Am I Too Horny or Too Online?

There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from constantly seeing beautiful people. Not in real life, but when you’re on your phone. When you’re scrolling late at night, when you’re alone, and when the mind is at its softest. When ideas silently imbed themselves. When you look, again and again.

I am exhausted not from the bodies alone, but what they promise, what they tease. These people are men I follow or come across on reels or hunt for on Grindr. They aren’t posting porn necessarily. They allude with bulges and abs, they writhe around with just enough clothing on to leave something to the imagination, and they tell us what they’re into via this performance. All by their lonesome, for now. The currency is not nudity, but the possibility of it and more. I’m exhausted from holding onto this promise.

I re-downloaded Grindr for the fifth or sixth time this week. My starred profiles served as my menu. “We’re running out of time to kiss,” I message to someone who I have been flirting with online for the past two years. Plans are quickly made. I do the usual pre-sex cleanup and hop on a Citi Bike, cruising from Bed-Stuy to Bushwick, Lorde playing in my headphones, my UCLA T-shirt sweaty from the summer heat. It’s the closest thing to a normal teenage life I’ve experienced since I was 17 and skipping school to smoke weed on the Santa Monica pier. I felt like a teen boy heading to his girlfriend’s house on a weekend when her parents were away. But I didn’t have the blind confidence of a teen boy. Logan, whose name on the grid was just “aging twunk,” and I had been playing this game for so long that I was unsure of what I wanted out of this. The pictures of him on Grindr, Instagram, and Hinge all matched my idea of desire. His shape, his poses, his high follower count all told me that I should want him.

He was handsome and I liked how much he wanted me in his bed. Still, I couldn’t shake my uncertainty. He could sense this, and asked me what’s up. He said I’m “in my head” and too “cerebral.” How magnanimous. He asked if I even like sex and I realized that I couldn’t really answer him. He asked if I watch a lot of porn. “Oh, am I a gooner? Well yeah, I guess I go through seasons of watching a lot of porn,” I said, jumping to the point so my glibness could hide my shame. We resumed the hookup, and all I could do is question what brought me to Aging Twunk’s apartment. To put an end to the questioning, I asked if he wanted to come on my back while he fondled my ass and feet. He happily took me up on my offer. I rolled onto my stomach and dropped my shoulders and head with quiet relief. The scene wasn’t over though and I figured I’d give him a good show to the end. I arched my back and threw him a coquettish grin. For the three minutes it took him to come I held that pose.

After a rinse off in his shower I walked back to Bed-Stuy with my arms crossed. I wanted to want him. Everything about him was what I’d been trained by “the media” to desire. I kept waiting for the part where it would click and his touch would feel good, or even just easy. I thought I knew what I wanted, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what I was looking for in his room. I thought this particular instance was a sign that I was somehow sexually repressed, inhibited from feeling pleasure, something that I could fix if I reread The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs enough times. I’m starting to think of my mind as an operating system that’s being trained by the algorithm of desire and realizing that my sexual dissonance is a feature and not a bug.

I have never known my sex drive without images attached. During puberty, my sexuality began to develop, and alongside it my taste in digital content. Early access to porn may rot the brain but it sharpens the eye. I remember scrolling on Tumblr in my dark bedroom, late at night. Sifting through images and GIFs, maybe hundreds in a night, I learned how to recognize the patterns of value. The look and movement of the bodies, the image quality, the lighting, the level of anonymity: all the variables of desire. Looking back I can see that I was taught how to recognize desire rather than how to feel it. I was given a set of choices and mistook that for free will. I was given a script and mistook the lines for my own thoughts. This is what it’s like to be a gay man in this time. We are told what we want before we even know it for ourselves. We are given hard lessons in what pictures get attention and what don’t. We learn that to desire is to make an aesthetic choice and to be desired constitutes success.

Grindr is ostensibly an apparatus for horny men, a means to an end. I see it more as a stage where desire is performed and we are taught to suspend disbelief. I find myself changing out my profile photos often, knowing that images get old fast. My formula has been developed through trial and error in my teens and early 20s. The brutish mirror pic: torso (more so v-line and up), raking light to accentuate the muscles, face partially cropped out, not too available, casual, a little douchey, Calvin Klein or boxers (trendy), medium-clean mirror (not too type A but not too DL trade–esque). This isn’t necessarily my personality on display, but rather an assemblage of codes that signals what role I’m willing to play for a potential partner. If done correctly, my performance will attract the Juliet to my Romeo. The high of getting messages or replies can come crashing down if you look too closely and catch a glimpse of what’s behind the curtain, ruining the fantasy. Or, you become too aware of the fantasy you’re selling (and the fact that you’re selling something). Stuck in a loop, we delete, re-download, delete, and re-download. I can abscond only for so long till I go back looking for proof. Proof that I am desirable, that connection is accessible, that I can play the part well.

The aesthetic codes of desire are peddled by the newest digital class: the erotic influencer. These are the OnlyFans creators who tease and bait their paywalled content. Your regular feed is interlaid with sexual skits, bulges in public, and straight-to-camera, lighthearted, and humorous confessions of dick size. As I scroll through Instagram reels the OnlyFans star Peachy Boy stares back at me, shirtless, in tight underwear, standing next to another man in the same outfit. They’re laughing, lightly posing, not really committing to either action. Trending audio plays in the background. Above both their heads are measurements in centimeters that go unaddressed, but so obviously allude to their dick sizes. He’s purposely being opaque to compel you to go on his profile and either watch more videos or switch to a different, more explicit, platform like Twitter or OnlyFans. Videos like this exist in varying levels of production; all show just enough to pique interest and get you curious.

Even if we aren’t selling porn, we’ve all learned how to tease; on platforms as quotidian as Instagram. We may not profit monetarily but know how to keep the reply guys replying. I can admit to being a digital tease. Showing just enough skin, just enough of the time, keeps people interested and wanting to see more. The plethora of story replies or DMs and the dopamine hits that follow mean I’ve done something right. We’ve been taught that what we should desire is to be looked at the way we have been taught to look. In internet terms: we’ve all become gooners and desire to be gooned to.

This constant performance comes at a cost. Is it loneliness disguised as flirtation? Am I trying to find someone to hold or am I just afraid of losing my status as someone people want to look at? If buying into the promise of intimacy has become the final stop, where do we go after?

I hit on a guy in real life a couple of days ago. It was on the corner of Tompkins Square Park on a bright June day. He was my type so I went up to him with my heart racing. He was fussing with a Citi Bike that wasn’t undocking. “I couldn’t let you leave without telling you how cute I think you are.” He was a bit flustered but said thank you. He gave me a tight-lipped smile then walked to another bike and rode away. You win some, you lose some. At least it started and ended in the flesh.