I was single, straight and female. When I turned 30, I imagined my sex life ending in a terminus of monogamy. Then I split up with someone I had been in love with for two years and – after sleeping with a couple of men and ending up in a clap clinic being tested for chlamydia – I decided that, based entirely on my own experience, the whole way we approach relationships had undergone a seismic shift in the past five years. In need of even greater solipsism, I moved to San Francisco to write a book about it.
On reaching the west coast, I signed up for the internet-dating site OkCupid. After a couple of dates, however, I began to feel an underlying malaise. While the internet offered countless opportunities to meet people, it was no guide to their suitability. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her 1949 classic The Second Sex: “I live in fear that someone will invent the internet, as it’s hard enough trying to stop Jean-Paul shagging women as it is.” So it was that I stopped going on OkCupid: the men I met bore little or no relation to their picture or descriptions.
Walking through the Mission area one day, I saw an advert for an organisation called OneTaste that offered Orgasmic Meditation. This seemed like something that would make a chapter so I signed up. At my first meeting, I was welcomed by a woman called Daedone, who explained how orgasmic meditation worked. “You basically strip off and let a man rub your clitoris for 15 minutes,” she said. Intrigued, I decided to give it a go with a man called Jose. It was quite enjoyable but I didn’t experience orgasm. On another occasion I did, so then I stopped going.
Next on my to do list was internet porn. Although my research – Gloria Steinem’s seminal work, Revolution from Within – had suggested that it was mainly men who consumed pornography, many of my women friends who were working at Google said they found pornography liberating. So I decided to go along to a hardcore film set to experience it for myself as a feminist. After spending 20 pages writing a potted history of the porn industry, I spent a long time chatting to female porn stars who were all fascinated to talk to me and who all told me how much they enjoyed their work, though after some reflection I decided this was not a line of work I would want to pursue for myself.
In Virginia, a woman wearing a panda head was live-streaming herself while performing various sex acts on herself in response to men who were watching her online. I decided to get in contact with her. “Have you read Andrea Dworkin’s seminal work, Pornography: Men Possessing Women?” I asked. “No,” she replied. “That’s odd,” I said. “I could have sworn you must have done.” We then talked for a little while more about her work and then the conversation rather petered out.
Next came Elizabeth, who worked at Google. She was looking for a relationship but did not want to restrict herself to having sex with just one partner. Brian also worked at Google and was also looking for an open relationship. Elizabeth and Brian compiled a Google document spreadsheet that provided the framework for whom they would be shagging at any point in the day and at what time they might be free to shag one another. Then Elizabeth met Chris, who worked at Facebook. Elizabeth quite fancied Chris but Chris fancied Brian more, which turned out to be a bit of a problem – since Brian didn’t mind kissing Chris, but didn’t want to have sex with him.
From then on, Elizabeth and Chris decided they would only sleep with other people who worked at Google. To celebrate, they held a party at which everyone at Google would shag one another. I upgraded my browser to Google Chrome Plus and went along with some trepidation. I can’t quite remember if I slept with anyone else or not though, as I was a bit out of it.
“Why don’t you come to the Burning Man festival?” said a man called Adam. “Everyone from Google will be there.” Man, it was awesome. To see so many nerds acting like space cadets was literally mind-blowing. At one point, I was in this tent having amazing sex with someone on MDMA, and the next I was smoking too much weed and having sex with someone else. This really did feel like the future of sex.
When I came down and got back to New York, I did vaguely wonder if this really was the future of sex after all. Maybe all I’d done was immerse myself in a Google west coast subculture, but at least I’d finished my book. Anyway, it had been a blast and who knows if I will have a baby one day or not?
Digested read, digested: Much the same as the old sex.
