A vignette about morality and technology

A young male client that I have been seeing for some time passed his cell phone across the room so that I could have a look at a photograph posted by a female acquaintance on Instagram. As he leant across the room, he told me it was inappropriate for     a man my age to be looking at naked young women on social media. 

The picture in question was a self-portrait composed in a full-length mirror of a girl in her late adolescence, naked and in the attitude of Venus on the half shell, one arm across her breasts the other modestly covering her genitals. The picture in question was a self-portrait composed in a full-length mirror of a girl in her late adolescence, naked and in the attitude of Venus on the half shell, one arm across her breasts the other modestly covering her genitals. My client had met her in a local nightclub and after what was clearly a mutual frisson of attraction, he had walked away from the encounter and its possibilities because he is dating another woman and “didn’t want to be that guy”.

It occurred to me as we discussed his feelings and the sexual politics of his situation how differently he and many young people like him, experience the exploration of sexual and romantic relationships when compared to my generation.

From where he sat in my consulting room, with two or three small movements of his thumb, he could send an instant message to this girl and reinitiate their encounter and all of it’s possibilities. Or at very least he could ascertain her interest in doing so. I couldn’t help but contrast that with my own experience of being an undergraduate student in the 1980’s. 

Where he can “slip into her DM” as the parlance has it, readers of my vintage reflecting on their youth will remember that when interested in pursuing a connection we would first have to obtain a telephone number which would involve asking either the person in question or a mutual friend. Then we would have to secure access to a telephone which might have been a public call box in the foyer of the residence or possibly in the public area of our own home and then, having plucked up the requisite courage, dial the number and deal with whoever answered on the other end, and when we finally got our intended on the other side, we would have to speak in real time rather than tap out our approach on a keyboard.

There is a sizeable difference in the nature and scale of the obstacles to creating sexual possibility faced by suitors separated by the 35 years between my young client and his therapist.

And this difference suggests that technology’s easing of many of the practical constraints on our behaviour places ever more emphasis on our individual capacity to regulate behaviour. In a psychological sense we may consider a cell phone an instrument capable of simultaneously activating our most basic drives and impulses and offering us the means to act on these activations with minimal expenditure of energy and that is a lot of individual responsibility to carry.