America Unzipped by Brian Alexander

Author:Brian Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307407382
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

You’re a Naughty Daddy

I DISCOVER THAT VIRTUAL SEX ISN’T ALWAYS VIRTUAL

To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion.

—Pierre Baudrillard, 1990

I am stunned by her openness. She lacks any trace of self-consciousness. He, on the other hand, is a little on edge but wants to be brave because she is, and he wants to keep up to please her.

I sit with Susan and Michael in Susan’s kitchen, as she talks about her sexual life and her adventures and misadventures with men—and sometimes with women and sometimes with both at the same time. I have come to watch them take some pictures of themselves, possibly having sex. We’ve left that a little vague. But I want to talk to them first, and the longer I am here and the more we talk, the longer I want to keep on talking. I am in no hurry to go upstairs. We are on the clock because Susan’s son will come home at a certain time, so we don’t have all day, but I keep stalling. I sense something going on between Susan and Michael that is not nearly as casual as they have made it out to be.

Before we jump ahead to Susan’s bedroom, though, I should explain how I ended up in a Maryland kitchen with the prospect of watching two people have sex.

It started during a conversation with Kim Airs, who has become a helpful Virgil on my tour. I asked her what I have asked others, why there was so much sexual conversation when America was supposed to be a Puritan place rediscovering its religiously restricted carnal outlook.

It’s not just the conversation, she said; it’s the doing. As my own correspondents indicated, many people were not just watching porn and buying vibrators by the millions. They wanted action.

“One word sums it up,” she said. “Internet.”

“Yes, yes. I know,” I said a little impatiently. Everyone from the folks at Phil Harvey’s place to the women in Missouri have said the Internet has replaced school and family and church as sources of information about sex. I rolled my eyes.

I have a prejudice against the Internet. I am sick of hearing how “the Internet has changed everything.” I know it’s true, but I hate hearing about it from smug know-it-alls in chino pants, the BlackBerrys hanging from their belts turning them into wan gunslingers. I have long thought the rise of the Internet was a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by stock options. To my mind, the Internet as we know it was created by hippies who failed to make utopia in Haight-Ashbury or back-to-the-land communes and thought they could finally carve it out of virtual worlds made possible by digital technology, worlds conveniently free of all the human nature—sex, drugs, self-interest, money, emotions—that mucked up the Haight and the entire hippie-anarchist enterprise. But just as they did before, they turned into prophets for profit, cashing in on promises of a technological nirvana of free information, democracy, and liberty for all.

What nobody seems to be saying out loud is that the Internet has created a new tyranny of technology.

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