By Matthew White
I came out in the midst of a great deal of shame. I was 18, participating in a very conservative religious culture and I was deep in the throes of self loathing. My initial instinct when telling people was to assure those around me that I was doing my best not to act on any of the urges that I was feeling. At that time and in that space, sex was taboo and gay sex was a ticket to a life of misery. People who had gay sex were bound to start hating themselves or using drugs or some other so-called perversion.
I also came out in the midst of great loneliness. I didn’t know anyone in this new city where i had moved after graduation, and I lacked the same support system that I had known back home. I didn’t understand how to interact with the world as a gay person, and I went straight for the the promise of connection with other people who were like me - Grindr. It drew me in before I could consider the consequences of what I was getting myself into.
I came out, and almost immediately was pulled into a world where I was inundated with the knowledge that people wanted me for my body. My early forays into the world of “the apps” was rife with unsolicited dick pics and the subliminal idea that I was only as good as the pleasure others could derive from my body. Grindr was a place where I could look for easy quick connections that left me momentarily satiated without the need to really look beyond into the mess of emotions that I was feeling about my sexuality.
This left me feeling empty. For a very long time I refused to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that my brain was rife with, which resulted in an inability to really connect with other people on a level that I needed. The part of me that craved spiritual community denied myself those things because of my upbringing and the part of me that needed to know that it was okay to be gay was always curbed by this pervasive feeling that everything that I was doing was tainted by my sexuality.
There is a lot of writing about Gay Loneliness but I’m not sure any of it really captures the depth to which you can feel isolated from your communities. Coming out of a spiritual practice that considered my orientation depraved only added to this sense of isolation. But on top of all of that was the emotional damage I’ve done to myself as a result of being sucked into the world of online dating.
As I’ve been processing my way through therapy, something has repeatedly come up that breaks my heart every single time it surfaces: I have not loved myself. Not only have I not loved myself, but my lack of understanding for how to do this has severely limited my ability to love other people the way that each of us needs to be loved.
One of the most blatant ways that this lack of love manifested was through my early experiences in gay dating apps. The understanding that my body was to be consumed by others for their pleasure disconnected me entirely from any concept of self actualization or care, and kept me held down in a process of self objectification.
This objectification is something that I think can be universally understood when it comes to how we see bodies in this stage of western civilization, but it is also a process that affects gay men in very unique ways. While heterosexual dynamics often cause women’s bodies to be sexualized and objectified for the pleasure of the man, therefore creating a hierarchy of power wherein men become consumers of women’s bodies, I often found myself understanding that I was also a body to be consumed. In other words, I became both the object of someone else’s consumption and I understood that others should be consumed by me.
After a while, it becomes difficult to separate the bodies from the people - at its worst, I was having a hard time valuing relationships that were not sexual because I could not take pleasure from those interactions in the same way that I could through something like Grindr. I vividly remember one night leaving a party that my friends were having to hang out with a guy within the first 15 minutes of us getting together. My life became characterized by this deep need to feel like someone wanted me, but Grindr did not give me the vocabulary to understand that I could experience more than my current state of being.
I would bet money that this is not an experience that was unique to me. Even if it does not emerge in such an obviously detrimental way, I wonder how many of us have a hard time valuing those people on the other side of the screens - how often do we engage with these people purely for the sexual satisfaction they might be able to provide us?
I think therefore that there are good and bad ways of attempting sexual liberation. I had a conversation the other day where I discussed the idea that sexual ethics needed to move beyond black and white discussions of consent, and take into account the potential harm that we do to others and to ourselves as a result of our obsession with taking pleasure from one another.
This was met with some push-back - my partner responded that he did not believe that the conversation of Grindr ethics could go beyond concepts of consent, because if two people are in agreement then their responsibility to each other has been met. I think I still disagree.
I think a sexual ethic that does not assume the humanity of another person, and therefore resist the objectification of that person’s body, is one that harms ourselves. An ethics of hooking up that does not take into account it’s potential for harm is one that created unhealthy precedents for how I began to perceive other people - and therefore myself.
I think that this is especially relevant for those of us who desire to witness deep changes within our community. We do ourselves a disservice when we perpetuate the dehumanization of our bodies. I think this is relevant to those who feel that the LGBT community is overly racist or fatphobic - the objectification of the body on dating apps removes individuals of their humanness, highlighting only our ability to generate sexual pleasure for someone else.
I also think this goes beyond hooking up; how often do we ignore people on the basis of their physical appearance just because they aren’t someone we might be sexually attracted to EVEN if we have explicitly stated that we are “looking for friends”. I know this is something that I have done, and that I will likely do again - it’s hard to move away from these kinds of patterns.
I think that we who would call ourselves progressives have a lot of really hard work ahead of us. If we are going to prevent the onset of young people whose experiences in this community are like my own, we have a responsibility to reinvigorate the humanity of those people we engage with on apps like these.
Let conversations move beyond picture exchanges. Seek out interactions with people who you might previously have ignored because of the way that they looked - make friends with people who you might have missed out on because of your focus on bodies. And if you, like I once did, begin to see yourself in terms of your body’s ability to please others, remove yourself.