Shocking numbers to ponder on World AIDS Day
Which tactics and messages are most effective—and who gets to decide?
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
“Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?” That question, posed on the cover of Out magazine’s current issue, immediately got our attention. According to Michael Joseph Gross’s engaging and provocative story on the wildly popular gay cruising site, lots of intelligent activists and therapists believe Manhunt is indeed leading to our downfall.
Of course, quite a few men might disagree, such as the 1 million Manhunt members.
The article’s a fantastic read, partly because Gross weaves in many big-picture themes (objectification, risky sex, HIV, isolation) along with the facts (the site rakes in about $30 million a year and gets 400,000 unique visitors a month).
After reading the article, we couldn’t wait to hit the blogosphere and see what other readers were saying about the topic.
Columnist Wayne Besen, of Truth Wins Out, makes the case that hookup sites don’t, as Gross says, “exaggerate our propensity to objectify each other” or “decouple sex from emotion.” Besen writes that gay online culture “is a result of the law of supply and demand.… To make up for this husband deficit, we are thrust into fierce competition—which is reflected by the level of skin shown in many of our online ads.
“What sites like Manhunt do,” Besen writes, “is give busy gay professionals the opportunity to kiss enough frogs before they hopefully find a prince—which is no guarantee.”
Over at radaronline.com, Choire Sicha calls out the anti-hookup screeds of folks like Larry Kramer (who is quoted in the Out piece) and the ideas that gay men don’t know how to have loving relationships and are missing out on some sort of mythical gay community by staying home alone online.
“Kids today don’t’ see much difference between the community they run into on Manhunt and the community they run into in the local bars of Brooklyn, for instance, or on the street,” Choire writes. “Hookup sex isn’t a lie. It’s not some betrayal of the self. This incredibly conservative view is just silly.”
We agree with Sicha. And with Besen. And with Gross. And even Kramer. Oh, and Michael Musto (back in June, the Village Voice columnist lamented that Manhunt was in fact ruining the gay bar pickup scene. The argument is: Why go out to a bar to meet folks when you can do it at home?).
It’s possible that Manhunt and other Internet cruising sites do damage the psyche of some gay men. It’s also possible that many men navigate that world just fine and remain healthy in many aspects.
But unfortunately most readers didn’t want to discuss these topics. Instead, most people zeroed in on the fact that Manhunt co-founder Jonathan Crutchley is a Republican who donated $2,300 to Sen. John McCain (see Chris Crain’s related op-ed on page 27, in which he denounces the politically correct witch hunt against Crutchley).
Fascinating stuff. But still, most people haven’t discussed the two elements of Gross’s article that we found most revealing.
The first, and not surprising, fact to digest is the sheer volume of viewers and dollars going to Manhunt—and not to other LGBT causes. As Matt Foreman, the former executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, explains to Out that Manhunt’s membership is “larger than the membership of every major gay political organization combined.”
Then there’s the site’s addictive nature, specifically the way it is designed. Psychologist Alan Downs compares it to a slot machine, in which you never know whether you’ll get lucky in the next 10 minutes or 10 hours. He says it’s an incredibly addictive form of psychological conditioning.
In fact, viewers stay for an average of 40 minutes, twice the time, according to Out, claimed for Facebook or MySpace. Manhunt’s former director of marketing Phil Henricks boasts that this makes the site the second-stickiest in the country (“sticky” describes how long a visitor stays at a site). The stickiest site out there? Pogo.com, a gambling site.
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