{"id":16480,"date":"2013-08-08T13:23:56","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T17:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=16480"},"modified":"2013-08-08T13:57:20","modified_gmt":"2013-08-08T17:57:20","slug":"track-me-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/08\/08\/track-me-baby\/","title":{"rendered":"“Track Me, Baby”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"iGibbs<\/a>
Image credit: EliniGibbs on deviantART<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once upon a time, when I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12 years old, it was my job to go with my mom to the laundromat to help do my family\u2019s laundry. I wasn\u2019t a huge fan of this\u2014the nearest laundromat was kind of sketchy, to this day I remain mediocre at folding t-shirts, and there\u2019s just something a little uncomfortable about having to fold your parents\u2019 and brother\u2019s underwear\u2014but there was one thing I really liked about those trips, and that was the 20 minute lull in between when the last load went into a washer and the first load demanded sorting and partial transfer to a dryer. During that downtime, my mom would read her book, and I was free to do whatever I wanted. Invariably, I sat at a little folding station and, sheltered from view by washing machines on three sides, pretended to do my homework while reading from the laundromat\u2019s stack of \u201ctrashy\u201d magazines.<\/p>\n

With rapt attention and furtive glances over my shoulder, I read ALL the sex tips (in Cosmo<\/i> and in other such fine publications). I studiously absorbed articles that subtly (and not-so-subtly) encouraged me to feel insecure about body parts and features that I didn\u2019t even have yet. I was also a huge fan of Ladies\u2019 Home Journal<\/i>\u2019s \u201cCan This Marriage Be Saved,\u201d even though I was already developing opinions that sometimes clashed with those of whoever was doling out advice to unhappy wives.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in all that secretive studying was when I first read about (what I think of as) The Marble Thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What, you ask, is The Marble Thing? As explained by a woman who wrote in to relay advice she\u2019d gotten from her mother shortly before she’d gotten married, The Marble Thing is this: get a jar and a bunch of marbles, and keep them under the bed. Starting from the night you get married, and for the first year of marriage, put a marble in the jar every time you have sex. (What counts as one marble\u2019s worth of \u201csex\u201d was apparently so self-evident as not to merit addressing.) After your first anniversary, start removing<\/i> a marble from the jar every time you have sex\u2014and see how long it takes you to empty the jar. The woman who wrote in said it took her and her husband about four years, though she didn\u2019t mention whether her husband knew about the marbles or not.<\/p>\n

Even as a kid, I wasn\u2019t quite sure how to feel about this marble business.<\/p>\n

\"marbles\"<\/a>
Image credit: MidwestFinds on Etsy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I bring this up to make the point that tracking one\u2019s sex life is not new. On some level, we know this already: reference, for example, the (usually figurative) expression about \u201cnotches on a bedpost.\u201d And especially when we were younger and first sexually active, most of us knew exactly how many partners we\u2019d had (it\u2019s a prerequisite for fretting about having slept with \u201ctoo many\u201d or \u201cnot enough\u201d people, after all). I reference The Marble Thing, however, to show that it\u2019s not just informal tracking that\u2019s been around for a long, indeterminate while; it\u2019s formal, quantitative tracking, too.<\/p>\n

From my perspective\u2014as someone who studies self-tracking, and who has known about sex tracking (like The Marble Thing) probably longer than I should have\u2014it was only a matter of time before sex-tracking apps started turning up somewhere inside my field of attention. (If nothing else, I know the life-hacking crowd talks about \u201csex hacking,\u201d and they tend to be a pretty tech-savvy bunch.) Today “sooner or later” became sooner, as the magical network that is Twitter pointed me at a sex-tracking app called Spreadsheets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Spreadsheets. (Let\u2019s all pause to think about that name, *facepalm* a little, and move on.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a whole lot to say about this app, and I\u2019ll probably write about it again in a few weeks when I\u2019m not half-packed for #ASA13 and theoretically leaving in about an hour. But for now, there\u2019s two main points I want to make:<\/p>\n

First, we need to ask some big questions about the cultural and political implications of both this app’s design and its very existence. What messages is this app sending about which types of activity do and don\u2019t count as \u201csex,\u201d and about what the meanings of sex are, and about what\u2019s most important during sex? How is the design of this app reinforcing which conceptualizations of and attitudes about sex, and to what effect (and for whom)? What are the lessons it\u2019s teaching about masculine and feminine sexuality, and how would queer sexualities fit into its structuring? What does it mean to distill sexual activity down to \u201chow many thrusts per minute you\u2019re averaging, how long you go for, and exactly how loud it gets\u201d? What does it mean to encourage users to \u201cmonitor\u201d their sexual activity, to view sex as an “accomplishment” or an “achievement,” to compare their sex lives to other people\u2019s sex lives (\u201cShare [your data] with your friends and let the facts speak for themselves\u201d), and to seek \u201cfeedback\u201d from an app rather than talking to their partners?<\/p>\n

As Jenny (@Jenny_L_Davis<\/a>) argues in her analysis of the kink-oriented social networking site Fetlife<\/a>, the way a platform is designed and structured can influence how we come to see others and ourselves as sexual beings, as well as how we think about sex itself. While I\u2019m not usually a fan of the line of reasoning that goes, \u201cOMG, now people will look to an app for feedback instead of asking other people or relying on their own intuition, surely it is the end of the world,\u201d I do think this case is a little different. I used to volunteer answering questions and giving advice on online safer-sex information bulletin boards, and I frankly think it\u2019s somewhere between \u201ca tragedy\u201d and \u201cpsychological violence\u201d how little we (in the U.S.) teach people about how to talk about sex. The promotional video on the Spreadsheets website, for instance, tells the story of a woman who is frustrated trying to get her male partner into bed. She tries leaving her clothes all over the stairs; she tries wearing short shorts and bending over in the kitchen; nothing works. Since clearly she can\u2019t use words to express her desire, or to directly initiate sex herself (especially as a woman!), she remains frustrated\u2014until the excitement of tracking with Spreadsheets is finally enough to get her partner’s attention and lure him into bed. Perhaps this is Spreadsheets\u2019 way of arguing that the app could be \u201ca conversation starter,\u201d but I honestly don\u2019t think it will structure the kinds of conversations about sex that our culture (and each of us as individuals) needs to be having. \u201cMonitoring\u201d decibel levels, for example, is not the same thing as knowing about, and seeking, enthusiastic consent<\/a>.<\/p>\n