Future Sex (5 page)

I saw that it was taken for granted, or asserted by books of biological determinism such as Louann Brizendine’s
The Female Brain
, that the monogamous relationship made women the
most happy, was where they most enjoyed sex, and that this sort of commitment brought women both freedom and security. This line of thinking forced me into a gendered role that I resented. If every expression of free sexuality by a woman would be second-guessed, it left men as the sole rational agents of sexual narrative. The woman was rarely granted the heroic role of seducer. If a woman pursued
a strictly sexual experience, she was seen as succumbing to the wishes of the sovereign subject. If the sex she had with no commitments made her unhappy, it was not simply bad sex but rather proof of her delusion that it could be good. Male sexual desire was the overwhelming constant, the chemical imperative, and female desire either a concession or a taming influence, whose achievement was not in
the act of seduction but in wresting a man’s interest from the wider field to her alone. What a stupid way to live, where the pure force of sexual desire could never be trusted. Casual sex, abundant and plentifully available to any woman willing to announce her interest in having it, always came second to this precious and rare thing, the loving relationship. Very few people questioned the worth
or desirability of this denouement. I didn’t question it either.

It was the very naturalness of the committed relationship, its supposed inevitability, the ne plus ultra of comfort and respect that it represented, that induced the worst mania in the women I knew, because many of us felt simultaneously entitled to it as a destiny while also finding it impossible to achieve, what with our technology,
our moral landscape, and our lack of clear gender roles. Unlike school or work, the amount of effort and thought we put into it had no correlative result, because the outcome depended on the behavior and complicity of another kind of person. “It is agonizing for a woman to assume responsibility for her own life,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex
, first published in 1949. Many decades
later this was still true: to give up on the
idea
of the relationship would be to assume a mantle of preternatural self-sufficiency. Letting go of the ideal relationship, to instead declare herself autonomous, to treat sexual desire as a force that gave life meaning rather than as a means to a structural end, would run counter to the thing that most religions and every happy ending she had ever
seen assured a woman would bring her the most joy.

Even if I rejected the books and magazine articles, which forecasted a range of consequences from the simple decision to have sex or not, they colonized my mind. Experience indicated that love would not be more likely to arrive if I rejected sex, but I read articles that spoke of a woman’s “choice” between casual sex and serious relationships.
I learned about an “economic” theory of sex, wherein if women make sex more readily available (never mind wanting it) its “price” drops, and men have to “do less” to get it. “She struggles with him in the effort to uphold her independence, and she battles with the rest of the world to preserve the ‘situation’ that dooms her to dependence,” wrote Beauvoir. “This double game is difficult to play,
explaining in part the disturbed and nervous state in which many women spend their lives.”

*   *   *

I had a friend who began pursuing casual sex as a declared intention in her twenties, when she lived in New York. In New York, her strategy had not been complicated: when her friends left the bar, she would stay. When she later moved to a smaller city, the bars closed earlier. A car-bound transportation
system meant people drank less. She turned to the Internet.

While plenty of men offered themselves as interested in casual sex on OkCupid, too many encounters ended sadly: it was, after all, a dating website, and she did not want to talk about feelings, she wanted to have intense, satisfying sexual encounters. She began using the “Casual Encounters” classifieds on Craigslist. She would go on
at night and respond to ads. She had a system: first, an exchange of photos. Then a phone call. She is deft and decisive, and these traits gave her an advantage when it came to casual sex. Every phone call, she would lay out a list of rules. She would get a real name. She would say that everything they did would be consensual and that if she said “no” or wanted to stop that all sex would stop. They
would use condoms. If she liked the man, and he agreed to her conditions, she would go to his place. She would meet him outside and then they would go in and have sex. She understood all of the risks.

Sometimes the encounters would be depressing, but even the worst ones would give her stories to tell. When the encounters went well they could be powerful sexual experiences. Some of the men who
used Craigslist to seek out casual sex, she said, were really good at sex. They were people for whom sex was an end in itself, who had a lot of experience, who tended to have an ardent fascination with and interest in the body and in pleasure.

When I spoke to her about it, she was now in her thirties, and more interested in having a monogamous relationship. I asked her what her Internet sex experiences
had given her. The most important thing, she said, was learning that if she overtly expressed interest in having noncommittal sex with men who also seemed interested in sex, they almost always responded positively. They would delight in her willingness and affirm how much they desired her. This affirmation was not, as perhaps she had been led to believe, “cheap” for being readily available.
(Or rather, as another friend once put it: “Yeah, it’s cheap—it’s free!”) She learned that even if she never found love, she would always find someone who would want to have sex. It made her feel good about herself and her body, it made her more confident, she grew in her awareness of her own agency and had more control than she was used to experiencing in the confines of the traditional view
of dating, where the idea remained that sex was to be withheld until some indication of emotional commitment was revealed. When a woman wanted casual sex, and not a boyfriend, the old gender roles were often reversed. She was the one who could choose; she was the one to whom men would clamor to reply. These lessons outweighed what she saw as the downsides: the depressing encounters that were really
depressing, the fact that her partners in the future would have to reckon with the extent of her sexual history, the risks. Also, she said happily, “now I’m really good at sex.” By which she meant, I supposed, that she had overcome the idea of good sex as a chemical accident, as rare as falling in love.

I never felt secure enough to pursue sex online. In the depths of loneliness, however, Internet
dating provided me with a lot of opportunities to go to a bar and have a drink with a stranger on nights that would otherwise have been spent unhappy and alone. I met all kinds of people: an X-ray technician, a green tech entrepreneur, a computer programmer with whom I enjoyed a chaste fondness over the course of several weeks. We were both shy and my feelings were tepid (as, I gathered, were
his), but we went to the beach, he told me all about mushroom foraging, he ordered his vegetarian burritos in Spanish, and we shared many mutual dislikes.

Internet dating had evolved to present the world around us, the people in our immediate vicinity, and to fulfill the desires of a particular moment. At no point did it offer guidance in what to do with such a vast array of possibility. While
the lonely might harbor a secret object, from the desire for a brief sexual encounter to a longing for love, the technology itself promised nothing. It brought us people, but it did not tell us what to do with them.

ORGASMIC MEDITATION

The organization OneTaste was careful about the impressions it gave, since its mission to “bring female orgasm to the world” could sometimes be misinterpreted. Once a week, OneTaste therefore offered an open house, where curious members of the public could meet practitioners of what the organization called orgasmic meditation, or OM-ing, in a casual and friendly setting,
without any of the actual orgasms or meditating. Advertised as “A room of people (cool, fun people) engaged in honest, humorous, playful conversation around topics we mostly only consider having in our head,” the meetings were held every Wednesday evening at OneTaste’s small headquarters on Moss Street, a secluded back alley in San Francisco’s South of Market district. The building was a squat two-story
former warehouse, its exterior painted a neutral gray, its front a façade of frosted glass windows. A velvet curtain shielded the front door from the view of the street, and entrances were monitored by beaming members of the organization, who greeted newcomers with the confidence and searching eye contact characteristic of all purveyors of conversion experiences.

I entered here one evening, gave
my name to one of a small fleet of enthusiastic people presiding over clipboards, and walked from the foyer into OneTaste’s inner chamber, a clean, skylit space with polished concrete floors and exposed wooden beams. In one corner was a table holding coffee and tea. Music played softly through speakers. Two rows of chairs were placed in a half circle; in front of them another row, of fabric chairs
lined up on the floor. Maybe twenty or so people occupied these seats, a healthy-looking, multicultural group of people who mostly appeared to be in their thirties or forties.

I sat on the end of the back row of chairs, and said hello to the woman sitting next to me. Her name was Melissa. She was originally from Kansas City but had most recently been living in New York. She had only just moved
to San Francisco. She worked in public relations. She was white, had long brown hair and a full figure, and wore a knit dress. Her looks and dress would have been visually congruent in a vast array of settings: she would not have stuck out at a church in Kansas City, or in a bar in Midtown Manhattan, or at a Whole Foods in Austin, or on a back patio in Atlanta, and nor did she stick out in an orgasmic
meditation information session in San Francisco. We compared New York and San Francisco, agreeing that the latter’s slower pace and manageable size had its advantages. We talked about how expensive the taxis were. We ran out of things to talk about. Melissa had been to OneTaste before. “Everyone is really nice here,” she finally said, and it was true.

In front of her, a slim man with light brown
skin and glasses turned around and stared at us. He and the man next to him said something to Melissa and she listened. “You don’t want women and women sitting together?” she said. So she stood up and switched spots with the man, who now sat next to me. Still staring, in the friendly, focused, interested way that indicated to me he had clearly had some experience in this setting, he introduced
himself as Marcus. We shook hands. Meanwhile, the music that had been playing was turned down. A man and a woman sat down on stools before the half circle, and a quiet settled over the room.

The man and woman did not immediately speak. Instead they gazed thoughtfully around the room with tranquil, wise glances. They were both attractive, and radiated the clean healthy blondness endemic to Northern
Californians. They were casually dressed. He was in his late twenties, sandy-headed, clean-shaven and with symmetrical features, the sleeves of his faded T-shirt nicely taut against his biceps. He had the human neutrality of an Apple store or IKEA—if he had been a piece of furniture he would have been a solid but elegant construction of blond wood. Both wore jeans, hers with a plaid pearl-buttoned
shirt of thin cotton that allowed the edges of the tattoos that framed her chest to peek through at the collar. Her nails were a vivid tomato red and her wavy blond hair delicately tousled. I could picture her leaning against a vintage pickup truck in a field of wheat at the golden hour, perhaps in an advertisement.

His name was Eli; hers was Alisha. He had been OM-ing for three and a half years;
she had been practicing for more than six. They told us this now, and then explained the meeting we were attending as a way to introduce the practice to us, the public. We would begin, they said, by playing a series of three games to get to know one another, and then they would explain the practice of orgasmic meditation for those who were unfamiliar with it.

The first game was called One Mind.
To play it, we answered a single question with rapid responses made sequentially around the circle. First we gave our names. The next question was “Why did you come here?” I was one of several people who answered “curiosity.” Already, however, people showed an apparent eagerness to make their answers sexual, although Eli and Alisha had yet to indicate that OneTaste had anything to do with sex,
per se. The third question confirmed that the intention of the whole endeavor was to in fact encourage us to talk about sex in an overt way. It was “What does your red hot desire look like?”

The responses ranged from “Being tied in a bed,” to “Naked in a forest in Tahoe,” to “Giving head for fifteen minutes straight.” One woman said, “I can’t fathom it so I’m here to figure that out.” Someone
else gave a sylvan vision of a fawn caught in a sunbeam in a tree-filled glen. A man in his mid-fifties whose hair seemed styled into a monk’s tonsure said only, “I’m available.” Someone else said, “Licking pussies.” Another, to Alisha: “You, when you’re turned inside out.” The familiarity and gusto with which many people in the room played the games indicated that they already knew one another.
They emphasized their ease and comfort with discussing sex to galvanize the rest into adopting the same attitude.

We proceeded to the second game, called Hot Seat. For this game a volunteer sat on the stool in front of the room, the aforementioned hot seat, and answered questions from the audience. The questions were supposed to be “interested rather than interesting”—oriented to show curiosity
toward the recipient and not to make a provocative point. The game’s rules forbade any rejoinder beyond “thank you.” If the answer satisfied the questioner before the person in the hot seat had finished responding, he or she could cut off the response with “thank you.”