Negotiating Intimacy via Dating Websites and Apps

Since the early 2000s, researchers have illustrated the primacy of online spaces for people to find platonic, sexual, and/or romantic intimacy. Online dating has increasingly become among the most common ways for couples of all sexual orientations—particularly heterosexuals and gay men—to meet in the United States. As the study of online and offline intimacy moves forward, it is necessary not only to assess the effects of political contexts and discrimination but to consider how marginalized groups like queer women, trans and nonbinary people, fat, and/or disabled people rely on and navigate these spaces in their efforts to fulfill their sexual lives and find romance. This article provides an overview of existing sociological research on online dating to illuminate the ways dating websites/apps are shaping contemporary relationship formation along the axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality, while also noting avenues for new research trajectories.

The Psychological Profile of Involuntary Celibates (Incels): A Literature Review

This narrative review provides a qualitative synthesis of more than 40 years of research on involuntary celibacy, late sexual onset, and adult virginity. Studies suggest that Incels struggle with a lack of sexual and romantic intimacy, and that their negative body image, shyness, poor social skills compounded by inexperience with sexual and romantic relationships contribute to further restrict their opportunities to build rapport with potential romantic or sexual partners. In line with life course theory, many feel as though they have missed an important development milestone and, consequently, feel ‘’off time’’ relative to their peers with regard to sexuality. This can lead to a view that celibacy is a permanent state and that life is hopeless, a feeling encapsuled in an ideology known as ‘’blackpill’’. Stereotypical standards of masculinity and masculine sexual scripts may contribute to further increase the sense of embarrassment and stigma among reluctant virgins. While it is important for future studies to ascertain whether these various mental health issues were present prior or after their ‘’Inceldom’’, current results nonetheless describe a community characterized by a high prevalence of mental health problems.

Romantic intimacy and terror management: Examining the mediating roles of felt security, relational self-esteem, and relational worldview defense

Terror management theory posits that close relationships assuage existential mortality concerns because they foster attachment-based felt security, enhance self-esteem, and validate shared cultural worldviews. However, the relative buffering influence of these mechanisms remains relatively unknown and has sparked theoretical debate. Some theorists argue that felt security is central, whereas others suggest it does not offer unique protection from death awareness, independent of self-esteem and worldview validation. We conducted two experiments to clarify felt security’s role. Testing felt security on its own, it significantly mediated the association between death awareness and increased intimacy striving (Study 1). However, when tested alongside relational self-esteem and worldview validation, felt security again exerted a significant mediating effect in parallel with relational self-esteem, although only among female participants (Study 2). These results provide initial support for the subordinate tripartite model and functional independence claim put forth in recent years. We discuss the implications of these findings.

Screening Piety, Class, and Romance in Indonesia

The collapse of the New Order ushered in what many had hoped would be a new era of openness and transparency for Indonesia. The loosening of laws pertaining to broadcast and print publication gave rise to a proliferation of new media and cultural production. This had a profound effect on everything, from politics, religion, and the economy to popular conceptions of romantic intimacy and personal accomplishment. The question is whether prevailing approaches to media and popular culture are adequate to the task of accounting for these oft-cited transformations in Indonesian public life. Focusing on issues of piety, class, and romance, this article examines a sequence of films, pop songs, and YouTube parody videos to offer a presuppositional critique of the current scholarship. Its central contention is that closer attention to pop culture as a form of ‘argument’ offers an important corrective to the reifying tendencies of prevailing approaches.

Friends, lovers, risk and intimacy: risk-taking as a socially meaningful practice

In this article we aim to analyse and discuss the notion of risk in photo-sharing practices and the purposes risk serves in the development of intimate relationships. We will argue that risk in the form of self-disclosure is an inseparable aspect of intimate photo-sharing rather than an undesirable side-effect, and that a broader analytical perspective on the role of risk in the development of intimate relationships allows us to understand risky photo-sharing as socially meaningful practice. We will unfold and elaborate this theoretical perspective on the basis of five focus-group interviews with 21 German high schools students aged 14 to 17. The interviews focus on the participants’ sharing practices, and the role risk plays in relation to these practices. The data indicates that risk does indeed serve a social purpose as a way of ‘proving friendship’. Yet, it also indicates that the young people in question are more willing to accept risk related to ‘friendly intimacy’ as compared to ‘romantic intimacy’. We will discuss the possible background for this difference as well as its wider methodological and theoretical implications.

SEX, GENDER, AND ROMANTIC INTIMACY IN SERVICEMEN'S LETTERS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

This article explores sex and romance as under-examined aspects of wartime masculinities through a focus on letters from servicemen recipients of woollen ‘comforts’ to girls and women who knitted for them during the Second World War. It examines the tension between the cultural ideal of ‘temperate heroism’ that formed the hegemonic masculinity during the Second World War and evidence of predatory male sexuality and sexual violence, both in combat and on the home front. Servicemen's letters to anonymous knitters reveal many aspects of their emotional lives, including the widespread deployment of romance as a mechanism for maintaining morale. They also reveal that some men were able to manipulate their image as ‘heroes’ and make use of the comforts fund as a vehicle for engaging in sexually explicit correspondence and transgressive and deviant behaviours. A foregrounding of romance and sexuality suggests that we need to look again at arguments relating to the contiguity between military cultures and middle- and working-class civilian codes of respectable masculinity and male heterosexual expression. The article further engages with critiques in the history of masculinity of the neglect of working-class masculinities and the tendency to focus on cultural scripts about masculinity rather than what men actually did or felt.

Dangerous Fiction and Obscene Images

The magazine Meiyu 眉語 (Eyebrow Talk), published from 1914 to 1916 and edited by Gao Jianhua 高劍華, was China's first literary magazine edited by a woman and targeted at a female audience. It was also the first modern magazine to pay extensive attention to nudity and to physical and romantic intimacy through at times carefully considered juxtapositions of texts and images. In addition, it was the first Chinese magazine to be banned on the basis of obscenity legislation introduced during the early Republic. The committee that banned Meiyu was led by Zhou Shuren 周樹人, who later became known as the author Lu Xun 魯迅, and his disparaging reminiscence about Meiyu caused the magazine to be all but forgotten for nearly a century. In this article, the authors use a wide variety of archival material to reconstruct the complex publishing history of the magazine, as well as the processes and cultural standards involved in its banning. This is followed by a close analysis of aspects of the contents of Meiyu, especially the interaction between texts and images in the representation of nudity, intimacy, and coupledom.

Intimacy and Smartphone Multitasking—A New Oxymoron?

This study investigated the relationship between smartphone multitasking and romantic intimacy. Participants currently in a romantic relationship ( N = 128; 98 women; M age = 26.7 years, SD = 4.3) filled out two sets of questionnaires: The Emotional Intimacy Scale, measuring romantic intimacy, and the mobile phone interference in life scale, measuring multitasking on a smartphone. Participants filled out each questionnaire twice, once in relation to themselves and once in relation to their partner (for the partner questionnaire, statements were altered from the first person to the third person singular, he/she instead of I). Results suggested that only the partners’ smartphone multitasking scores were negatively related to ratings of romantic intimacy, whereas participants’ own smartphone multitasking scores were not related to ratings of romantic intimacy. These results can be explained by the actor–observer asymmetry, suggesting that participants attributed their multitasking behaviors to situations, but attributed their partners multitasking behaviors to behavior patterns or intentionality. This research suggests that smartphone multitasking has a negative association with face-to-face interactions. People should attend to the costs of smartphone use during face-to-face interactions.