All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (35 page)

And yet, despite her melancholy over missed intimacies, Balch would write to her friend and fellow Nobel recipient Addams, during the period in which psychologists were attempting to pathologize nonconforming single women as perverse, that her peers had survived just fine without the sex that they might have been curious about. Balch wrote, “If the educated unmarried women of the period between the Civil War and the World War represent a unique phase, it is one that has important implications
which have not yet been adequately recognized by those who insist upon the imperious claims of sex.”

Sex and love might have been desirable elements in life, Balch believed. And yet, the absence of them,
even
for those women who wished it otherwise, was not an absence that necessarily deformed the rest of female experience.

The message that an active sex life was not simply a new freedom but, in fact, an imperative, a form of validating the worth of young women, has been one of the more convoluted messages to emerge in the century since Balch objected to the notion that sex had been made to mean too much.

Psychologist Paula J. Caplan has written about how the Second Wave, in combination with the invention of the birth-control pill, created for women “a strange combination of liberation and disturbing pressures with regard to sex.” On the one hand was the revolutionary idea that “women should be as free as men to enjoy sex, and [that] those who did so ought not to be demeaned as a result.” Countering that were the “greater pressures on women and even very young women: ‘You won't get pregnant, and you're supposed to be free to enjoy sex, so you have absolutely no reason to refuse,' came the argument from many men.”
⁶
The invention of the pill meant new carnal possibilities, yes, but also a new culture of public concupiscence and objectification and with it, new reasons for women—especially those already suspicious of male power—to fear exploitation, abuse, and degradation.

This was the thorny heart of the anxieties laid out by some radical Second-Wave feminists who famously objected to the gendered subjugations of marriage, but also saw unregulated sexual freedom as a new arena of objectification and diminishment for women. Back then, there were so few contemporary models of what unmarried female life might look like that even the most ardent antimarriage agitators had trouble making single sexuality sound terrifically appealing.

Feminist Shulamith Firestone was among those activists who was no fan of marriage, but saw no cheery alternative. In
The Dialectic of Sex
, Firestone advocated egalitarian partnership and romantic love, both of which she found wanting from the contemporary marital model. But she could not seem to envision actual independence from men, describing
unmarried women as “consigned forever to that limbo of ‘chicks,' ” destined to become the “ ‘other woman' . . . used to provoke his wife, prove his virility.”
⁷
Firestone also argued that “those who do not marry and have children by a certain age are penalized: they find themselves alone, excluded, and miserable, on the margins of a society . . . (Only in Manhattan is single living even tolerable, and that can be debated.)”
⁸
In this formulation, to not be a wife was to not be one's self, but to be a wife-alternative who was still defined by abstention from marriage and now also by an identity tied to sexual degradation, still as passive objects of (inherently male) sexual impulse.

It's not hard to imagine Firestone or her radical colleagues looking with grief on Internet dating apps including Tinder, used by an estimated 50 million people in 2014,
⁹
where the process of erotic coupling has been taken to new consumerist heights. Online dating involves reciprocal evaluation—men and women selecting other men and women from real-time, steadily updating catalogs. But sites like Tinder, and their online buffets of willing partners, can also reduce the search for sex partners to its quickest and most commodified form. “You can swipe a couple hundred people a day,” one young man told the
Vanity Fair
reporter Nancy Jo Sales in 2015. “It's setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you've slept with in a year.”
¹⁰

On Tinder, and other apps like it, including Hinge and Happn and OkCupid, men and women present versions of themselves that are photographed for maximum impact, describe themselves in just a few words and catchphrases, bringing the mid-twentieth century art of the singles ad or, for that matter, the centuries' old business of matchmaking, to a new technological age, making the process of pursuit and rejection swifter, the volume of potential choices higher. And because women remain more sexually objectified and less sexually empowered than men, troubled by more double standards and harsher aesthetic evaluations, the dehumanizing impact of dating apps, of sex apps, can be very real. “It's like ordering Seamless,” another young man told Sales, “but you're ordering a person.”

That's big talk, and it sounds pretty horrifying from a gendered perspective
except that the sexual supply and demand patterns being reworked by apps and social media do not, in fact, all work in one direction. In a widely circulated 2015 piece, “The Dickonomics of Tinder,” writer Alana Massey chronicled her use of Tinder after a heart-wrenching breakup, describing her approach to Tinder as hinging on one resonant mantra: “Dick is abundant and low value.”
¹¹
It was a phrase she cribbed from another woman whose words she read on Twitter, a lawyer and writer, Madeleine Holden, who had written that “there's this cacophony of cultural messages telling us that male affection is precious & there's a trick to cultivating it. They're all lies. To any women reading ‘how to get a man' franchises or sticking around in stale dissatisfying relationships: dick is abundant and low value.” To Massey, that last sentiment “emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay,
transfigured,
by the message.” It was an idea that enabled her to use Tinder to treat men as disposable, to give her the power of rejection, of being picky, knowing that the technology was presenting her with ample choice, and that “the centuries' long period of dick overvaluation is over.” Massey knew that some would read her account of giddy evaluative dismissal of men as “evidence as a disturbing uptick in malevolent, anti-male sentiments among single straight women,” but, she wrote, that's not true. Instead, “it is evidence of us arriving nearer to gender equilibrium.”

For plenty of women, the experiences of sex and dating in the Internet age are somewhere in between objectification and liberation, or maybe comprise a bit of both, which is not so different from the stories of dating and sex in earlier eras. “My feelings about Tinder are complicated,” said Amina. “Dating, period, is horrible. I don't think there is anything exclusive to Tinder that makes it worse.” Amina said that despite press coverage suggesting that it's only a mechanism for commodified, brief, zipless erotic encounters, in life she knows plenty of happy “Tinder couples,” “People who've gotten married or are in happy long-term stable relationships, and when I consider them, I don't know how they would have met without Tinder.”

One of the challenges as people remain single later is that the contexts in which they are likely to encounter other singles narrow. There's
not the romantic marketplace of college or fresh-out-of college social life. For people who don't like to date colleagues, or who work remotely, or who work all the time, there are few places to seek mates. Apps address this need.

The reality is that Tinder probably hasn't invented a new level of awful for women in dating. Rather, it has simply brought the human heartbreak and gendered inequities long threaded through heterosexual encounters to a new technological platform. “I don't think it's worse than sitting at a bar or even going out with people my friends have introduced me to,” said Amina.

Today, in a culture that has more fully acknowledged female sexuality as a reality, it is perhaps more difficult than ever to be an adult woman who does
not
have sex. But there are plenty of such women out there, who feel varying degrees of pride or shame about their sexual inactivity. It may not define them any more than it did earlier generations of abstinent women, but it certainly occurs to them.

“I feel that it's one hundred percent worth waiting for [sex] to be within marriage,” said Sarah Steadman, the twenty-nine-year-old Mormon schoolteacher from Utah. “I feel that sexual intimacy is a very sacred thing, and it's a beautiful gift we've been given to be able to express love and closeness with the person that we're married to.” Yes, she acknowledged, “I sometimes think, ‘Ah! Why do I have to wait?' Sure. I'm human and I have hormones. Lots of times I've even thought, ‘Maybe I should marry this guy just so that I can.' ”

Sarah has set guidelines as to how far she's willing to go, physically, within a relationship, and said that any time she's ever violated those guidelines, her relationships have been ruined. Some of that damage, she said, is based on self-recrimination and guilt about not having lived up to her own standards. But more, she said, the relationships suffer because “I see the act of waiting as caring enough to be completely committed to the one person. And [sex] is the final act that shows your complete commitment.”
Sarah said that she feels “a greater love for my boyfriend when we can control ourselves, as opposed to when sometimes we take things a little too far. Sure, taking things a little too far is pleasurable. But when we can control each other I know that he respects me, he loves me, and that we both have the desire to wait.”

Meaghan Ritchie, the twenty-year-old undergraduate from Kentucky, is also holding out for marriage for religious reasons. “I do plan on saving myself for my husband,” she said. “And I pray that my husband saves himself for me. That is just for marriage. Why give yourself away like that, emotionally and physically, especially when it can lead to pregnancy?” Meaghan's take on chastity echoes Jane Addams's; she sees her commitments and desires as rechanneled in other directions. “As a Christian,” she said, “I feel that I am having a relationship with Christ. My number-one goal in life would be to bring glory to him. I'm very involved with my church, very involved with campus organizations. I just enjoy life.” Ritchie has considered the possibility that she might never marry and thus, based on her beliefs, never have a sexual relationship. When this crosses her mind, she said, she comforts herself with two reminders: “First,” she said. “I don't feel like God would give you desires if he wasn't going to fulfill them.” But also, “If I
were
to be single, he would fill in that need. He's not going to make your life miserable if your goal is to glorify him.”

For many women, the pressures to remain celibate come not from their own devotion, but from the religious beliefs enforced by parents and community.

Ayat, twenty-one, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and remains a virgin, though a sexually curious and experimental one. When asked if her parents knew about her sexual life she replied, “Oh, my God, I'd be shot in the face. They would go nuts. They definitely expect virginity first.” She recalled a childhood conversation with her mother about whether she might have lost her virginity after slipping off a bicycle, and how her mother flipped out! She was like, ‘This is a disaster!' It's definitely important to them. I would never say any stuff [about sex] to them, ever. Ever. Ever.” But the cultural linking of adult femininity to sexual activity and identity plays on Ayat. Considering the question of what it
means to be a woman versus a girl, she quickly returned to the subject of sex. “I would like to think I feel like a woman, but I haven't had sex yet,” she said. “When I think about the fact that I haven't had sex, I feel like the process isn't complete yet or something. So, I guess, intellectually I think I'm a woman, but because of pop culture [its messages about sex] I don't feel like it.”

Sometimes, abstinence can simply be the product of divided attentions. While most people feel sexual urges and desires, they aren't always quite strong enough to drive them to action, especially when other engagements are drawing their energies.

Remembering her late teenaged, collegiate life, Amina recalled, “I was too busy being good at math and science in college, and too busy making friends, to have a sex life. Then I felt like I needed to check off a box and was like, ‘Okay, I'm going to do this now.' ”

Amina said that this experience of first or early sex—almost as a chore to be dispensed with—was common among her compatriots. It certainly was true for some of my high-school and college friends, and for me. It wasn't as though we weren't curious about sex, that we didn't long for physical intimacy, engage in fantasy, or masturbate. It's just that when a suitable partner didn't make him or herself readily available, we busied ourselves with other things . . . things that in turn distracted us from any kind of laser-focused search for sexual intimacy.

This dynamic of having interest but no discernible opportunity to follow through on it leads to another, too rarely discussed, category of single women: the unintentionally chaste.

It's so easy, in high school or college, if you have not forged a specific sexual connection, if your energies, to use Jane Addams's term, have been diffused, rechanneled as enthusiasms for art or drugs or sports or science, to simply find yourself . . . not having sex. Not because you don't want to, not because you don't believe in it, but just because, well, appealing opportunities aren't always as plentiful as Hollywood summer movies would suggest.