Après #METOO, l'érotisme ? - Richard Mèmeteau - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Richard Mèmeteau, sociologist Lecture, followed by a discussion with journalist Ysé Sorel

Fantasy, filtering and fetishism: desire put to the test by dating apps

We have never had so many means of fulfilling our fantasies, nor understood so well the extent to which our desire eludes us. Twenty years ago (a reminder: Grindr was created in 2009 and Tinder in 2012), meeting the rare gem—the sensitive rugby player who likes horror films and rom-coms, lives less than three kilometers away and is available within 24 hours—was a miracle. Today, apps make us believe that all we need to do is apply the right filters: desire has become a computational problem rather than a matter of self-examination.

The problem, then, is not that they facilitate sexual pleasure, but that they promise a perfect match between desire and reality. As if we no longer had to pitilessly bend hard reality to our desires, but simply find where to insert them into the erogenous network of the social world.

A dialectic is set in motion: fantasy produces an ideal; the filter searches reality for what corresponds to it; fetishization ultimately reduces others to what we want them to be.

But fetishists paradoxically point to another path: starting with practices rather than people. No longer looking for someone who is our fantasy, but for someone with whom to consciously enact a fantasy scenario, without claiming to confine the entirety of the individual within it.