Sexualities of Imagined Bodies During a Time of Social Isolation

Abstract

As the world shifted into social isolation at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, many found remote dating to be their only outlet for romantic and sexual interaction. In this paper, I examine the constructed reality of personal advertisements in the COVID‐19 era. I focus on the meaning individuals find in online dating and how they use their imagination in the development of online relationships. I followed the stories of those individuals who took out personal advertisements in the New York Review of Books at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Although I draw on textual analysis of these advertisements, I am less concerned with the genre and more concerned with the ad authors' relationships to online dating. By conducting interviews, I found that online relationships offer their own distinct pleasures and that their format affords individuals more freedom of self‐presentation and expression than in‐person dating, thereby setting participants up for potentially more successful romantic first impressions.