as she put it. I didn't even want to find out if I was a
winner and never called her back.
What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is
riding on your initial appearance. Not only do you have to look right,
you also have to find the words that the interviewer wants to hear. I
had to put up with this nonsense when I worked on Wall Street. Why would
I or any sensitive person have to put up with it in affairs of the
heart? One of the reasons that Columbia University was such a
deliverance for me was that I would no longer have to put up with the
stupid questions of people in the Personnel Office. "Why do you think
Paine-Webber and you are suitable for each other?" "I don't know. The
thought of working at another one of these Wall Street dumps makes me
sick to my stomach. I just need the money to pay for my rent, scholarly
Marxist books and African music CD's."
The unstated, and therefore more powerful, message of this movie is that
the cash nexus distorts everything. Everything in capitalist society,
including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their
exchange value. This colors everything. The way we speak reflects this
alienated existence. We speak of the "investment" we have in an intimate
relationship. We are worried whether our "assets" are to be found in our
appearance, like Richard Gere's, or in our intelligence or wit, like
Woody Allen's (well, from 25 years ago anyhow).
full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/unmade_beds.htm
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