Seduction By Spotify
Can a song be a sext? If you’d asked me that question a few years ago, I would have responded with an emphatic “hell no.” Songs can be sexy, sure, but they’re nowhere as explicit as a lusty photo or a graphic text exchange. But that was before I met a cute Norwegian who was visiting New York on vacation. We had a fleeting, fun summer romance, and after he flew home he friended me on Facebook. We chatted from time to time—typical stuff about our days, dinners, Homeland, and Mad Men. But then he started to send me songs through Spotify.
At first, the songs were our version of virtual note-passing, shy invitations to learn more about each other’s lives, tastes, and interests. We basked in our shared love of old soul, Fleetwood Mac, and Beyoncé, and I discovered that he was a hardcore hip hop junkie. In turn, I revealed my soft spot for bluegrassy country. Our music exchange transmitted a layer of texture and flavor that emails and Facebook messages couldn’t convey. It felt like we were making a digital mixtape, a collaborative jukebox that we could update in real time, light-years faster than if we were doing it the old way, with cassette tapes and the postal service.
But then the song exchange began to take on another shape, evolving into sonorous courtship, a game of call-and-response to gauge each other’s feelings about our interactions. After I Instagrammed a photo of myself laughing with friends, he sent me a bouncy ’90s R&B song called “I Love Your Smile.” I responded in kind, sending him “Sweet Talk” by Jessie Ware. Once, after a long and involved Facebook chat, he sent me a song called “Best Love” by Georgia Anne Muldrow, and I listened to the chorus, which loops the words “You know I wanna give my best love to you,” and swooned.
I was falling hard. But was he? It’s difficult to misinterpret an outright declaration of love, or even of lust, like an X-rated photograph, but songs are more mysterious and opaque. I found myself obsessing over hidden meanings behind the steamy “Fire We Make” duet by Alicia Keys and Maxwell. Did he send that as a nod to our summer fling, or was he just sharing a good new song by two of our favorite artists? And what exactly did he mean by sending me Janet Jackson’s “Got ’Til It’s Gone”? It was impossible to decipher, and the frustration became a kind of foreplay, a buildup before his next trip to New York roughly a year after we’d first met.
He arrived, and the two of us sat in my Brooklyn apartment, awkwardly sipping beers and sweltering in the thick July heat. I remember thinking that this had all been a mistake, a misread. I was preparing myself for a friendly few weeks of platonic activities when he flipped open my laptop and launched Spotify. I watched him skim around for a song, something slow and melty and gorgeous, and then he turned, leaned over, and kissed me.
—JENNA WORTHAM
Swipe Right. Get Laid (Finally!)
We’ve all heard of the euphemistic “dry spell,” but what I was experiencing was a full-on sex drought. Everyone was having sex, everywhere—my next-door neighbors, my ex, characters on HBO. I hadn’t had sex (nor been as much as kissed or groped) in two and a half years. I had to do something more extreme than my usual tepid, OkCupid-enabled dates.
I’d heard about Tinder as a hookup app for straight people. One snowy night last year I signed up, uploaded a few photos, added a Beyoncé quote, and five minutes later I was swiping through available guys within a 6-mile radius of my Brooklyn apartment. It didn’t take long to start chatting with a cute cartoonist who made jokes about Joni Mitchell. After flirting for 90 minutes, I invited him over, making him promise, as some kind of lazy safety precaution, that he wasn’t going to murder me.
I didn’t even bother to change out of my pajamas. And I didn’t end up wearing them for very long. What followed was a Tinder- enabled winter and spring that surpassed my college years in promiscuity. Among my hookups was a social media manager, a stylist who always complimented my lingerie, and a guy who co-developed an app that’s almost a household name.
By summer, Tinder had lost its luster for me. Every guy I encountered either had abhorrent social skills or seemed to want a pen pal he could occasionally sext. Or maybe I just wanted something more meaningful? My sex life faded along with my nightly swiping habit. But I keep the app on my phone, ready to browse, just in case.
—MARISA MELTZER