Casual sex was, predictably, everywhere. In Argentina women in relationships often have a chongo, which literally means “strong man” or “muscleman,” but is also a catchall term for a casual sexual partner, one that can refer to a friend with benefits, a regular hookup, or someone whom you’re seeing on the side while in a serious relationship. Used in a sentence: “Nah, we’re not serious. He’s my chongo.”
One married woman at a focus group told us that during her previous relationship she’d had a chongo whom she saw regularly for several years. “It was just skin,” she explained, to make sure we understood that she wasn’t cheating on her relationship, only meeting a sexual need. “I didn’t even know his parents’ names.”
I hope I’m never in a casual relationship with someone in Argentina and catch feelings. Imagine how much it would suck to hear, “What? Relationship?! Are you serious? This is just for skin. Come on, I thought I was very clear: You’re my chongo, nothing more.”
Amazingly, the widespread interest in casual sex has shaped the buildings and neighborhoods of Buenos Aires as well as the culture. The city is teeming with telos, love hotels with no detectable stigma, where rooms are available by the hour. Telos, which exist at all price ranges and are available in the roughest as well as the most high-end neighborhoods, are designed for maximum privacy. The people we interviewed described a variety of techniques that ensure user discretion: In one telo guests drive into the parking lot, ask for a room, and then park in a spot numbered so that their open car doors are adjacent to the door to their room. In another there’s a small chamber between the front door and the room where hotel staff can deliver room-service items without seeing the patrons.
That said, at some hotels maintaining privacy during peak hours is impossible. In Buenos Aires most young single people live with their parents in relatively small apartments, as do children, of course. What that means is that nearly everyone who wants to have sex winds up using a telo on occasion, and late nights can be especially busy. Eduardo, the thirty-one-year-old who messages thirty women per week, told us that occasionally he’s had to sit in a waiting room when he arrives at three or four o’clock in the morning, along with everyone else who’s come in from bars and clubs. One expat who lived next door to a telo said that she’d noticed a lot of traffic during lunch hours, when, her host mother speculated, “bosses like to screw their secretaries.”
If, on the one hand, the whole telo and casual-sex scene sounds fun and liberated, on the other hand, for at least half the population Buenos Aires can be pretty tough. In our focus groups people reported that they’d often see young women crying hysterically in public places, like park benches and bus stops. When Eric asked why it was so common, the response was always the same: men.
The dating culture in Buenos Aires is extremely exciting and sensual, full of flirtation, pursuit, and casual sex. There is also an undeniably darker side, though, with unwanted aggression, manipulation, and infidelity. Everyone suffers the pain of love in Buenos Aires, but I couldn’t help but conclude that things were a lot rougher for women than they were for chongos.
CHAPTER 6
OLD ISSUES, NEW FORMS:
SEXTING, CHEATING, SNOOPING, AND BREAKING UP
The advent of smartphones and the Internet means that our romantic lives now inhabit two worlds: the real world and our phone world. In the phone world we have an unprecedented, highly private forum for communication that forces us to deal with age-old issues like jealousy, infidelity, and sexual intimacy in new formats that we’re still trying to figure out.
SEXTING
Of all the changes in modern romance brought on by the phone world, the most radical has come in the form of sexting: the sharing of explicit sexual images through digital media.
Conceptually, sexting is a timeless phenomenon. Nude photos, erotic letters, and the like have been documented throughout civilization. While something like the Anthony Weiner scandal seems unique to our time, there are precursors, such as the salacious love letters written by U.S. president Warren G. Harding to his neighbor’s wife, in which he nicknamed his penis Jerry and her vagina Mrs. Pouterson.
I wish I had been there when the historian analyzing the letters had the eureka moment: “Hey, wait a second. Whenever he says ‘Mrs. Pouterson,’ I think he means . . . his neighbor’s wife’s vagina??”
Most strange to me is that, whereas “Mrs. Pouterson” is a horrible nickname for a vagina, “Warren G. Harding” is actually a great nickname for a penis.
When it comes to photographs and video, our ability to capture ourselves has evolved with the technologies. Consumer film cameras were great for capturing high-quality images, but they had their disadvantages. Unless you had your own darkroom, you had to drop off the film to get developed, so your privacy would be compromised.