Judith Duportail: "I made the decision never to sleep again out of politeness"
An emotional burn-out, this is what Judith Duportail claims to have experienced. Symptoms ? Wear, fatigue, loss of confidence, fear of others. Causes? Love and seduction in the post-Tinder era. After having investigated in 2019 the workings of the application and the sexual capitalism which results from it in Love under algorithm (1), the 34-year-old journalist and author exposes and analyzes the way of the cross of certain singles in Dating Fatigue, loves and solitudes in the 20s (20), published on May 19 by the Observatory editions (2).
She recounts the mental exhaustion of the 21st century due to fuzzy relationships that make certainties waver and close us to the other. Dates that have become job interviews, affective incivility like ghosting, which seemingly damages, and then sometimes flouted consent. To do this, the 30-year-old took a year. A year of vacation of seduction, sex and love to understand what's going on and find ways to reconnect with peaceful relationships. Maintenance.
Madame Figaro.- You express a real aversion to dating apps and a fear of dating, of seduction. How have these new encounters led to an almost visceral fear?Judith Duportail.- The question has not finished being studied, but what upsets me the most with the apps is the speed and the choreography that they impose. It is commonly accepted that when we meet someone, we will have kissed them within three hours, removed our clothes within four hours, whereas a few hours earlier, it was a complete stranger. And if we stay at the second drink, it means that we agree to sleep with the person. We can want that, but on Tinder, we enter a circuit like in an Ikea store and we don't choose the rhythm. A mortgage is placed on the consent, a horizon of expectation is plated on the other, and to get out of it, good luck. I have the same feedback from men.
You say that today the world of dating is a "butcher's shop"...Meeting with another is always complex but the current problem lies in the infinite pool of people and the fact that with apps, we repeat our misfires. Let's say that in normal times, we experience disappointments three or four times a year. With the apps, it's three or four times a week. We press, we press again on our wounds, until sometimes becoming hermetic to the other. Moreover, when we want to flirt in the physical world, we put ourselves in an emotional posture of openness: we go to a party where we know few people, we take Spanish lessons... We can reap the benefits secondary even if it doesn't work. On an app, we find ourselves in a binary IT logic: if it works, it's fine, if not, we've failed. Either we create a bond, or we create a vacuum, and often, this generates more loneliness than bonds. Not to mention that we are in the process of entrusting private actors with the task of giving birth to our love stories. We must collectively ask ourselves the question of the management of these apps.
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To counter this brutality, you campaign for more sensitivity. During your quest, you also discover the term "demisexuality", in which you find yourself. What is it? It is a sexual orientation that one cannot have sexual desire for someone without having a strong emotional connection. I have the feeling that the concept emerged in response to the imposed ultrasexualization of our time, to this constant imperative to have sex without emotion, without feeling. I have also learned that some women use it and say “I am demisexual” to respond to overly pressing men and close the debate. Words are weapons and help create our reality. In my opinion, this allows you to impose your temporality.
You describe in your book a kiss with an unknown woman at a Berlin party. She takes you into a room, you follow her, "without fear", because she is a woman. In terms of sexuality, are women afraid of men? When you are a woman, the fear of rape is unconsciously present, even in a tiny way or for a second. And when we meet a man and maybe have sex with him, we go through a checklist to answer this question: "Am I safe?". Because we know that there is a physical superiority. Living this episode with this woman, I said to myself that I would never have followed a man so easily. With her, I had the feeling of living the life of a free woman. So it crosses my mind: my sex life could have been much crazier than it was, if subconsciously, I hadn't always had this fear in mind.
According to you, what soils is to betray oneself to correspond to the expectations of another. What happens to lock ourselves into each other's desires? Because of thousands of years of domination, we find it hard to hear our own voice. When I was told “respect yourself” when I was younger, I didn't understand the meaning. Growing up, I understood that this did not mean respecting the morality of society, but listening to its "internal music", respecting its feelings and acting accordingly. It is not easy to understand this because women are raised in the idea that they have no sexuality to live but that they are objects, that they are going to be “taken”. I spent a whole first part of my sexuality wondering if I was beautiful naked before asking myself if I liked what was happening. It's tragic. Society stole ten years of my emotional and sexual life from me, and that's why I made the decision to never have sex again out of politeness.
That is, to never abuse myself again, never to force myself into anything, whether it's having sex or going on a second date. The promise is not always easy to keep. Saying no to a man in 2021 sometimes involves being yelled at, being emotionally blackmailed, justifying yourself, negotiating… Many people have told me that they had sex because it was easier, in other words, easier than getting out of an interaction where sexual intercourse was expected.
Isn't that what children should be taught as part of their sex education? Of course. My sex education, for example, boiled down to seeing porn when I was 12, which traumatized me, and only hearing about AIDS and pregnancy in college. I would have liked so much to be told “you are going to make love and it will be beautiful, and when it is no longer beautiful, you can stop everything because you have all the rights”. The body must only obey its own logic. So you have to learn the subtlety and each step of consent to girls and boys. Because even today, the social value of men is correlated with their sexual potency, and when a woman says no to them, it's a bit as if they take it for a negation of their value or of their masculinity in general. We must dissociate these two elements, otherwise we will remain in the tragedy in which we are.
What can be done to have more peaceful relationships? There is no miracle solution. To say “all become polyamorous, it's great”, or “all become lesbians because the guys are bastards”, would make us miss the point. From a personal point of view, the most important thing is to listen to your feelings. From a societal point of view, it must be understood that love is a political issue like ecology or family policies. In history, to channel violence into the public sphere, we created democracy, diplomacy, institutions to prevent countries from going to war. We should now create the conditions for this same peace in our interpersonal and private relationships. We could thus get away from the idea that a loving relationship between a man and a woman is always a power struggle.
Should we also question the hegemony of the couple? Yes, it is important to question political heterosexuality (the organization of society around the couple, editor's note). As a woman, a social role is assigned to us: being in a couple, getting married, having children... Hetero-normativity makes us feel like half a person if we are single. It's normal to want to be in love, but it's outrageous that society deems us less worthy when we're alone, that our value depends on what's going on in our hearts or our bed.
(1) Love under an algorithm, (Ed. Goutte d'or), 17 euros. (2) Dating fatigue, love and loneliness in the (20s)20s, (Ed. L'Observatoire), 18 euros.
