Labor of Love (3 page)

On an episode of
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
that became notorious, one of the housewives, Yolanda, hosted a group of friends in her recently remodeled kitchen. Over white wine, she delivered some real talk on the importance of keeping sexual passion alive in marriage.

“Let's get it straight,” Yolanda said. “Men love beautiful women and beautiful women love rich men. They will fuck your husband for a Chanel bag.” This, she seemed to be saying, was why it is imperative to fuck your husband first.

“If you have found your true love, it should be easy.”

According to Yolanda, “true love” is what you share with a man who finds you as sexy as you find him rich. It makes that exchange—of sex for financial security, consumer pleasure, and social status—easy. Not like work at all.

The irony of course is that all of the housewives who appear on
Real Housewives
thereby become
professional
housewives. Impersonating themselves, they gain credentials that let them leverage their stay-at-home identities into lucrative careers as consultants and businesswomen. In that capacity, they sell products to enrich the housewife experience, like Skinny Girl Margaritas.

No wonder the Real Housewives are so beloved. We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession. Yolanda is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.

*   *   *

The old-fashioned practices of chaperoned courtship and calling had drawn clear lines between the worlds of men and women. Dating undid them. It took courtship out of the private sphere and into public places. It transferred control over the process from the older generation to the younger generation, from the group to the individual, and from women to men.

It all seemed highly suspicious to the authorities. In the early 1900s, vice commissions across the country sent police and undercover investigators to check out spots where people went to make dates. As early as 1905, private investigators hired by a group of Progressive do-gooders in New York City were taking notes on what we can now recognize as the dating avant-garde.

At the Strand Hotel, in Midtown, an agent named Charlie Briggs saw many women who did not seem to be prostitutes, exactly, but who definitely seemed shady. The majority were “store employees, telephone girls, stenographers, etc.”

“Their morals are loose,” he wrote, “and there is no question that they are on terms of sexual intimacy with their male companions.”

When a female investigator named Natalie Sonnichsen and her male colleague T. W. Veness went to an uptown dive called the Harlem River Casino several months later, they deemed the floor to be too small and “much too crowded for decent dancing.” Sonnichsen was appalled by how the women were dressed.

“Two girls [wore] very tight knickers,” she noted. Another had “a very décolleté costume with practically no sleeves, tights, with very short and skimpy knickers.”

The idea that young women might want to go out and enjoy themselves—and, maybe, even enjoy sex—was a lot for the Calling Class to process.

In the 1910s, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the Standard Oil founder, funded investigations into the commercialized vice industries of more than a dozen American cities. The reports that they produced are full of anecdotes about young people making dates.

The Chicago committee found that many young girls often used their charms as a ticket to a day's entertainment at boardwalks and amusement parks: “Some young girls go regularly to these parks. They come with the price of admission and carfare, and as they have no money for amusements, seek a good time at some one's expense.”

The write-up on New York described a cruise that took place in August 1912, between New York and New Haven. Two girls, accompanied by a woman who seemed to be their mother, rented a stateroom on the boat, where they stayed all day and were visited by different men. At some point on the trip, “the girl became friendly and offered to make a ‘date' with the investigator.” The report does not mention whether he said yes.

*   *   *

Early dating slang stressed that what was taking place was some kind of transaction
.
“Picking up” made a date sound like a casual purchase. Other terms romanticized dating as an exchange of gifts. Take “treating,” for instance. The word “treat” was commonly used as both noun and verb to describe a date or the action of taking someone on one. When a woman accepted “a man's treat,” she could later brag to her girlfriends that “he treated.”

Women who did this were called Charity Girls. A 1916
Sexual Dictionary
included “
Charity cunt
, n. Woman who distributes her favors without a price.” Meaning for only the price of a date. By the 1920s, the prostitutes at New York's Strand Hotel complained that Charity Girls were putting them out of business.

The key fact that distinguished a Charity Girl from a prostitute—and still legally distinguishes an escort from one—was that she did not take cash. Undercover investigators in bars and dance halls reported that many women refused to discuss money with them. Instead, they would bring up things they wanted.

When one investigator in New York started to negotiate the terms of leaving a bar with a woman late at night, she demanded that he buy her a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey. And while he was at it, could he come with her to the butcher to pay an outstanding bill? (It never seems to occur to the investigators that the women they write up might have recognized them for what they were, and decided to mess around.)

“I told her all butcher shops were closed now,” he wrote, “and I didn't care to travel around from store to store, she got sore at me and called me a piker and told me to beat it.”

To be treated to food or drinks or even articles of clothing was one thing. But when offered money for their services, many women balked.
Who did he think she was?

In the 1910s, many women arrested for dating protested that they had been wrongly accused.

At Bedford Reformatory, an institution founded to rehabilitate female delinquents in upstate New York, an Irish woman told her jailers again and again that she had “never taken money from men.” Instead men took her “to Coney Island to dances and Picture Shows.”

An African American inmate admitted to having had “sexual intercourse with three different friends” but swore she had “never taken money from any of them.” Instead, she said, they “sent her presents and have taken her out to dinner and the theater often.”

As the years passed, the vice squad had to accept it. Daters did not see these exchanges as tawdry. They saw them as romantic.

*   *   *

Dating still suffers from a kind of prostitution complex. I have heard many debates about whether you “owe” someone “something”—meaning some act of physical intimacy—in return for an evening out. The people who say these things do not usually seem to think that they are negotiating a price for their time or access to their bodies. But it would be difficult to pinpoint what exactly makes sleeping with someone because he bought you dinner different from sleeping with someone because he paid you what that dinner cost. At the same time, the very ambiguity that is supposed to make a date different from a sex-for-money transaction makes people nervous. Who has not wondered:
Does he like me? Is she just using me? What is the other person
really
in this for?

American English still has a huge store of slang that describes dating as transactional. Expressions like “damaged goods” no longer fly in polite company, and few people I know wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get all the milk he wants for free.” But we do say that both men and women should shop around. If you really like someone, you should play hard to get. If you let a partner get some for nothing, you risk selling yourself short. He or she may just want to seal the deal. Friends with benefits offer a sense of security. But they come with trade-offs. Wait too long and you may have to settle. If you're on the market, it's wiser to invest in a relationship.

This is before we even get into all the increasingly common ways of talking about dating that self-consciously borrow concepts from economics. People conduct “cost-benefit analyses” of their relationships, and cite the “low risk and low investment costs” of casual sex. They try to “position themselves” to “optimize” their romantic options.

A large sector of the advice industry encourages people to approach their love lives equipped with a business strategy. In 2003, a dating coach named Rachel Greenwald published a “15-step action program”:
Find a Husband After 35 (Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School)
. Greenwald promises to teach daters of a certain age “to see the problem of finding a husband through the eyes of a marketer.” Blogs about online dating obsess about ROI, short for “return on investment.”

There is one other rich set of metaphors used to describe dating. These imply that dating is like playing a sport. It is not just the bases. We take long shots. Losers aim too high and strike out.
Don't hate the player, hate the game!
If you ask a friend to be your wingman, or to run interference, that friend must take one for the team. Friends do not let friends get cock blocked. They help them score.

People may use these expressions half-jokingly. But the fact that so many of them remain current shows that our culture still sees dating as a transaction that takes place on uncertain terrain between work and play. It also tells us something about the gender roles that many daters still feel pressured to perform.

Theoretically, these two sets of metaphors are equal opportunity. In many social circles, a young woman can now call herself a “baller” and assume she will be understood. A young man can joke about playing “hard to get” and expect the same. But the cows and milk and allusions to testes make clear that we still associate these opposing attitudes toward love and sex more “naturally” with one gender or the other. A female “player,” like a “man slut,” adopts a kind of drag by professing to be so.

In other words, our slang suggests that we still think dating is work for women and recreation for men.

*   *   *

Over the past few decades, it has become commonplace to observe how dramatically the Digital Revolution is disrupting dating. Yet many of the disruptions that new sites and apps have brought about recall the changes that brought dating into being in the first place. I have seen a sandwich board outside a bar joke that they had “3-D Tinder.” It took me a minute to realize that by saying that they served the “3-D” version of a popular dating app, all the owners meant was that there were people inside.

Like Tinder, the first dive bars and dance halls that the working classes created when they flooded into cities were forms of social media. A bar is still a dating technology. It brings strangers together and enables them to connect. It also structures the possible ways that they can interact. The streets around the overcrowded tenements where the first daters lived were platforms, as the Internet is a platform
.

In their unruliness, they resembled the early World Wide Web. In the 1990s, marketplaces like Craigslist's “adult services” and Backpage became notorious for making it easy for those looking to buy sex to find people selling it. Law enforcement eventually shut these pages down. But new digital technologies continue to create new kinds of erotic transactions. Many sex workers who engage in them still refer to meetings with clients, and clients themselves, as “dates.”

The year I got my first job out of college, in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the trend that I heard people giggling about the most was “findoms.” Through webcams, men who called themselves “pay pigs” were hiring women to “financially dominate” them for a fee. Mostly they seemed to want to be verbally abused and told to offer gifts.

In the years since, the spread of smartphones and mobile dating apps has made it easier for sex workers to find clients directly and thus avoid the risks associated with streetwalking—including surveillance and harassment by police.

One man I talk to says that he finds the women he hires to come to his apartment the same way he finds the women he takes out to drinks or dinner: by using Tinder. The only things distinguishing the dates he pays from the ones he does not are the discreet links that appear on their profile photos. Click, he explains, and you find yourself at a website with a short bio and a local phone number. Text it and someone shows up within thirty minutes. When she finishes working for the night, she will deactivate the account.

“They don't even bother to use burners.” He shrugs.

Recently, mobile phone apps that facilitate “sugar dating” have captured the popular prurient imagination. The most notorious is SeekingArrangement. The concept is simple. SeekingArrangement provides a platform for “Sugar Babies” and “Sugar Daddies” to find one another. According to the site, Sugar Daddies are “successful men and women who know what they want … and enjoy attractive company by their side.” Sugar Babies are “attractive people looking for the finer things in life.”

Mostly SeekingArrangement connects younger women who want money with older men who want sex. Opening an account and setting up a profile is free. Both Babies and Daddies post photos, stats like weight, height, and ethnicity, and charming self-descriptions. Then they indicate their “Expectations”: how much a Daddy is willing to pay and how much a Baby asks. You select from a drop-down menu.

Select Assistance Level:

        
Negotiable

        
Minimal

        
Practical