Excerpt
The rhetoric of dating has become so silly and debauched that
I’m forced to use the rhetoric of sports to talk about it. For example:
not even for research purposes can I bring myself to watch an entire
episode of most reality dating TV shows. You know. Blind Date, elimiDATE,
The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Average Joe. I stumble across
these shows sometimes, stare in horrified fascination and think Paddy
Chayefsky was right! Network isn’t even a satire anymore! and quickly
turn the channel.
However, reality TV doesn’t have to be a sign of apocalypse. It can, when it wants to, approach documentary filmmaking, in the spirit of Roger & Me or Supersize Me. Singer Lisa Loeb’s reality dating TV show #1 Single on E! was like that. Here was a professional woman my age searching for a true partner. It wasn’t a thinly veiled Helen Fielding posing as Bridget Jones or a thinly veiled Candace Bushnell posing as Carrie Bradshaw, but Lisa Loeb posing as a public version of herself. The premise: She’s been in two six-year relationships that didn’t work out. She’s 37. Time’s a wastin’. So she moves from LA to New York City. She enlists the help of friends and family. She tries all sorts of ways to meet men, using both virtual and actual social networks. The question you’re asking (and I asked too) is: “Why did she do this?” To promote herself? Why not conduct her search for love privately, like everybody else? However, I am enormously grateful that she allowed some documentary filmmakers into her “life project.” Bless her little be-spectacled heart, she inspired me.
If you went and rounded up a group of people and put them in five groups (teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and up) and showed them an episode of #1 Single, here’s what I’ll bet they’d say:
Teens: Who the hell is Lisa Loeb?
Twenties: Who cares if there’s a camera with her on dates? People film themselves all the time. Hello…YouTube! Anyway, the show’s kinda boring. She needs to get in a hot tub or dump a drink on some guy.
Thirties: Isn’t that the girl who wrote that song from Reality Bites? [The person starts singing wistfully the lyrics to “Stay (I Miss You).”] Wait! Oh my God! Is she really going on dates on television?! Is this woman insane?
Forties: A desperate move to kick start her career, plus she’s desperate to get married and have children. Desperate, desperate, desperate.
Fifties and up: If she hadn’t been so selfish and hungry for fame and pursued a singing career, she’d have a husband and babies by now. She’s a narcissist, just like all the other kids today!
Replace “How do you feel about #1 Single?” with “How do you feel about online dating?” and you’re likely to hear these same generational reactions, which are based on that age group’s comfort with communication tools such as email, webcams, MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, text messaging, blogs, and YouTube. In both dating and football, technology has changed everything.
The first use of instant replay during a televised football game occurred on December 7, 1963 during the Army-Navy game. The TV announcer felt the need to explain to the potentially confused viewing audience, “This is not live, ladies and gentlemen. Army did not score again.” It’s hard to imagine watching a televised football game in the low-tech days: before instant replay and sky cams; when there was no box in the corner of the screen to instantly tell me the score, the quarter, the time remaining; before the “crawl,” feeding me statistics and scores from other games. And I know I’m not the only person who goes to live football games and keeps looking for that magical yellow first-down marker. Some of the impediments (like space and time) that once stood between a football fan and the game itself are being obliterated. We can DVR games and watch them later. We can root for teams outside our region. We can connect to our favorite team via Direct TV, team websites, online hometown newspapers, and Internet fan forums, where we can sit on virtual barstools and virtually cheer and chat with fellow fans before, during, and after games.
And technological progress has changed the way football players play the game. Take the football helmet, which was once nothing more than a leather head harness. Then the helmet went plastic (like everything else in America) with a chin strap and a single-bar face mask. Scientists speculate that someday in the not-so-distant future, the football helmet will become a one-piece helmet and shoulder pad combination. Can’t you just hear your dad saying, “In my day, we didn’t even play with helmets! These guys are soft, I tell you! Soft!” and haven’t you already heard him say, “In my day, we didn’t meet girls on the Internet! We met them in bars, the old-fashioned way!”
These days, football and dating are played on a postmodern playing field dominated by Generation Y technology and the conventions and social mores that accompany those technologies. Even if you’re a Boomer who wants to meet another Boomer, or a Generation X’er seeking a fellow X’er, you still have to get with the program, folks. Of course it’s preferable to meet people through low-tech channels (school, work, organizations you belong to, family and friends), but when those actual social networks don’t produce results, and you’ve been sitting around your house for a month or a year or a decade, then you’ll probably turn—as I eventually did—to virtual social networks. Be prepared, however, for a considerable culture shock. Just a few months ago, I remember walking around thinking, Oh my God! What if people know I have a profile posted on Match.com! After a few months, I’ve become somewhat desensitized. I’m still a little embarrassed, but nowhere near as traumatized as I was.
Recently I did a search on Match for younger men from 25-32. I’ll admit: I felt creepy doing this, virtually robbing the cradle, until I realized nobody but me really cared. The difference in the profiles astonished me! Here were men who weren’t ashamed to be on Match. They smiled broadly and comfortably. They were able to articulate specifically (in both narrative and list form) who they were, the things they liked, the kind of woman they wanted. I practically jumped out of my chair with excitement. After months of reading bland profiles written by the modest men of Generation X that told me nothing except that they liked Bill O’Reilly, pizza, and the color blue. Call it Generation Y narcissism if you want, but their impulse to provide Too Much Information helped me (a woman nervously navigating her way through a crowded virtual room) to discern what from what.
What’s helped, I think, is realizing that an online dating profile isn’t a lewd personal ad or a self-promoting billboard. It’s helpful to see it as the door to your teenage bedroom or your college dorm room, where you affixed pictures of your cultural icons, your favorite quotes, political slogans, funny cartoons, and photographs of yourself doing the things you loved. This door is the gateway between your public self and your private self, a representation of the “real you” that isn’t quite the real you, but also sort of is.
Technology breaks down the barrier between our private and public selves, and Generation Y understands that on that spectrum, there are many levels of “self,” each represented by an avatar, whereas Generation X and older (who don’t even know what an avatar is) don’t see it as a spectrum at all and get very, very itchy about making the private public. I still remember when one of my students in New Jersey showed me how to use AOL’s Instant Messenger. Later, I awkwardly IM’ed with this student for a few minutes, and then his “away message” came up that said he was “in the shower.” I gave out a little appalled scream. I didn’t want to know this! Later he told me, “Who cares if you know I’m in the shower at that second? It’s not like you can see me in the shower. I shower. You shower. We all shower.” Still, I stopped using AIM, since the only people to talk to were students I spent too much time with anyway. What Generation Y understands, and I have been forced to learn, is that the way to use all this privacy-blurring technology to your advantage is to adopt the postmodern pose of many celebrities: the world desperately wants access to the “real you” so you develop an authentic-seeming persona (think Ellen Degeneres), or in the case of Peyton Manning and his popular commercials, you create a winky, self-aware character, thereby satisfying the public’s desire to see the real you without actually having shown it to them.
I’m serious. I think Peyton Manning is postmodern genius. He doesn’t shun the media, like Marvin Harrison, who closely guards his privacy. He doesn’t showboat, like Terrell Owens, who squanders his right to privacy. Peyton is my avatar and my hero because he has figured out how to be “Peyton the Quarterback” and “Peyton the Actor Playing a Quarterback.”
