I've been thinking, as you do, this might involve a resistance to social media generally, a personal refusal on some level to properly grasp the Internet as a legitimate extension of my social reality. Is that so unheard of? I grew up in a period of transition, and I think it's only newer generations whose earliest memories won't be discernible from full immersion.
I'm wary of lumping time periods/shared experience into cultural sensibilities that speak for an imagined majority, and too often these consolidations have technology as their pivot. Which is fair, technology is a huge player. Only extrapolations seem to come quicker now, public amnesias concerning the definitively experimental nature of new-media (such as facebook, grindr, etc) precipitating hysteria that's starkly positive or negative, and hopelessly premature.
It's either futurist-hippy hysteria (be you an advocate of utopia/dystopia), or a wilful docility incapable of discriminating each shift as more than given.
Presently, I feel more despairing than hopeful, but I'm loathe to shuck an open and discursive presence of mind. So here goes a purging list of personal complaint against grindr, to be followed by a sketch of a remedial method to extract from grindr more positive experiences, ones closer aligned with expectation (realistically. I'm not Bridget fucking Jones).
For starters, as big a fan of sex with strangers as I am, there's no comfortable precursor to the deed beyond perfunctory (not obligatory) chat, during which you don't even get to slyly grade the person, except from a static profile image which can be tweaked, clipped, rendered GQ-slick at all odds with reality (if one were brazen enough).
In fewer words, I miss the middleman.
The best example is meeting someone in a bar (is serendipity an alcoholic? Where the fuck else are you meant to meet someone?). Of course you wanna score, but the grounds of every conversation you have aren't coloured as heavily by sexpectation as they are on grindr (unless you're that guy).
I know that's the app's convenience, evasion of general interest for the common goal of hooking up. But a 'general interest' conversation is not a frivolous expenditure of time/energy to me even if I'm primarily focused on fucking the hypothetical person I'm having this hypothetical conversation with.
It sounds finicky, even hypocritical, but that middleman, though a narrow aperture of contextualisation, affords me a real-time moment to ground a new face in the narrative arc of my life (albeit a fleeting cameo). I need it.
Furthermore, I think it's the absence of the above that's giving me cognitive whiplash. I don't know how to integrate grindr's massive convenience, and am even wondering if I should. It might not be for me, it's detrimental to my approach.
What method exists to reconstitute this middleman in terms of grindr etiquette? I don't know. Watch this space.
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