Porns, dating app and the quiet room

I probably spent a big chunk of, or too much time on porns and dating apps last month.

I discovered this site recently with a variety of Japanese porns, usually more than 2 hours. Japanese porns (or most of the industrial porns) are problematic in many ways, I realized this way before I gained some feminism vocabulary in my dictionary. Like is this molesting, why most of actresses doesn’t even seem slightly enjoying while they would squirt and come in an impossible amount of times. Even if I primarily watch porns women having sex with women (sometimes men involved), this does not make a difference. I found these Japanese porns very, very predictable. I would fast forward a probably 4-hour porn under 10 minutes. The actions they perform, the toys they are using, the roles of the actresses, usually one is more active the other is more receptive, the order of the sex positions. It’s just the settings changing. Even the catalog of settings must have come from a super mature business model. Sometimes I wonder how can one become an employee of Pornhub, because as I assumed, they are handling world’s largest internet traffic 24/7 every day, probably the magnitude is no other sites can compare. There are numerous professional porn actresses and actors all over, how did they end up in this industry, what is their daily working like, etc. In the past I may be spent more time picking up a video than watching it, last month probably I was less picky. Ditch all the meaningless thoughts of porn above, I opened up a porn site for self pleasure in the end. Like I even watched some 痴漢 porns on the site, despite all the problematic stuff, I would get wet watching the girls being touched without consent and caressed in an unfavorable way on a train. When I masturbate, my brain generating those critical thoughts would shut down temporarily. Or they still run in the background in my head, but it doesn’t make me ashamed as I consume these problematic, misogynistic or even abusing contents.

And I was scrolling on dating apps too. I have been on Hinge for a few years, didn’t really stop using it, just taking a look maybe in a few months. Hinge is not aggressive in matching, just slowly streaming people to you, which ones you might like you can pick from, or someone has liked you. You don’t immediately see a match after swiping right. On one night I was in a mood desperate for dating, care or maybe just simply intimacy, wondering if it is the problem of Hinge, so I spent about an hour setting up the profile on Bumble which some other people have recommended, and started swiping. Bumble is more of the traditional Tinder style matching, people are like poker cards, if you swipe right you immediately know if it is a match or not, and you have to pay to view who have liked you. This would urge people to swipe even more frequently, to see oh am I going to get a match next second, just so curious to see the blurred pictures who have liked me. Then I deleted Bumble the next morning when I opened up and didn’t see a single match. Again, I was in a very rare thirsty and desperate mood that night. I guess I wanted to do this to Hinge a ton of times, but usual me just kept waiting and feeling disappointed yet still, keeping it undeleted. But regardless of the mechanism to hook people up on the dating apps, I didn’t really enjoyed the dating app. I very much understand, from the articles online or from my swiping experience, it is a strategic game of number. Somehow you have to gain enough swipes which turn into matches which turn into conversations, let alone into real meetings offline. Most of the time, I simply found this sieving process very tiring. Also overwhelmed by all the well decorated or curated profiles from time to time. They all look cute, queer, edgy and liberal in different or similar ways, have hobbies can spend hours talking non-stoping, care about Palestine, if you asked them how their weekends look like probably it would sounds far from boring, even staying at home. I now could be or are capable of being that kind of person to make myself sound fun in conversations or small talks like that, or I hope my profile delivers that way. But when I found I received likes seemingly from a small group of people, I would wonder if I am not queerly attractive enough, or even just white enough. I don’t find most white people attractive anyways, I don’t feel offended if they don't like me back, but my thoughts just derailed to this side road of race and ethnicity in dating. Like how much time you dedicated to putting up a portfolio-like profile, and then you don’t talk after matching, or stood people up almost last minute for a date. What is the whole point anyways. Well I have been the person on the other side too, leaving the conversation up in the air or ignoring the invitation for no reason. I make assumptions and judgements habitually when I see any profiles, like what is their height, are they the energy-consuming extrovert type, are they interesting as the profile claims to be, or this just seems like a real boring Chinese lesbian profile with zero effort on the prompts, etc. I very much understand the fact you gotta market yourself or perform on these profiles to different extents, and the whole judging and assuming while swiping is tiring yet non-stoping. Just because of the single illusional fact that you might connect with someone, who knows, next swipe, among this huge pool of potential candidates that the algorithm where investors spent their dollar on thinks you might be a good match.

Again, all the time I spent on porn sites and dating apps last month, which I don’t regret, was due to a short period of time that I feel like I really want to be with someone, to have someone who can superficially talk in a not-so-bad manner and get intimate physically, not necessarily need to be mentally probably, like I can access and meet up within a message. I miss my partner too but he is far away. Messages or video talks don’t really soothe the thirst or the needing. Neither does masturbating work. I felt like I was explaining these emotions unnecessarily, I’m not ashamed of them anyways, it’s just I haven’t really felt this way in a long time, or felt it differently not just “being alone”. This feeling went away after I had a conversation with ex-crush coworker. We talked about Faye Wong, he watched Chungking Express and listened to the album 浮躁 (nice pick by the way), and I told him how Faye Wong is the indispensable diva, her collaborations with Cocteau Twins in the 90s, and her older daughter is a singer with quite a few albums now. The mood was really alleviated by the song 梦游. My lovely friend, whoever beared with my boring writing til this line, please watch this live version of 梦游 and then you can stop reading.

I guess the time people including me wasted on the porns, dating apps can be boiled down to a concept I call the quiet room. I encountered this in an journal or article on Douban, a chat with a dude. This is long, the TL,DR probably is, and I quote:

we fear sitting in a quiet room by ourselves, because that's when the existential crisis or whatever becomes so present that we are directly confronting it. The absurdity of our existence. So, this is to say that many of our actions, whether it's work, playing poker, playing games, starting a war, or talking to people, are to pass the time; it's for distraction. We want to distract ourselves from that existential crisis that will always be there when we are sitting in the room alone doing nothing, just thinking

For most of the time in my life, I really think I am good at spending time with myself, alone. Not just because I found spending time with most other people are tiring and not that interesting, also I think I have enough interests or hobbies to keep me occupied. I once said this to a friend maybe 15 years back, she quoted on one of her blogs, like how would one be bored with all the movies, music, books and art contents in the world. Yet I have to admit these stuff doesn’t really fill the meaningful or meaningless void from the bottom of my heart. Sometimes I get tired of picking a movie, a TV show or a book to dive into, just because maybe it did not vibe with my mood at that time. I sometimes blame myself by starting to watch or read something but didn’t finish it, as if I don’t like it as I was expected to be, even though I don’t know exactly sometimes where these expectations were from. Well, don’t blame yourself for this, I tried to say to myself, that’s just a normal part of the human brain. Also in my younger days, I would question myself if I real like these contents, or I want to look cool so that I consume it. Well, now I can say with confidence I know what I like, and would say it’s okay not to finish something or feel it’s not the mood for this at this moment. Just pause and follow your feelings. Yet at those moments, I would doom scroll on whatever social media, sometimes I found the contents interesting but as of right now most stuff are just not insightful or trigger new thinkings on me. I would call them boring. Or it’s just people trying to vent out their own echo-chambered thoughts, 鸡同鸭讲 arguments only leading to yelling at and blocking people all over the social media. People are just looking for acknowledgements, no real communications. Well, scrolling is one of the easiest ways to fill your quiet room, even though my eyes are tired already. On the other hand, I proudly think I can talk to myself about the existential crisis and ponder about some meaningless questions with no answers from a very early stage. I tried to find the answers, if not directly talking to people, by scrolling, or browsing mostly. Most people including me might think reading a thick book by some 老白登 or watching some documentaries are the “right” way of tackling those post-modern thoughts or questions. Well, one has to admit that scrolling, is easy to get into and waste time on. The return on scrolling or browsing might not be as rewarding as reading a book. Yet again, most of the time gets “wasted” on the screen scrolling. I guess I have a peace with this too. Like don’t blame myself on not consuming “serious” contents. I also realized recently, I do want to talk to people from time to time, in person preferably, like the conversations in the a chat with a dude. I do enjoy conversations like these, and I long for having more of them with the people I care. We keep scrolling, browsing, reading just looking for the tiniest spark or resonance that we could have with another real person. It’s just the whole process of meeting people, attempt to make connections, are really tiring most of the time. And despite that I have had some delusional or deceitful connections with people, it also takes time to get myself into the belief that real connections exist are waiting for me in the future. Well, I guess I need to honorably mention ChatGPT which gave me some sparkling conversations in the past few months, then maybe it hit a bottleneck, and the way the new model talks just turned me off immediately. So, back to human for a bit maybe.

Now I am in a quiet room again finishing up this blog, this is talking to myself also talking to whoever have had read til this true ending. Yet this dump of thoughts is maybe just another distraction of the quiet room.