Your phone is why you don't feel sexy

Eros, desire, instinct, eternity

Scrolling on our phones is killing us. This is a statement of fact that needs no citation (besides, research isn’t really my thing). The massive suck of our phones and the never-ending, algorithmically-driven internet has been covered at greater length by better-informed writers. We all know our phones are destroying our attention spans, our dopamine reward systems, our relationships. We know they’re numbing our feelings and experiences. That’s all I’ll say about the general badness of phones and the internet.

But I want to talk about a very specific kind of badness: our phones are also killing our ability to feel sexy.

Feeling sexy is not frivolous. Getting in touch with our true desires is critical if we want to feel connected, happy, driven, and alive. But, like an old iPhone battery, the vital charge that used to fuel our lives is trending precipitously downwards. Our phones aren’t solely to blame for the lack of sexy vibes in the world, but they play a central role. Nothing about our phones is sexy—from the things they allow us to do, to how they feel to use, to what they ultimately symbolize.

This wasn’t always the case.

Paris Hilton, 2003.

Phones used to be sexy

A call from an unknown number. A little black book. Your heart pounding as you checked your answering machine. Calling someone from a payphone. Hearing someone say, “It’s for you.” This was romance.

Now, we use our phones—which are more like handheld supercomputers than phones, let’s be honest—to rot in bed on TikTok, slide into someone’s DMs, and thumbs-up react to a text. And this is to say nothing of the ubiquity of pornography or the hair-raising prospect of being added to the WhatsApp bachelorette group chat (LADIES: THIS IS YOUR FINAL REMINDER TO RESPOND TO THE DOODLE). I think we can all agree: this is a nightmare.

Despite our current disappointments, the rise of technology during the late 90s and early 2000s was a pretty sexy time. The internet promised us, first and foremost, new ways to communicate and connect with each other. The human element was still at the core of this new, uncharted territory. It was brimming with possibility. We almost fetishized the clean, cool promise of instantaneous, high-tech communication—particularly evident in the “Gen X Soft Club” aesthetic that emerged during that era (1996-2002). Minimalist, clean lines, extra-terrestrial elements, the vast digital future, the underground coming up for air, the expansion of our worlds. It was hopeful. And it was hot.

We thought we’d be getting more of each other, not less.

Gen X Soft Club. If you’ve ever been to Morimoto in Philadelphia (<3), it’s kind of like that.

Helmut Lang Parfumerie on Greene Street, New York City. By Gluckman Mayner Architects, 2001. More photos here.

Eros is embodied

But it’s safe to say, now that we’re more than thirty years into the great internet experiment, that our devices didn’t bring us closer together. They drove us further apart, deeper and deeper into our algorithmic hell holes. The proliferation of devices surrounding us at all times may help us “get in touch” with other people, sure, but they impede our ability to get in touch with ourselves. A “touch” screen would indeed seem to promise something tactile and real, but they leave us cold, tepid, and listless. Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order a sandwich.

Shalom Harlow for i-D Magazine. Photographed by Craig McDean, June 1995.

Eros—carnal desire—is an embodied experience, and our phones do a terrific job of getting us out of our bodies and into our heads. In the digital age, we often neglect our bodies entirely, and use them merely as a way to transport our heads to meetings. (The rise of rave culture and physical fitness programs since the 1990s is perhaps evidence that we feel the need to fight against this.) No one feels connected, present, alive, embodied, or sexy when they’re on their phone all day.

Shalom Harlow for Jil Sander. Photographed by Craig McDean, Spring 1995.

And our phones don’t just move us out of our bodies, but they have become something of a second brain, a second body. You don’t have to remember something if you can record it, photograph it, or type it into your notes app. You don’t have to look good in person if you look good on Instagram. Our phones not only hollow out our true selves, but are starting to replace us.

Easy things are not desirable or rewarding

In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone. He originally pitched it as three separate products: “A wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device” only to reveal, to an electrified crowd, that they are all the same device.

Original Apple iPhone, 2007.

The purpose of the iPhone, as it was originally conceived, was to make our lives easier. And it undoubtedly has. What we didn't—and couldn’t—know at the time was the cost. In the beginning, being able to call a cab from your phone, having access to every song ever made, and ordering any product known to man while walking down the street felt amazing. Until it didn’t.

Today, everyone and everything is always available, and there’s nothing less sexy than that. There’s no chase. Our phones don’t allow us time to dwell, and they don’t allow us time to yearn. Why force yourself to daydream about the guy you’re seeing when you can easily look at dozens of photographs of him online? Why walk into a store in Soho and see what’s on offer when you can stay home and scroll the entire inventory from the comfort of your couch? Why go to the library to find books about a topic that interests you when you can look it up on Wikipedia in two minutes and move on with your day?

Apple billboard, late 1990s.

Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

It is perhaps impossible to desire what we already have, what is easy, or what is implicitly promised to us. Desire is fueled, to a certain degree, by the possibility of not getting what you want. It depends on a certain distance and difficulty that must be overcome through one’s own effort. Technology makes us lazy. We think our phones will do the work for us, but they don’t. Thoroughly exhausting ourselves intellectually and physically through productive work brings fulfillment, and with fulfillment comes peace.

Our phones undermine our instincts and confidence

Our intuition is one of the most valuable tools we have at our disposal, and I can’t think of anything that undermines it more than our phones. In person, in real life, you can’t literally press replay. Sure, you can ruminate about something someone said, but the memory will eventually fade. You’ll move on. You can’t rewatch a memory the way you can rewatch a video you posted to Instagram or re-read a text while second guessing yourself.

Milestone Venture Partners offices, New York City, 2000-2001.

No one can escape the 24-hour news cycle, the what-ifs, the you-really-should-bes that come to us through our phones. I’m certainly no exception; I’ve seen videos so utterly and immediately convincing that I’ve shamefully purchased products it didn’t even occur to me to want in the first place (most recently Pocket Blush by Haley Bieber… thanks girl!). I mean, RIP René Girard, you would have loved Tomato Girl Summer. Sure, we “borrow our desires from others,” but the unprecedented, immediate, intimate access we have to the lives of other people means we are always second-guessing ourselves. Is the latest TikTok trend something I should be doing or does it feel nice to pretend to be a part of something? While you’re busy scrolling and following trends, your intuition, confidence, and drive atrophy inside of you.

… and our appetite for risk

That said, cosmetics and aesthetic trends on TikTok are harmless fun and games compared to what’s going on in the darkest corners of the internet. All over the world, an entire generation of young men, often referred to as “NEETs,” are robbing themselves of agency, drive, and romantic relationships through their addiction to video games and pornography. Video games allow a young man to experience a sort of pseudo-achievement, while pornography masquerades as love. Some of these men have seen more naked women than any king who has ever lived. Many will mock their pain and their addiction, but it’s heartbreaking to think that they’ll never experience true risk, true reward, or true romance.

Catherine Yass, Stairs Photo 2, 1998-2002.

On a lighter note, aren’t we all so sick of looking stuff up? You know what, maybe I go to a restaurant and it’s bad. Maybe I don’t know what’s good on the menu before I get there. Maybe I throw caution to the wind and put something in the dishwasher without googling if it’s dishwasher safe. Maybe I get a flip phone and get comfortable saying, “I don't know.” While you’re looking down at Google Maps, the love of your life is walking past you on the street. To feel sexy, we need risk and spontaneity. Our phones kill both.

(As an aside, it’s disturbing that instead of moving away from the cause of our problems, we’ve leaned harder into them. We’ve mistaken greater personal exposure and self-disclosure as confidence, risk, and spontaneity. They are not the same. What we really need is more modesty, secrecy, and discretion—but that’s a topic for another day.)

Eternity is not a sexy concept

Sexy things are fleeting. The internet is forever. The kind of virile, salty life so many of us crave is incompatible with our sanded-down, stagnant, sanitized online existence. The chance encounter, the pregnant pause, the flirtatious touch, the generous laugh—these are the sexy, ephemeral moments of life. The scroll is endless. What’s sexy is always here and now, not somewhere, out there, forever.

“Peace.” Windows XP default wallpaper, 2001.

We need to remember that everything of this world has a beginning and an end (especially the sexy things). We can’t escape the normal ups and downs of life or the passage of time. We need to allow ourselves to be restless and bored, to be less preoccupied with the opinions of others, and to look honestly within ourselves. We need to get off of our phones and hear the gravel crunching under our feet. Our phones promise us something eternal and infinite, but we should be extremely skeptical of anything that claims it can go on forever.

Remember this the next time you fall asleep to a TikTok playing on an endless loop: one day your heart will stop beating. The only thing that’s eternal is love.