Future Sex by Emily Witt Page B

fulfillment”), seemed self-obsessed, it was because so many doctrines—marriage, the nuclear family, sexual taboos, diet, gender—had successfully been exploded. The privilege of being middle class in America in the twenty-first century meant that most of the pressing questions in life were left to choice. Who should I have sex withwhen I’m single? What should I eat for dinner? What should I do to earn money? There was limited ancient guidance on such historically preposterous questions. The difficulty of actually choosing which rules to live by invited extensive self-examination.
    There was an idea that greater gender equality had not brought equal sexual fulfillment, and most commonly held ideas about sex were still orientedtoward masculine ideas about orgasm and desire. People felt sexually “liberated”—they were trying a wider range of things on a broader scale than perhaps at any other time in American history, and although sexual repression lingered, the problem was often not sexual repression. It was that the women who saw promise in pursuing sexual openness often found themselves battling their own feelings:trying to control attachment, pretending to enjoy something that hurt or annoyed them, defining sexiness by images they had seen rather than knowing what they wanted. The people at OneTaste were looking for a method to arrive at a more authentic and stable experience of sexual openness, one that came from immanent desire instead of an anxiety to please. Their method was strange, but at least theybelieved in the possibility.

 
    INTERNET PORN
    The first legal images of penetration were published in the magazine Private in 1965. And to think of everything that has happened since then … What was called porn, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, was a paring down of plot, performance, and romance to the very basics of efficient sexual stimulation. The ten-minute video clips, organized into a grid on websitesand indexed by interest, were, in relation to the history of porn, like the pinnacle of a mountainous landfill. Seagulls circled above and bulldozers aerated below, unearthing martini glasses, smoking jackets, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, alt.breast.net. Yesterday, without putting in any credit card information, you watched three tanned hard bodies winch a woman up against a gently swaying palmtree and today you watched a butch woman with very hairy legs and one pierced nipple face-fuck another woman with a strap-on and tomorrow you will watch what the computer says is a cum-craving hottie feeling a ripping hard cock banging her pleasure hole. Or you didn’t watch it at all. The culture had an abstract idea, “porn,” which for some people meant particular websites, search terms, and somaticmemories but for others was only a vague menace that flickered obscurely in the dark.
    Porn caused my friends a lot of anxiety. Some people enjoyed watching it as part of a daily routine. Some felt enslaved by their desire for it. Others saw their real-world sexual experiences reduced to a corny mimicry of porn, and wished they could somehow return to a time when porn was less ubiquitous, or wasjust soft-focus tan people having unadventurous sex by a swimming pool. Since more men watched porn than women, the occasional imbalance of knowledge caused distress all around and was perceived at times as an imbalance of power. Porn made people jealous, it hurt feelings, it made them worry about whether their partners were attracted to them or to the kind of people they watched in porn, who mighthave a different hair color, skin color, or bra size. Because porn loves the taboo, it could also be racist and misogynist.
    It was tempting, now, to think that sex before Internet porn had been less complicated. There were sexual acts in porn that it would not occur to many people to attempt. We had more expectations about what kind of sex to have, and how many people should be involved, andwhat to say, and what our