MySpace Meat Market

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Monogamy is the custom or condition of having only one mate during a given period of time. The mystery of monogamy has puzzled the human race for a long time. It is usually reasoned to be the result of an attachment that is strong enough to make someone be true to his or her loved one. The history of monogamy is the history of an alliance of interests than of affections, and an affinity of families rather than of hearts. Consider the monogamy of the Caesars.

And yet the tradition is still the most widely adopted social custom of the human race. However, the spread of modern democracy and the invention of modern mass media technologies like television and the internet have resulted in the formation of a modern global culture that now challenges many of our monogamous traditions. The availability of reliable birth control in the modern world has broken the connection between sex and pregnancy, and now sex can be pursued for pleasure while having children has become a matter of choice. It is now common for people to have more than one sexual relationship before they choose to have children. Couples often live together for years before they marry. Some men and women avoid lasting relationships as long as they can continue to attract desirable partners. The result has been the formation of an unregulated social reproductive system called the meat market'. This system is particularly conspicuous in the major metropolitan cities of the western world, where the axiom, try before you buy, has become a rule of thumb. Almost everyone would like a partner who is physically attractive, smart, funny, and possibly even wealthy. But it is usually very difficult to find all of these qualities in the same person. Most people are forced to compromise and lower their expectations in order to find a compatible partner. The degree to which we compromise depends on what we ourselves have to offer and how desirable we are to others, in other words, our own value on the meat market. Now there is a new public forum to express our increasingly schizophrenic urges: We can call it M3: The MySpace Meat Market. MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive network of friends and an internal e-mail system. It is currently the third most popular website in the United States and rapidly becoming an important staple of our popular culture. MySpace created its 100 millionth only a few months ago, and currently attracts new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day. MySpace is a public forum. Yet not everyone utilizes it for its most sublime motives. MySpace is the latest device assisting in the de-privatization of our lives. Before cell phones were ubiquitous, there was not a tacit expectation to be able to reach anyone at any time. This sanctuary of silence is only a luxury people rediscover when they embark on a trip outside their cell phone range or when their batteries run out. Before Instant Messaging (IM), a workday could flow uninterrupted from the concerns of friends and family. Now it seems an offense to loved ones to be busy at work, or lost in the comfort of solitude. MySpace offers a different invasion of privacy. Friends and strangers are now privy to the everyday happenings of a member's existence. Beyond the trivialities of one's basic information and tastes, voyeurs can track your correspondence with other members (if you have made them public through comments), and piece together a chronology of your very being. MySpace hearkens back to the classic experiment by the Russian scientist, Pavlov, where the dog learns to salivate whether his food is present or not. Or consider the experiments in which rats push buttons in order to get an increase in the drug boosting their happiness for a time. MySpace acts as a new form of button pushing, both literal and metaphorical. A kind of cyber crack. One of the chief offenders: public comments. If MySpace comments were a one-way valve, allowing others too a see a more elaborate online headshot with stats, like a model card for the rest of us, the problem would not be so pernicious. But comments go both ways, and this changes the equation. We have all become part of the large global bulletin board, not unlike the one where we discovered who we were cast as in the school play. In this case, the world is the play. And sometimes we go to the board not to see our own role, but to see what leading lady or man we may be cast with. MySpace allows the human imagination to go wild. We see comments without context, and so the human mind adds its own self-created context. An innocuous comment, I had fun last night, can assume all of the sudden contorted bravado and malice of a sexual compliment. Or perhaps the comment invalidates a perfectly could alibi for why you couldn't be someplace. So you did go out last night. I though you were staying in. It is for this reason that MySpace gained some unexpected popularity among the young people in our culture: they are, after all, the most insecure segment of society. And thus MySpace acts as a private investigation service, free of charge. For this reason, many feared the rumors of the so-called MySpace Tracker. But the advent of a MySpace tracker is the last thing founder Tom would want for his enormously successful site. It would destroy MySpace. If people knew who and how many times a person was going to their profile, both parties would know and refrain from further visits, resulting in a phenomenal decrease of traffic. MySpace thrives in the murky atmosphere of semi-anonymity. MySpace only works when we can be voyeurs and exhibitionists. We are exhibitionists when we post pictures of ourselves, and try to share with the world our latest exploits, victories, and tragedies. We are attention whores looking for comments. And since the medium is so shallow, there are never enough. Like the way we have to keep eating bad food because it has limited nutrients, we need to keep feeding our cyber-addiciton to get validation; even for those of us who THINK we have self-worth. We are voyeurs when we seek information from others. When we decide to play their game and communicate with them, leaving the protection of our own solitude to enter their world. We learn about their rock concerts, parties, and invitations. We see their photographs, listen to their music, and we read their blogs. Are we looking for ourselves in these other profiles? Are we looking for something transcendent? Something blissful enough to make us shut off our computer and halt our search once and for all? The secret behind this phenomenon is what I call the MySpace Persona. Because of this wall of semi-anonymity, we are free to build a superior image of ourselves, and then communicate to others through this alter ego. It is still us, just airbrushed, photoshoped, and tweaked through our rational process of selection and elimination. The Chicago Tribune's recently printed an article concerning MySpace that argued that young college graduates compromise their chances of starting careers because of the content they post onto their profiles. A potential employer can utilize information provided by the applicant's MySpace's profile. Thus the employer may not hire a highly qualified candidate because he or she maintains an account suggesting wild or inappropriate behavior. The barrier between our personal lives and our professional lives is diffused through MySpace. To be fair, may still manage to censor their site, and offer an almost corporate, basic profile, akin to a professional business card. However, many more use the slipperiness of boredom and their own compulsions to use the site in a more nefarious manner. Dave Itzkoff re-iterated this notion of a MySpace Persona in the June 2006 issue of Playboy magazine. In his article he notes that females who feature photos of themselves in little clothing on their profile pages behave in ways that they would not behave in person, and that this duplicity undercuts the central philosophy of MySpace, which is to bring people together. Itzkoff claims that MySpace gives many people access to a member's life, without giving the time needed to maintain such relationships, and that such relationships do not possess the depth of in-person relationships. In other words, it makes our friendships shallow, based not so much on reality as our idealized version of reality. Instead of ten friends that we know really well, we have forty friends that we sort-of know. The extreme version of this hyperbolized persona is the notion of the MySpace Celebrity, individuals who have attracted hundreds of thousands of "friends", which they then use to leverage careers in the entertainment industry to one degree or another. The June 2006 issue of Playboy magazine, for example, featured a "Women of MySpace" nude pictorial. Some have made the leap to television, magazines, and radio, including the infamous Christine "ForBiddeN" Dolce's appearance on The Tyra Banks Show and her own Playboy pictorial in the October 2006 issue. Celebrity Role models aggravate the problem by being the actual poster children for the death of monogamy. In the same way that a cigarette is marketed to be a glamorous and sexy accessory instead of a chemical weapon, celebrities make serial polygamy look the raison de atrea of the alpha race. Perhaps we regular folk are not quite fabulous enough to entertain midnight trysts with the waitress at the bowling alley while simultaneously giving roses to our girlfriend. Yet if this the true Zen path to enlightenment " and we are all supposed to copulate with short term memory " then MySpace is the second coming, herald of a new age of hedonism. Perhaps, If you can keep it, to paraphrase Ben Franklin out of context. Is this our destiny as a human race? Are we meant to slip out of relationships as easily as Brittany slips out her panties? Or are we by nature monogamous? What is the nature of love and attachment? Understanding the nature of monogamy holds the promise of someday discovering the truth behind the abstract concept we call love. Most of twentieth-century biology is based on paradigms originated by Charles Darwin. In the course of evolution, the reproductive success and survival of the young produced by pair bonds has been the ultimate goal. For most of what scientists consider monogamous social organization, it has been shown by examination of DNA that "molecular biology genotypes don't show exclusivity." Biologists find it very rare for reproductive pairs of any species to be truly sexually exclusive. In a study done by ethnographer G.P. Murdock (1949) of 849 human societies, 83% were found to be polygynous; 16% monogamous (serially); and 1% polyandrous. The implication is that humans are most likely to be monogamous in a serial way (not mate for life). And then there is the Prairie Vole. Prairie voles are monogamous creatures, so much that eighty percent of the time males refuse to mate with any vole other than their first mate, and both parents tend to their offspring. Montane voles, which are a very closely related species to prairie voles, are polygamous. Both female and male montane voles leave each other and their offspring after mating. "Prairie voles spend more than 50% of the time in close physical contact with each other, whereas montane voles spend less than 5% of the time in close proximity to other individuals." Oxytocin and vasopressin are released after the prairie voles mate, so that they form an "attachment.Oxytocin is the same chemical that is released when human beings have sex with one another. When bathed in this chemical, lovers are truly blinded to all others. Score one point for monogamy.But observations of the animal kingdom cannot give us the whole story.While the mating habits of other species are guided by strong biological instincts, humans have evolved to become much more flexible in how we can be socially conditioned. While we are still driven by the same basic biological urges as other animals, we are also driven by the higher functions of our cerebral cortex: rational thought, spirituality, and the ability to learn from past relationships.It is from these higher functions that man has fashioned civilization, including the secular arrangements of marriage and other protectors of the monogamous instinct.As the ancestors of humans began to evolve, they formed tribal laws and customs to regulate their social behavior, and in particular, their reproductive behavior.Initially, families usually arranged marriages. Multiple wives were common in communities that were ravaged by war. In places where women were rare, marriages were sometimes arranged with multiple husbands. Ancient kings and medieval sultans took hundreds of wives and concubines. Men who occupied positions of power could do as they pleased as long as they were unchecked by rival powers. Even today, dictators like the president of North Korea have an entire government department dedicated to recruiting gorgeous women for his personal use.With refinements to the art of writing, strict rules governing sexual behavior became enshrined through religious doctrine. Strict laws condemning sex outside of marriage, and even laws against divorce and abortion, were enforced by the various religious traditions.Christianity requires that the laws of chastity are binding upon men and women equally,and no person can innocently indulge in amorous pleasure except with his own wife or her own husband. The old Church of England matrimonial ceremony describes the tradition of marriage as a mystical union, so that men and women may satisfy their lusts without harmful consequence.The laws and values of Islam reflect the harsh desert conditions from which it arose. As Muhammad fought to unite the desert tribes under Islam, his followers were permitted to marry up to four wives, and his warriors were allowed to keep any number of captured slave girls.In Roman and Greek times, marriage was not expected or intended to preserve the public purity, or to secure domestic happiness, but was rather designed to perpetuate their races, to preserve their rich patrimonial estates, and to maintain the ascendancy of their aristocratic families. So it seems that history teaches us that marriage and monogamy has served a social role that is conspicuously absent in modern society. We live in a time that is not ravaged by war or famine. Our incredible resources have made us gluttons, not only of food and drink, but also of the opiate of love. Of course, we still tell ourselves the fairy tales are true. We cannot look in the mirror and turn away from the one transcendent emotion that we detect in the cosmos, that antidote to loneliness we call love. And so we guard our true hearts with vigilance, but habitually seek own sensual pleasures away from home in the public haunts of impurity. MySpace is now that public haunt of impurity. We are not destitute of the passion for love, but that passion is permitted to influence us little in this age of constant opportunity. And so we have systematically degraded our love into lust.Our monogamy requires it.That is the irony of the debate. It is our very deep seated and spiritual respect for monogamy that allows us to debase it so. It's a test against the very cosmic foundry that forged us. For what is the test of something's true worth, then its survival against incredible challenges and obstacles that try to surmount it.It is the trials and tribulations of a relationship, so magnified through our mass media, that will eventually yield the pair bonding that both Darwin AND the great prophets could be proud of: a sublime friendship. Blessed with mystery. Chastened by integrity."It had to be you, it had to be you I wandered around, and finally found The somebody who Could make me be true, and could make me be blue And even be glad, just to be sad Thinking of you." -Gus Kahn and Isham Jones by James Larson