The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
A generation of writers who grew up with online porn are sexing up the sitcom
When online dating was invented, I found it tremendously useful. That’s because my ideal man is a 25-stone truck driver from Minnesota. The internet’s like a sweet shop for me.
I’m joking. I never used the internet to find a mate. Throughout my single years I dated lonely, socially awkward misfits. I didn’t feel like I needed an extra way of meeting them.
That’s not to say I didn’t look at a few sites. I even filled in one of the profile forms once. It said, “Describe yourself in six words”. I put: “Not very good at describing myself ”. It said: “What are you looking for?”. I put: “Usually my car keys”. It said: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”. I put: “Still filling in this form.”
I preferred normal dating: encountering a boy in the real world, having an awkward conversation, swapping numbers, meeting in a pub, eye contact, flirting, do you have siblings, do you have pets, what’s your favourite cemetery, who’s your favourite wife of Henry VIII, no no let me get this, no I insist, OK let’s split it, well then if you must, clumsy leave-takings, bumpy kiss at the Tube station, repeat for eight weeks and then, if still on speakers, a high-pressure mini-break at a Novotel.
I’m not sure it’s like that now. I say that because this week I’ve been watching Shrill (a third outing for the American comedy series, which has just dropped on iPlayer) and I May Destroy You (which just won three Baftas, with many more to come, I’m sure).
They’re both terrific, but my word they reflect a scary romantic universe. Shrill opened with the central character dumping her boyfriend because he’d just told everyone in the office about an experimental new sex position they’d tried (which the audience was able to see in flashback), then meeting a new chap and going back to his flat, where he ejaculated on her arm and burst into tears. Later, her friends bolstered her confidence by repeatedly chanting, “Sex whore!” in a supportive, encouraging manner.
Remember, this isn’t drama. It isn’t Normal People, that rather sober piece which delivered hotand-heavy scenes for audiences to nod seriously through. This is sitcom! Light sitcom! It’s today’s Friends! You have to imagine Monica on all fours, pants down, with Chandler heaving away behind her as Ross scrubs his semen off a smiley Rachel. (Obviously you don’t have to imagine that. I just thought you’d enjoy it.)
I May Destroy You is not light sitcom – its storyline is a brutal one about rape – but, in an impressive and hugely original way, it tells its harrowing story with humour as well as a certain indefinable comic structure. And its mise-en-scène is one where, for twentysomethings, online hook-ups and threesomes are de rigueur.
When our heroine Arabella (a mesmerising performance from Michaela Coel, who also wrote the series) looks back to a better world before her terrible ordeal, she remembers the innocence of that summer night when she went home with a drug dealer who realised she had her period but tenderly removed her tampon and had sex with her anyway.
It is almost impossible to describe this without appearing to disapprove. It’s so new, so generation-specific, that if anyone over 30 says “They’ve only just met and they’re having an orgy!” one sounds like a maiden aunt clucking over the teacups.
That’s not how I mean it. None of this looks like much fun to me – I’d have found that dating landscape tremendously stressful – but if they’re enjoying themselves, good luck to them. I’m only on episode five of IMDY but I’m very much hoping it’s not some Victorian journey where Arabella and her friend Kwame, who is also raped, decide to stay at home doing more tapestry. If the rapes appear to teach them some sort of lesson, the series will cease to be brilliant and become loathsome.
And I oughtn’t to romanticise my own dating life in the earlier 2000s, which was anachronistic even then. Is it better to have weeks of chaste conversation like a sort of shop window (clean hair, fresh anecdotes, ready smiles, rapt attention) before, having started a long-term partnership, gradually revealing one’s full terrible personality, moaning and complaining about everything from work to health to friends until every evening feels like a long, grim, joke-free episode of Room 101? (I think I was a guest on that episode, as it happens.)
It probably isn’t better. But
I do have to navigate my more general worries about the internet. What we’re seeing in new, younger TV and film writing, both in the fictionalised milieu of twentysomething characters and the real-world readiness to put graphic sex scenes on camera, is the effect of a generation who’ve grown up watching online porn. They have seen so much X-rated stuff, it’s so normalised, that it might strike them as weird to tell a story without such visceral scenes. And I sense that the crossover between online porn and online dating is now quite significant.
It is really, really hard not to worry about the internet if you didn’t grow up with it. It’s so amorphous and huge, so savage and uncontained, that sometimes the whole web can feel like the dark web.
Both Shrill and I May Destroy You are (like Fleabag and Promising Young Woman and a raft of other great stuff) created by women: brilliant, analytical, emotionally articulate women. So they will know how to navigate it. I hope the rest of their generation is like them.
It’s hard to discuss this without sounding like a maiden aunt clucking over the teacups