Bent Street 4.1. Tiffany Jones
and I are also working on another ongoing study of love and sex in the time of COVID-19. We have a large international sample that we’ve surveyed in four waves starting in March 2020, when lockdown recommendations first began in the United States. Our preliminary results have shown strong evidence that in ‘lockdown’, people are heavily relying on technology to create intimate interactions and maintain their intimate relationships.
JP: Human intimacy is often thought of as entirely human—something that exists between people involving emotional and/or physical contact. How should we imagine technology within this?
AG: In my work, I see technology as both bridge and a shapeable tool. I conceptualize technology as the piece that can work to bridge the gap and strengthen a relationship between two people, and also as a tool that we can—with work and some stumbling—figure out how to shape into something that facilitates our human needs. For instance, now that we have the technological capability to find romantic and sexual partners using technology, we have to figure out how to connect with them in that same space where there aren’t any of the usual visual cues of attraction and compatibility. In my work on emojis, my collaborators and I found that people who used emojis more frequently with potential partners also went on more dates and had more sex over the past year. More frequent use of emojis was associated with personality characteristics like emotional intelligence and more secure attachment, both of which tend to be implicated as characteristics of good quality relationship partners. So these people, likely unknowingly, may have found a way to successfully advertise their traits in a single character and build chemistry with potential partners in ways that people who didn’t have those traits did not do.
JP: There is a common perception that technology is playing an increasing role in human relationships due to new digital technologies (mobile phones, mobile cameras, dating apps and so forth). Do you think this is the case? If so, what are the most significant changes that may have occurred as a result of this?
AG: I do. I think the most significant changes that technology has ushered forth in our relationships are the ability to connect with people over long distances, the ability to be in contact frequently, and the ability to harness it for sexual gratification. Not too many generations ago, we met our long-term partners within a few blocks of our family home. Being able to span distances and be exposed to people that you may have never encountered otherwise is very valuable, I think, for finding someone you’d really like to spend your time with, who you’re really attracted to, and who is really compatible with you. It also has value in expanding our minds, introducing us to different people and practices. And it can provide more of a safe space to start meeting people before potentially putting your life on the line with an in-person meet-up.
The ability to be in contact immediately, frequently, and privately has surely helped to create and maintain emotionally close relationships. Think of couples who, decades ago, had to endure one going off to war, or off on a months-long sailing trip, or even today’s couples who may be subject to stigma and discrimination if they’re seen together in public. Technology has provided a way for those people to keep in touch with their support system while being physically separated.
And I think that the role technology is now playing in sex is hard to ignore. Technology and the internet have created a space for any sexual interest to be shared and discussed, and have created methods for engaging sexually without having to, or having the opportunity to, give someone access to your physical body.
JP: What questions relating to technology and intimacy or technology and sexuality do you find yourself thinking or wondering about?
AG: I wonder what long-term changes we would see if human-looking sex robots became widespread and affordable. I wonder what the next generations will come up with to serve their romantic and sexual needs. I wonder if future generations of older people will be less lonely because they’re used to interacting through technology and may have an easier time staying connected through those means.
JP: Do you think that the COVID-19 social lockdown periods are likely to have changed the way people use technology to create intimacy with other people? Do you think such changes will have any lasting effects on cultures of sex or intimacy?
AG: I do, and I have some evidence of it in the study my colleagues and I are doing on sex and relationships in the time of COVID-19. We’ve seen that people—and especially people who are single and who are lonelier—are turning more toward technology to connect with other people. This includes sexual digital behavior, as well. People reported engaging in more sexting and sexually explicit video-chatting, and some subgroups of people are reporting signing up for and using online dating services more. I think the pandemic has changed how we’re able to connect, but hasn’t changed the need to, so we’re seeing people adapt to their current means.
DIGITAL INTIMACY, GENDER AND SEXUALITY
JAMIE HAKIM
Dr Jamie Hakim is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, where he has been since 2014. His research interests lie at the intersection of digital media, intimacy, embodiment, gender and sexuality. He explores these themes in his book Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019). The book explores the recent rise of different types of men using digital media to sexualise their bodies, arguing they do this as a way of negotiating living through post-2008 neoliberalism. Dr. Hakim is the principal investigator on the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy’.
Jennifer Power (JP): Thanks for speaking to me Jamie, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and the work you’ve been doing lately?
Jamie Hakim (JH): Mostly I do research around digital media, questions of embodiment, questions of intimacy, and recently questions of care. I’ve got a book out at the moment, called Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture, that looks at the way that over the last decade more men have been using digital media to sexualise their bodies. The argument that I make is that this has happened in relation to a certain set of historical conditions brought about by the 2007/2008 economic crash. So, in the UK particularly, the austerity context has meant men have not been able to rely on the forms of value creation that they once used to. So, they have been sharing images of their sexualised bodies to feel valuable instead. Currently, I’m leading a project called ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smart phones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy’. We are taking a similar approach to the one I took in the book, looking at the kind of cultures that have developed around smart phone use, and trying to understand this within political, cultural, social and economic contexts. Over the next six months we are going to be interviewing gay and bisexual men in Scotland and in London about this.
JP: Are you including the full function of smart phones in this? Such as cameras and images as well as use of the apps?
JH: Yes. It felt to me that there is a tendency within some of the work on hook up apps and gay men to imagine that gay men only use the apps to negotiate casual sex. Although we are interested in casual sex, we’re also interested in a more capacious understanding of intimacy. So, we’ll be looking at different social media platforms, the phone itself, the camera, all sorts of things. We’re going to try and get a more holistic understanding of smart phone use, and in a way that tries to capture more about gay men’s sexual lives than casual sex, however important that might be to certain gay men. We haven’t started doing fieldwork yet, so a lot of our thinking is hypothetical at the moment.
JP: Can you tell us more about how you approach the concept of technology and intimacy in your work?
JH: In the 1960s and 70s, at the beginning of British cultural studies, there was a certain type of critique that argued that you need to understand technology in the context of its wider ‘conjunctural’ relations, namely in relation to the political, the economic, the social and so on; and that these things are continuously interacting with each other. I’m not sure that it’s especially fashionable