Farrell was always the wild child, so it didn’t really surprise his family when he decided to become a Dead Head, following the Grateful Dead from town to town. He financed his travels partly by selling videotapes of himself and his wife having sex to a small company, Homegrown, that relied mostly on tapes from swingers for its inventory. Farrell didn’t plan on making a habit of performing in front of a camera, but it was fun and easy and Farrell had always been sexually precocious, so why not? More tapes followed and by the mid-1990s, Farrell was appearing in mainline L.A. porn productions, billing himself as Tim Lake.
When Homegrown began to crumble, he and Moffit sensed a business opportunity. So they did what generations of WASP entrepreneurs have done. They asked their mother (their father had passed away) for a loan to buy it. She agreed, becoming probably the only backer of a porn production company at her country club. Today their website is one of the most heavily trafficked adult sites in the world, and their DVDs are wildly popular.
Moffit is married, settled, a member of a golf club near San Diego where he tells people he works in “technology.” He is a businessman, plain and simple. There is not a single sign of porn in his office, unless you count a golf photo as porn. As far as he is concerned, the product could be socks or bicycle rims or software. In fact, if things keep going the way they have been the past few years, Moffit tells me, he and Farrell might welcome a buyout offer, maybe from one of the porn companies that have already gone public.
Farrell, on the other hand, was divorced a few years ago. His son is being educated in an elite private school where the other parents know he does “something on the Internet,” though his son is getting to the age where Farrell and his ex are going to have to figure out a way to tell him Dad is in the porn business.
Farrell also has a new girlfriend, one of Homegrown’s more popular contributors. The daughter of a prominent Hawaii businessman, Mahealani was raised Catholic, attended an all-girls Catholic school, did some small-time fashion modeling, and worked as a child psychologist. A couple of years ago, she tells me when we meet, she wound up in a hot-tub orgy and discovered she liked it. It was freeing. She long had a secret desire to make porn, so she decided to make one for Homegrown. “Believe it or not, I told her she is nuts,” Farrell writes in his Homegrown blog. “Still, there is no denying that she is a natural hambone in front of the camera and obviously loves the sex. Ultimately, who am I to tell a grown woman with a Master’s Degree in psychology what to do? Homegrown video fans went nuts for her in her first video, which she doesn’t like that much because it was true amateur porn—full of glorious imperfections. She made another video for one of my amateur porn colleagues, Rodney Moore, and his fans raved about her, too. You just can’t keep a sexy mature lady down when her libido is supercharged that way.” Like some other Homegrown contributors, she can no longer really be considered “amateur.”
Don, on the other hand, is a purist. He has placed a small photo of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow on his Yahoo! Messenger screen while we engage in an online chat.
“I will change it to show you what I show women who are looking to cam,” he types.
“Okay,” I reply.
Whoa! There it is, a man’s torso, his hand reaching down, grasping his penis.
“I love the way it feels,” Don types.
Uh-huh. Well, Don is waiting for me to type something back, but what does one say to a man holding his own penis? Nice physique? Happy to see me? Don has become so used to showing himself off to other people and to typing graphic dialogue that the words from his side of the conversation flow as easily as a chat about the weather in Russia, where he happens to be at the moment. He is in a hotel room early in the morning, typing back and forth to me before heading out to work as a construction supervisor for an international contractor.
At least that’s what he says he does and where he says he is, but you couldn’t prove it by me, because on the Internet Don could be an elderly woman in Des Moines or a teenage boy in Hamburg playing God of War II with his other hand. This is precisely the point. Don is not fully knowable or reachable unless he wants to be. So he can display his privates with impunity, without fear of fallout, and have whatever version of digitized sex he wants with whomever wants. Over the past seven years, Don—and I do believe Don is a real forty-nine-year-old man, though I also think Don embellishes for effect (he will tell in one of our chats that he likes to have sex a Herculean three to six times per night)—has had online powwows with about 120 different people. Many of these have become regulars. He estimates that about 40 percent of his sex life takes place over the Web.
At first, Don spent time looking at porn sites, cruising for jerk-off material. Then he discovered a few amateur women using Web cameras. “I searched the chat rooms for more, and found myself sitting in the chair rubbing my cock and wanting more. Eventually, I met a girl from Florida who showed me everything and spread her legs for me and begged me to get a cam. I did, and soon found myself stripping for her, joining in a private digital sex act.”
Despite being conservative by nature, a Republican who grew up in the upper Midwest and now has two children and a wife who know nothing about his forays into the sexual nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web, Don has become an enthusiastic performer. When he ends his workday he goes back to his hotel room, switches on his portal into the digital universe, and begins broadcasting himself to anybody interested in watching and joining in, often via Yahoo!’s instant message service, AdultFriendFinder’s chat function, or ifriends.net.
“I think of it as pure erotic expression of human desire,” he tells me when I ask why. This is better than regular porn, because “we seek escape from our difficulties, from our routine or pressures and this gives it to us. The interaction of two or more sexually motivated people—real people, not actors—is so hot and can be very satisfying.”
Don credits the Internet with being a great equalizer. “Of course this also allows people—because of weight, or whatever—to hide what they look like and still have digital sex with hot partners using their desires and minds to weave an erotic digital date to achieve orgasm and satisfaction.”
When I ask Don how he goes about finding virtual partners, he says it’s easy. “If you go into the right room at the right time, all you need to say is something like, ‘Looking to cam with hot lady that loves cock,’ and you will have them begging to watch. Depending on how turned on I am, I can select one or two of those watching to chat with and see who they are and how sexy or nasty they really are. So the digital world gives me an avenue of escape [into] secret desire where I can find fulfillment.”
Satisfying. Satisfaction. Fulfillment. People keep telling me they are finding these online. My anti-Internet prejudice may be obscuring my judgment, but, really? Satisfaction? Fulfillment? What bothers me most about the Internet is the way in which it makes the virtual into reality. I doubt their word because the Internet offers a mediated, secondhand experience—to my mind, an impoverished version of fulfillment. Perhaps virtual and real have so blurred that we can’t tell the difference anymore. Perhaps virtual actually seems hyperreal because all distractions are stripped away. There are no bills to pay, no nagging partner, no smells or tastes, or troubles, no risk. The heat of high-speed cable simmers all that off until we are left with a reduction of intent: getting off.
Maybe this is all it takes for satisfaction, or maybe this is all the satisfaction that is available. Maybe it has come to that.
Don does meet real people in this virtual space. To prove it, he sends screen images of various women, or I should say parts of various women, mainly breasts and genitals, he has received from online sex partners. Then he forwards transcripts of his dialogues. The words were typed with all the ardor he and his partners could muster, but there are only so many ways to say what amounts to “Ooh, baby.” mmgarcia8: “I want every inch of you…balls slappin’ off my ass as you ride me.” Don’s feverish exhortations to mmgarcia8 and the other
women make Prince Charles’s infamous recorded tampon fantasy seem Byronic by comparison, though I suppose Don might be creatively handicapped by typing with one hand and masturbating with the other.
All the sessions Don sends end with magnificent eruptions of bodily fluids jetting across rooms, shattering orgasms, quivering sighs. “It can be a beautiful experience,” he types to me. “Romantic, bubble bath scenes or showers where you mentally wash each other with lots of soapy water and then go down on each other….…. Some like it rough and want to watch you moaning and stroking your cock….……. they long to see you shoot a stream across the screen to make them lose control themselves….. the best is when you have cam to cam sex and can see how hot you are making them…. that really turns me on.”
I am a little afraid to ask what the long ellipses signify and to think of what he is doing while one finger is hitting the period button over and over.
At forty-nine, Don believes he is much more sexual than he was at nineteen or twenty-nine. With age comes a dropping of pretense, a greater willingness to experiment. Fantasies and scary thoughts that went unexpressed rise from the molten center of the mind to the crust, where in the past they might have stayed. Now, though, the Internet provides the vent. As a younger man, for example, Don never realized there were women out there who “wanted it and were actively seeking raw, hard action.” Women would claim to “be ‘shy’ or delicate,” but thanks to the Internet, he has discovered that “like me, they had a private, hard core lover hidden inside an outwardly conservative, intelligent, but obviously sexual being.”
Age has had another effect on Don, though, that is not so salubrious. Accumulating experience has taught him that life sucks sometimes. His wife doesn’t want sex as much as she used to want sex. She doesn’t like to experiment. Life never seems to behave according to your fondest imaginations. Over time you rack up disappointments and then you are forty-nine years old and beginning the downhill slide.
Escaping into his virtual sex world is a way he can live the erotic life he dreams about living, but lately Don has been allowing the virtual to seep into fleshy reality. If he happens to be in a town where one of his viewers or chat partners lives, he might arrange a personal encounter. Don believes in sin and he thinks he is sinning every time he does this, but he has set himself on some sort of sexual journey and can’t seem to stop traveling. “Not claiming sainthood, here…I am basically a moral person, but flawed major league when it comes to sex.”
What does Don want? He can’t tell me. Whatever it is, he is unable to type it into words that make any sense. He uses high-flown language about satisfaction and fulfillment and even happiness, but he just keeps describing all the thrilling sex without explaining what he is hoping to obtain from it that justifies his sin. “I love my family, and yet there is this secret side to me that must be satisfied.” So he keeps looking.
Recently, he has discovered that he may be a submissive bisexual. He says he found out when he stopped kicking men out of his cam sessions. What the hell? he thought. Let ’em watch. One day he struck up a dialogue with a man and found himself excited. “For a dozen or so sessions I watched him cum as he ordered me into different acts and positions. He asked when I was coming to a town near him, and [I] don’t know why, but I told him. The date came and I was on my computer when I saw a message to call him: NOW! he said. I hesitated, but then called and set up a meeting.”
Don launches into a vivid description of their sexual encounter, typing so fast I can’t slip in a word. “Hey Don! How about…” He ignores every attempt. I realize I am just going to have to wait him out, that he is using me as his foil, either trying to get me worked up or that he just needs an audience to get himself worked up, but either way, there is no stopping him now, so I sit back in my chair and watch the words come across the screen and wonder at the power of virtual reality to overcome what we used to think of as real reality. It is a power that Don wonders at, too.
“There I was, on all fours, leaning into it and taking [it] into my mouth…sucking his cock and feeling it grow. How did that happen? I thought. How did I end up sucking cock in a Marriott?!”
Susan does not allow her son to have a MySpace page or even to use the Internet unless she is perfectly aware of where he’s going inside it. Likewise, Michael will not allow his daughter to have a MySpace page. She did have one for a little while, but then one of her preteen friends was discovered posing in her underwear on MySpace and linking to sexy sites and that pretty much ended computer privileges all around.
This is probably just as well. This way, Susan’s son, like the other students in her grad-school classes, the other nurses in the hospital where she works, the members of her mainline church, will never know that she enjoys using her computer to trade digital photos of herself like the one of her sucking a man’s penis that she is showing me as we sit in a nearby diner where we have gone for breakfast. In this one, she’s bent over a bed, the guy is lying on a floor, his erection in her mouth, though, truth be told, all that can be a little tough to decipher because when you make photographs while having sex in contorted positions, the images come out looking a lot like an ultrasound.
I am having trouble seeing it anyway because glare is flaring off the screen of her laptop, which is sitting on the table between our breakfast dishes. I am also trying to prevent the people in the next booth from hearing our conversation and wondering if ordering the scrapple and eggs—scrapple being parts of a pig you wouldn’t eat if scrapple weren’t Americana—was a good idea. I hadn’t counted on fellatio with my toast. Susan, though, seems oblivious to the neighbors and the food. She’s eager to show more, like those she received from one of her male correspondents.
Hello! I won’t be finishing the scrapple.
Susan enjoys displaying herself to the digital diaspora because she knows she doesn’t fit the usual image of Internet babe. No firm-as-an-unripe-avocado twenty-year-old here. No sir. At forty-seven, Susan is ripe and plump with wild red hair. But her correspondents tell her she is very sexy and that’s the point. When you get to be forty-seven, a little positive reinforcement can be a powerful incentive.
“One thing I am not interested in losing is my sexuality,” she says. “For a woman, that is more of a fight.” So she spends a lot of time on her computer, surrounded by her books, inside a charming house built around the time of the Great Depression, on a neat little street in a charming community near Baltimore. She watches other people perform sex acts in front of their Web cameras and sometimes masturbates along with them.
Still, this is no replacement for what Susan calls “skin on skin” with one, or two, or three other people. Men or women. Doesn’t really matter as long as they’re nice and can give her some direction. Susan, you see, loves “being in service.” She enjoys a little light bondage occasionally and being spanked, and the one sure way to find willing partners who can do that is by placing ads on the Internet.
Susan has stopped expecting any connection between love and sex. A divorce, some friction with her family, disappointments from people who do not share her unvarnished honesty, have left her feeling that trust is a rare commodity, perhaps too much to ask. Sex, though, is something you can feel intensely if only for a time, but that’s better than not feeling at all.
After her most recent breakup, she took some time to mourn and then placed profiles on AdultFriendFinder, a Maryland Craig’s List, and one or two other websites. Interesting responders from anywhere around the Chesapeake Bay region—a man or a couple—were welcome. If a fellow didn’t want a commitment, well, that was okay. Maybe they would have fun. She’s not into pressure. Recently, a man, Michael, answered her ad. He’s a professional, a tech guy of some sort, who sounded sensitive, caring, intelligent, and best of all, adventurous.
Michael is a tall, thin man with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses, a fit fifty-two. Like Susan, he is divorced.
Looking back, it was the divorce that set him off. Perhaps it would be more acc
urate to say it was the financial meltdown before the divorce or the increasing sexual frustration he began feeling or any of a number of other things that have melded into a unit of trouble in Michael’s mind so that teasing out just what was the precipitating moment is impossible. But Michael clearly remembers a point when his course changed.
Michael was a service brat in a conservative household that, like many service households, led a gypsy life. (I have to be vague about some details of Michael’s story—his name isn’t Michael—because he has a reputation in certain circles, top-secret clearance through his work for a defense contractor, and children he would rather not inform about this part of his life. He is not ashamed of what I am about to tell you.) Mostly, though, he grew up in this region. He and his dad used to enjoy putting things together, kit television sets, old hot rods, technical stuff, because Michael has always been a technical fellow. In college he started out as a design major in an arty but technical field. This was the mid-1970s, though, when digital electronics were beginning to seep out from labs and into the hands of the rest of us, and Michael was fascinated.
“I got my first calculator and did trig functions on it and it cost me a hundred bucks,” he recalls with a laugh when telling me the story. Then he thinks a moment and says “I had a watch this big,” making a gesture with his fist.
Michael is older than I am, but I remember when my high school took delivery of its first computer, a big typewriter affair that spewed paper tape, like an adding machine. Only the really smart math whizzes were allowed to go near it. One of my best friends was a smart math whiz and so one day he let me watch as he typed in a bunch of numbers and symbols and said, “Watch this!” and then the machine spit tape for a full minute figuring out his equation as we both stood there, dumbfounded and amazed and a little in love with the machine that could think. Like Michael, I remember thinking how good life was going to be.
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