Grindr: Sex Without Sexuality?

Mirror/Mirrors, no. 1, Paris: Wings on a Tractor, May 2013.

Far from being a symptom, the Grindr app is a marvel of sexual classicism under the guise of ultra-modernity. A creation that is not “postmodern” at all, which is admittedly a relief, and something unavoidable today, which everyone is talking about—so we will too.

 

As for the choice of theme, someone other than I will explain it, since they suggested it to me. I will be content to set out, in what follows, the reasons that encouraged me to accept this brief stroll. But I want to state a conviction from the outset. Contrary to popular belief, Grindr is not the Rungis wholesale market of sex but rather the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. For many, Grindr is merely an offshoot of liberalism and capitalism, which would make sex an object subject to the laws of the market, a consumer good like any other. Certainly, everything one can see of it contributes to this quick analysis. But to believe this would be to misunderstand the laws in question. Far from being reducible to those of the market economy, Grindr’s laws are grounded instead in those of the psychic economy. Supply and demand are indeed at work in the psyche as well as in the economy, but it is better not to confuse them too quickly. Sex is certainly treated more or less as an object of consumption by most of today’s new communication technologies, Grindr included (the internet, smartphone apps). But do they really reduce sex to an object? And are users compelled to engage only their capitalist and consumerist ambitions when they log on? Of course not. They bring their desire, their wish for love, their jouissance, and their dreams. Proof: they complain about it. Sexuality appears there as commonplace as everywhere else, at the risk of becoming banal. Even “gay,” sexuality does not avoid the problems all sexualities encounter.

From Marx to Freud, then, there is a step to be taken, crossing fields on the way. And why not lose one’s way in the open country and snoop around the king’s court? For with Grindr, it is to the court of the Gay king that we are invited. Versailles’ pretty boys have given way to other courtiers, where effeminate boys and virile males mingle indistinguishably. Photos, measurements, and emoticons as finery, bodies commit, offer themselves, and slip away in this round of today’s coquetry. So accessible and yet so hard to grasp, by the dozen and by the hundred they all bait and undress one another. Offer everything or almost everything without ever promising anything. Refuse oneself and thereby increase desire all the more. Feed it and let it wither. Speak truer than true and deny everything without contradicting oneself. Turn one’s back without a glance, called away by some matter of the highest importance. Such is the renewed experience of seduction and desire to which Grindr offers an effective and hypnotic access.

One more word. That love and sex are such difficult things, as everyone knows, deserves better explanations than those often circulated about them, somewhere between bar-room psychology and cybernetic sociology. Let us wager that the turpitudes of the unconscious can be glimpsed through 4G, for we have much to learn.

The (virtual) shopping basket of the (imaginary) housewife

In Grindr’s housewife’s basket we find all kinds of images and imaginaries: a rounded biceps, a thirsty buttock, a loving sun in a summer sky, an authoritarian cock, a sad look, a determined profile, a mistake. Little badges glow red and purr like parakeets in a mating display. They alert; they vibrate. A message arrives. A few abbreviated words, coded phrases. A photo

“Private.” A verdict. An address, more codes. The encounter… the fatal blade or a promise kept.

 

“Gay sexuality” is not the sexuality of objectified sex, contrary to what is said here and there. It has not made sex a material good, as manageable and as exploitable as all the consumer objects that surround us in daily life. Some lament this; others rejoice in it. Others strive to believe it still, out of loyalty and allegiance to the Gay king, even as Grindr provides yet another proof to the contrary. Finding a partner, here or elsewhere, is not the same as buying a vase to decorate one’s flat or a cake to satisfy one’s hunger—whose packaging one can throw away after satisfaction in the one case, or even put back in the cupboard if one tires of it too quickly in the other. Let it be said: the appetite for sex is not measured by the quantity consumed or the quality granted; sexual desire does not resolve into acquisition. If it had been possible, gay or not, we would have known by now.

Which does not mean that it is not, more or less, an underlying project to extract sex from the throes of the relationship. Indeed, do some not cherish the sweet dream of a sex freed from sex itself, a consumable sex without waste? And if modernity could offer that—a sex without affective, sentimental, or emotional troubles, a jouissance without traces? But is there a single sexuality capable of producing such a twist? So let us ask ourselves whether sex is soluble in the imaginary and the virtual. How does it work on the internet, on Grindr?

 

On closer inspection, sex is far from being undone from the contingencies of relational life to the point of living its life off in a corner. Proof: if some users claim

to be “seeking real” (meaning a genuine encounter, not merely a virtual flirt) as a guarantee of their intentions, how many act on it? Conversely, how many end up classified among the “mythos,” thus branded with a definitive judgment for having given in on their initial intention, ultimately aborted? On Grindr, commitment to the relationship is what allows one to assess and judge the other’s presence according to their level of participation (speed and substance of replies, kept appointments or being stood up, for example). We are therefore very far from being able to observe an ethereal sexuality.

 

Sex, and everything that comes with it, is too real to be merely imagined or represented; it demands the test of reality. And yet there is no sex without images or imaginary representations, no sex without fantasies. Grindr accounts very well for this sexual complexity, mixing, within an apparent virtuality, reality and the imaginary that are definitively knotted together. Indeed, even the power of the image is not enough to dilute the body, the drive, the sensation, the gaze, the voice—each a non-negotiable object and obstacle of the reality of sexuality.

 

But Grindr shows in particular that the virtual strengthens and amplifies the effects of the imaginary when it captures a part of sex, kidnaps it. It is therefore unsurprising that certain promises of meeting, offered in the haste of a somewhat hurried dialogue, vanish into unreality. They are not lost to everyone, because Grindr, in passing, takes its tithe. Grindr, a virtual monster, feeds on its users’ unrealized sexual desires. And it may even be there, in non-realization, that they

find their most effective and happiest outcome for everyone despite appearances, as if they had never had any ambitions other than to remain within fantasy, as if Grindr had, deep down, never promised anything. Thus, disappointed or satisfied, all (users and Grindr alike) benefit from the situation with more or less happiness; all derive jouissance from it one way or another. This is an almost total success, equivalent to the satisfaction of gambling: the joy lies in buying the lottery ticket, at the moment when everything can be imagined about a life after the “jackpot,” not in the result of the draw, which is always negative (except in rare cases).

Imaginary reality

This raises an important question: does virtual presence commit the person who is there to being there as a reality? In other words, in what capacity is the Grindr user there? In the capacity of their avatar, their fantasy, their image? Hard to answer, but we can at least say that they are there as an imaginary reality. Nothing truly commits them beyond being connected. And if their words, of course, always draw them a little further into the exchange, are they there as a body, as an image of their body? Is it even possible to understand anything in this matter, to find one’s bearings? Can Grindr reveal its secrets?

 

Listening to Grindr users and users of other online dating networks1 (especially when they complain about them), it is as if virtual presence necessarily commits the person who is there to being there in reality. That seems somewhat complicated. And it is rather paradoxical—or even frankly incompatible, deep down—with the very approach of the virtual network. How can one be truly virtual? That is a question that captures well what users of the app run up against. Is it enough to display on one’s user profile, or in one’s listing, the mention “seeking real” to clarify one’s own position vis-à-vis the virtual space in which one is engaged? Is it even possible to shed light on one’s presence and desire to the point that everything could be recorded on a personal information sheet? What, ultimately, do those who brandish as a standard these long litanies of text in the form of warnings—where nothing seems to be missing—actually say? What would there be to add, since everything is already said? Is there still room for someone

? Not to mention that very often the sentence has already been proclaimed: “you must read my entire profile, otherwise there’s no point talking to me.”

 

Narcissus, leaning over his reflection, would have adored Grindr—there is no doubt about it. One need only see how many users deem it necessary to inscribe at the top of their banner this sign: “no photos, no chat.” Let them be reassured: no one doubts the imperious necessity of the other’s image which, if absent, would prevent the exchange—an exchange of reflections, the reflection of oneself in the other’s image. But why make it a condition, a criterion? Does Grindr then flatter its users’ narcissism? Yes, evidently. But let us not believe that using Grindr is merely a self-centered narcissistic reassurance; it is more complex than that. Many other things slip into the housewife’s basket of Grindr users: precious objects, community alliances, lucky charms too, not forgetting a few dreams and a few disappointments.

 

 

 

More supply, less demand

So what is offered and sought on Grindr? Services? That happens sometimes, no doubt. But most users seem far more driven by their demand in the form of an offer, which is logical since Grindr requires one to begin by offering oneself through display, before even being able to state a personal demand. The housewife’s basket is therefore already fairly well stocked by the time one goes strolling through the virtual aisles, stocked with one’s singular offer. It may even already be quite full, overflowing with an individual offer so formidable that it can meet no demand from another equal to it. Here Grindr does not avoid the impasse: placing the user in a short-circuit of desire, when no demand can measure up to their offer.

 

This is a common bug, scented with frustration, and it is a structural dead end. Nothing about Grindr or its users can remedy this bogging down. It is a bit like prevention brochures in healthcare. They anticipate questions people have not yet had the time to think or ask; how could they possibly achieve their aim of conveying a message? Failure is known in advance; it is logical. Just like prevention brochures, the Grindr user’s offer runs ahead of the other’s desire, which is the best way not to recognise it in all its nuances, and the surest road to the flatness of a levelled-out, technical, off-topic exchange. Nothing says nothing will be consumed or realized, but at what dose of subjectivity?

 

Taking advantage of an overinvestment in the image, and thus in the imaginary, carries the risk of an even greater mismatch between what is hoped for and what is. Showing oneself in one’s best light and under one’s most favourable features condemns the person who does so to share with everyone else this connivance with masquerade: each knows what the other does with their image; each can therefore doubt it or refuse to be seduced by it. The supply–demand mechanism can thus sometimes grind to a halt precisely because it is so optimized, for Grindr is a fine connoisseur of this mechanism and can bring it to its highest point, thereby revealing at the same time its principal impasse.

 

The virtual image is therefore always at least an image. It is offered to whoever is willing to see it and, in general, to whoever shows their own image as well—sometimes an image in which they are not. What can fragments of chest or buttocks represent of the person from whom they come? A rather meagre portion, or the whole? But this little nothing is enough to make the difference in matters of seduction, like the gleam on the nose in the discourse of love2. A nothing, however discreet, can make the difference and prove capable of activating desire. All Grindr users know this at least as well as psychoanalysts do. One does not fall in love and one does not desire what is seen or what is, but what is not seen—even if this idea is difficult to accept.

 

It is therefore the image that seduces, or not, the one who sees it, and not the one who chose it to illustrate their profile. For even the profile is nothing other than a presentation of the user, where truth is not mandatory. Another discrepancy then operates here: the one who is seduced by an image is so as themselves represented by their own image—the image in which they feel an interest about which they know very little, and above all about which they do not want to know what, of themselves, happens to be represented by it for the other. The chat that may ensue can bring this gap to light and deepen it enough for the initial seduction to sink into the abyss thus opened. But the exchange of a few words can also make the virtual interest concrete, to the point of organising a real meeting, since that is, a priori, everyone’s stated objective. Thus the image on Grindr can deceive its world, just as images in general can. It is a nuisance not to notice it or to forget it too quickly, since, deep down, no one is unaware of it. And the test of reality does the rest, when the real meeting, disappointing, comes to destroy the hoped-for fragments of images—when the other “can thank Photoshop.”

Sex addiction?

But let us return to our coquettes and to the Hall of Mirrors. It seems that sex addiction is what strikes them, to the point that they no longer know how to stop using Grindr, or stop fucking. And that Grindr amplifies their sex addiction. It is true that what Grindr and other virtual dating apps seem to generate as behaviours easily leads us onto the track of addiction. But is it really addiction we are dealing with? Let us put the question differently. Is it enough that desires and their satisfactions are lived in repetition and constraint, by someone who cannot escape them, to make an addiction? Where does addiction begin, and how is it distinguished from obsession, repetition, compulsion?

 

In recent years, the notion of addiction has enjoyed spectacular success. This is hardly surprising. First, let us note that symptoms regularly appear on the surface of discourse and on magazine covers. Depression and stress in the 1980s, but also schizophrenia, which has since had the spotlight stolen by bipolar disorder, from which we can no longer escape. If what is at stake were not so serious, it would be laughable. For in the flood of pathological trends, the success granted to one category—never without its treatment—covers over the reality of the psychic processes at work and the suffering that goes with them. But then what is sex addiction?

 

Not so long ago, it was the backrooms and saunas that were seen as places of possible sexual overconsumption, where perdition lay in wait for some. It is true that some have been lost there, and others are still lost there. But is sex addiction a matter of quantity, of overdose? When sex life comes to constitute the central pillar of all social or affective life, the major preoccupation, the plan that occupies the week in anticipation of the weekend…

are we facing an addiction, or a primordial sexual question for the person concerned? Let us say that there is an insistence of the sexual question.

 

At times, sexual desire blocks everything else, or almost, and takes the form of a compulsion that demands satisfaction to calm the tension. In that regard, it is quite evident that the accessibility and proximity of places and potential sexual partners encourage the desire to be satisfied quickly, but what is there in that that is more “addictive” than the capitalist mercantile dynamics of large-scale retail, for example? No one thinks of seeking treatment for an addiction to capitalism; we live inside it, willingly and unwillingly. It is not surprising that sexuality, when it takes on the appearance of an object of bargaining (without quite managing to), ends up paying the price in its turn. So what should we think of this?

 

Let us note in passing at least three things: obsession, insistence (or repetition), and compulsion. These are indeed three significant characteristics of what are commonly called addictions. But they are above all three elements present in sexuality in general, in different proportions, and that pose more or less difficulty. They are not in themselves sufficient to speak of addiction, and this for at least one simple reason: if we say “addiction” too quickly, we risk stopping thinking about what lies beneath, too pleased to have laid our hands on “the problem.” And that is a pity, because there are very interesting questions in that direction that should be explored before being swept under the carpet. What might they be?

 

For example, being assigned to a recurring, or unchosen, place in sexuality, or always occupying the same function in fantasy, without being able to exercise any other or carry out any manoeuvre to enjoy another freedom in sex—these are effects of constraint that do not necessarily fall under addiction and yet can cause suffering. But beware: this is not to be translated into Grindr language, which does not seem able to think places and functions in sexuality other than in terms of top/bottom, meaning penetrator/penetrated. Having a place or occupying a function in sexuality is more subtle; it is not a position in the sense of the Kamasutra.

Another example: being unable to stop oneself from fucking, in this or that situation in response to this or that type of event, illustrates well a form of compulsion—but this is not enough to make an addiction. Nevertheless, it is indeed a source of possible difficulties that must be taken very seriously. It concerns the more or less conscious and unconscious determinants that, for each person, govern what is possible and impossible in sexuality. If there is sometimes constraint or compulsion, it is to desire and lived experience that one must relate them. These are not “illnesses,” but human sexuality.

 

All this is to say that the concerns encountered in sexual life do not necessarily need to be pinned under a label such as addiction for it to be possible to take an interest in them—indeed, it is often the opposite. Sexual life is a very complex thing, a source of many contingencies that are better approached as they are, even if we do not understand much of it at first, without wrapping them too quickly in certainties or in conceptual knowledge too convenient to be honest.

 

This notion of sex addiction nevertheless has the merit of drawing our attention to the importance not of quantity but of the quality of sexual activity. What matters is what is at stake subjectively, outside any economic or commercial quantification. Even under the promises or hopes of a sexually bulimic, identitarian claim, gay men are nonetheless subjects—subjects of the Gay king perhaps, but subjects all the same.

 

But the question of addiction also opens onto the question of jouissance. Grindr addresses gay men, and gay sexuality is not without being linked—historically, symbolically, affectively, and unconsciously—to the AIDS epidemic. This has its roots in the 1980s and continues to strengthen again and again, as the seropositivity rate continues to rise in the gay community, contrary to all expectations, contrary to all the predictions that could still be made fifteen years ago. In this epidemic, jouissance remains the most important and most tenacious unspoken today. Secret, diabolical, or political, it is as much hoped for as feared, when it is not simply pushed back into the shadows as if it could be forgotten. Yet Grindr, with what we glimpse of this attempt to fabricate sex stripped of sexuality, is a current sign of it. Trying to extract sex from relational encumbrances fosters the isolation of jouissance.

And jouissance in all this?3

In restoring to sex this supposed lost freedom, or in wanting to offer it this additional modern territory of freedom, sex finds itself stripped of its trappings, which can indeed encumber between masquerade and complexity, but which organise and regulate jouissance. When it is not supported or arranged by eroticism, fantasy, the relational dimension of sexuality, or some other weave, jouissance roams, agitates, spills, passes through, and strikes like lightning. Each person is free, as best they can, to venture there with or without precautions, with or without the means to bear it, in response to desire or to an identitarian imperative. No one can either say or judge what should be done or avoided in this regard. But no one can avoid considering that will is not desire, that jouissance is not pleasure, and that, contrary to what many would still like to believe, sexuality is far more traversed by jouissance and desire than by will and pleasure.

 

Not so long ago, the gay community had its first great thunderous encounter with the question of jouissance, in the field of the struggle against AIDS: the moment when controversies around bareback flourished, at the turn of the 2000s, to put it simply. Almost everyone agrees today that this rupture in the history of the epidemic among gay men was largely missed, from every point of view at stake. The consequences remain difficult to assess, even if certain current movements seem to be echoes or ricochets of it. Since then, it has been out of the question to address this burning file without risking eternal banishment, which does not make life easier for seronegative people, nor for seropositive people. Nor does it make it easier for psychological or psychic dimensions to be taken seriously into account. Yet there is much to say; there is no shortage of work.

 

Since bareback, other events or phenomena have occurred and still occur, with jouissance at their heart. Unfortunately, it is not thought through by associations or Mr. Average Gay, except under one or another of its most common figures—namely as risk or as threat—never for what it is: formless, unspeakable, disorienting, elusive. It is, moreover, in this vein that harm reduction (HR) applied to sex misses the essential of what it is concerned with, by ignoring it, while filling its discourse with cum as the promise of a sexual pleasure restored to its value—as if jouissance had a face and playing with semen sealed its return4. Yet it is not the same as orgasm and its secretions. And as every time it is clumsily repressed, it returns to us from another place, with even more energy. And it is not Grindr that will bring any new solution or problem on this point.

it is, moreover, in this vein that harm reduction (HR) applied to sex misses the essence of what it is interested in by dint of ignoring it, while filling its discourse with cum like the promise of a sexual pleasure reconsidered at its value, as if enjoyment had a face and playing with sperm signaled its return4. It does not, however, merge with orgasm and its secretions. And as every time it is clumsily repressed, it returns to us from another place, with even more energy. And it is not Grindr that will bring any new solution or problem on this point.

 

Today, we are facing a violent—and even ultra-violent—emergence of jouissance in the gay community through the consumption of drugs in a sexual context. This very much concerns the AIDS epidemic among gay men, even if these “behaviours” do not concern the majority of gay men—indeed, especially if they concern only a minority—because they are representative in that they bear witness to something that exceeds them. And here Grindr, by giving substance to this project of a fictive liberation of jouissance under the guise of mastering contacts and encounters, participates, despite itself, in this very delicate current reality.

 

 

 

Gay sex, drugs and HIV5

For some time now, we have been encountering (in “psy” practices, in hospital services) severe dependencies on GHB, use of

mephedrone6 with serious consequences, the development of injection practices,

the endless exploration of bodily and psychic limits… These shattering realities combine with an excessive jouissance, the kind that has no limits, the kind one cannot manage to put into words! And yet it must be heard, despite everything. For it is not an end in itself, no more a means of existing. Here jouissance commands, for better and for worse, without distinction, the one who offers themselves to it or the one on whom it imposes itself. It may even be capable of ignoring desire, carrying one far from familiar reference points and freely consented wishes.

 

But what does this have to do with AIDS? What does it have to do with Grindr? It is simple—scientifically unverifiable—but this seems to be borne out: most gay men who have met and who live through these most painful situations of drug consumption are most often HIV-positive, sometimes HCV-positive too. Most of the gay men concerned contact one another and meet via social networks, via Grindr, etc. Beware: there is no cause-and-effect link between HIV as a risk factor and drug use and its possible excesses. The link lies first in the histories—subjective histories—that those who live them are willing to tell. But to make a history heard, a few SMS messages or a Grindr profile is a bit short. Here, avoiding the relational dimension of sexuality places, very directly, on the shoulders of some a responsibility that others do not want to carry. Once again, it is seropositive people—as they are known, imagined, or fantasised—who are designated as the factors, proofs, and those responsible for the risk of contamination in gay sexuality in general. How is one to judge this? By the place made for them—given to them and assigned to them—in the community imaginary. Anyone can assess its content from whatever place they occupy, gay or not, for that matter.

 

Let us uphold this point of view: there have never been so many seropositive people (18%–20% among gay men in Paris), and the experience of serophobia in sexual and affective life seems never to have been so hard to bear. At the same time, irrational fears and behaviours of rejection or wilful ignorance persist, contrary to updated scientific data. Furthermore, while the offer of pleasures enhanced through psychoactive substances has never been so strong among gay men, they have never been so unskilled when it comes to drugs. More generally, there have never been so many risks taken, in an almost equal distribution of practice. A question imposes itself: is this merely escalation, or does it tell us something else?

 

The AIDS imaginary has therefore not disappeared—quite the contrary. It is a driver of the liquidation of violence, at the confines of pleasures, when these flirt with hatred and destruction. For to speak of all this is to speak of unpleasant things that most people do not want to hear. It is no doubt to speak of the horror of seropositivity when it is rejected. To speak of all this is to speak of some people’s need to chemically boost sexuality, to renew vanished sexual desires, to revive worn-out eroticisms. It is also to speak of gay identity and its relations to jouissance—something no one dares face, so as not to fall out with anyone, so as not to turn against oneself a so-called community that still needs to be located in order to know where and how it exists.

Grindr and prevention

Unsurprisingly, we therefore continue, after AIDS, with “prevention.” For Grindr, like other virtual domains, is now in the eye of the cyclone of prevention discourse which, like a weather vane, has begun to consider—with scientific proof to back it up—that this kind of app promotes sexual risk-taking, that Grindr plays into syphilis7 or AIDS8, for example. So yes, American researchers have shown that Craigslist contributes9, through the sexual encounters it enables, to a rise in sexually transmitted infection transmissions. Is that not a bit too quick?

 

One thing these studies highlight is that the modes of meeting made possible by these modern means are more likely than others not to guarantee a good level of prevention. Meeting via a smartphone or the internet makes it possible to bypass the community or identity fabric—this is a fact: outside neighbourhoods, outside bars, etc. This is not, a priori, a problem if it means more subjective freedom. But if it means taking advantage of an even greater distance from prevention discourse and its supports in the “scene” (information, condoms, gel, etc.), then this added freedom must be discussed. This also calls into question the relevance of community-based perspectives in prevention messages, when we know how much communities have changed their material existence.

 

But it is nothing new to observe that the unspoken or silence asserts itself when speech comes a little too close to matters of sex, and this is precisely the whole difficulty prevention discourse has faced for more than thirty years: how can one hold a discourse about something that is normally supposed to remain unsaid? Grindr does not necessarily worsen the situation, which did not wait for it to worsen on its own. These public-health questions today encourage the dissemination of prevention messages or somewhat forced contributions by Grindr’s managing company in the fight against AIDS10. Is this really interesting? And what does it conceal?

What can Grindr do about it? What more, or better, can it do for a prevention discourse that has already undergone so many transformations? Over thirty years, we can very roughly identify the following nuances:

 

1. I want you to live11
2. I protect myself, I protect you.12
3. If you fuck without a condom, at least use gel.13
4. Take your pills that protect you and be “undetectable,” please.14
5. Take your pills that protect you so you can take risks, because you are worth it 15

These changes in language clearly illustrate the shifts and fractures that AIDS has produced—and continues to produce, as it keeps dividing, even today. What changes most, at first glance, are the places of each: the place of seropositive people and that of seronegative people. The former were loved before being ordered to submit to medical and community demands; the latter have loved and would simply like to continue fucking without having to worry too much—but about what, exactly? About AIDS, or about sexuality, so troublesome, and by extension about seropositive people who add yet another layer of embarrassment to the matter?

 

Prevention discourse has shifted from love to obscenity, in the name of respecting “gay subjectivity,” a term everyone has been obsessed with lately. It divides the

“infected” and the “not-yet infected,” while remaining convinced it is addressing

“HIV-positive” and “HIV-negative” individuals. Yet we know full well what this epidemic has forced us to learn. One, prevention is not an exercise in information dissemination. Two, health is still not an object of communication, even if all the professionals in the field strive to convince themselves otherwise. And three, sex is still not a consumer good. Four, sexuality is not a matter of behavior, but rather an act. So for once, let us reread Foucault and the question of discourses that everyone usually pays lip service to, but let us truly read him. And let us interrogate the prevention discourse, which as a discourse is a structure that houses the speech it constrains and makes possible all at once. A state and industrial discourse, moreover.

To what do we owe this? We owe it to the largely imperceptible fact that when infections do not decrease, prevention believes in its own failure. And that is indeed what is being said about it, very quickly. With nearly 20% HIV prevalence among gay men, criticism and judgment can be as swift as they are indisputable, except that… By the very fact that prevention discourse targets sexuality, nothing it manages to do or fail to do can be approached as an evaluable product or result. Except that, of course, public health has not resisted integrating efficiency as a parameter; AIDS prevention has done the same without quite realizing it, even if some of its loyal representatives have made it a source of undisguised expertise and pleasure. But public health, the patron of prevention, confuses the physiological history and the psychic history of the virus and the epidemic.

 

 

 

From the Marais to the Place de Grève

Must we then kick Grindr off the couch and lead it to the scaffold? If it does not honor the promises it makes to those who use it, if it contributes to the current dilution of speech and the avoidance of the relational hazards of sexuality, if it plays into the hands of epidemics, why let it operate with total impunity? Well, perhaps because it is a very human invention to try to make one’s task easier and optimize gains in pleasure while avoiding seeing which dead ends we are trying to bypass by flying over them, as is often the case, if not the rule. Because there is always a way to speak, truly, to actually say something.

 

Must we then lead the Gay King to the Place de Grève to be shortened? Now that is a more interesting task, indeed. The Gay King embodies the sovereignty of identity over those who recognize themselves as being pinned to it. It is, however, an unprecedented force for many homosexuals to be able to construct themselves through this identity vector. But identity does not account for the identifications that found it in all their truths. This amalgam is troublesome if it does not allow what constructs it to continue moving without too many constraints toward new creations. From this perspective, Grindr is over gay, a mirror that does not even allow the image of the one looking into it to be reflected, instead imposing another that they risk taking for their own.

To conclude, as we have already reached the end, what are we saying? Grindr is indeed a modern affair, but it does not revolutionize sex. Rather, this application reveals in a new light the difficulties that exist here and there in sexuality. Wanting to simplify it at all costs is to risk losing it along the way or losing oneself within it. Sexuality is complicated, but that prevents neither loving nor fucking. Sexuality is a love story in itself.

2013. Miroir/Miroirs No. 1