by Moira Weigel
Between 1999 and 2009, states received nearly $1 billion of federal funding to support abstinence-only programs, and as of 2009, 86 percent of schools in the country mandated that the sex ed classes advocate abstinence. Not mine. In the liberal public high school that I went to in New York around the turn of the millennium, we talked about sex early and often.
I still remember my fifth-grade gym teacher crowding us into a room to play a warm-up game. She would throw out a word or phrase that we might have heard around, and then cold-call on someone, who then had to tell the class what he or she thought it meant. “Boner?” the gym teacher would ask. “Wet dream?” She had one lazy eye. The entire room would squirm trying to avoid catching the Eye, while also trying to look like we were not avoiding it, because that would get you called on for sure.
I humiliated myself when I guessed that “oral sex” meant talking about sex, maybe using a tape recorder? (I had just interviewed my grandfather about his experiences in the Korean War for an oral history project.) My ignominy lasted for weeks. But soon even nerds like me became fluent. We learned about anatomy. We learned words like “fallopian” and “frenulum.” In later years, we learned what “crowning” looked like from the childbirth scene in the movie The Miracle of Life. We learned what a pain it would be to have a child in high school from the Baby Project. The New York Board of Ed sent a box of rubber babies to our school, which would wail and wet themselves at all hours; they contained computer chips that kept track of how responsive you were to them. When one of our babies started howling tinnily on the subway, a group of fellow teen passengers snatched it and beat it against the pole. The “father” explained what had happened and argued his failing Baby Project grade up to a B-minus.
The point was mostly to scare us. Classroom slides showed HPV warts sprouting over genitalia like cauliflower blossoms and aching slits that our teacher said were “syphilitic chancres.” They showed us all kinds of discharge. Another teacher taught us that extra-large condoms are for extra-large egos by unwrapping a Trojan Magnum over her fist and yanking it down until it covered her entire fleshy forearm.
The main goal seemed to be instilling terror, and the cure for terror was supposed to be talk. Pleasure was secondary. Still, fear can edge its way toward desire, and wanting to know more becomes its own perversion. It was not as if the abstinence-only line that other kids got at school was keeping them from seeking out information about sex. More and more of us across the United States could find out what we wanted from cable television—from documentary shows like Real Sex and Sex in the Nineties, explicit fiction shows like Sex and the City, or pay-per-view pornography. Otherwise, we could try to learn for free, from the Internet.
Online, we all become autodidacts.
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AIDS forced Americans to develop a shared, detailed language for talking about sex. Programs like my health class institutionalized it. The Internet made it possible for anyone to join the conversation. As a searchable repository of information about sexual practices, it helped further standardize the ways they were described. And it served as an infrastructure over which new subcultures could develop.
The computer dating pioneered in the 1960s, and the video dating that followed it, harnessed the power of machines to match people who lived near a particular database. These services were limited by geography. Project TACT could connect only daters who both lived on the Upper East Side. Today For Singles could connect only daters with herpes to other daters with herpes in the D.C. area. The reach of any of these services was limited.
In the 1970s, sociologists reported that one of the main reasons that couples formerly committed to free love had retired from swinging was that it took so much time and effort to find other couples who were game. Swingers had to place personals, send and sort letters, take and send photographs, then spend weekends driving to meet one another for coffee, before they decided whether to go ahead with a liaison. A decade later, if you knew how to use the right discussion pages and Listservs, you could arrange real-life meetings with umpteen other couples without ever having to leave your desk.
In addition to providing a way for people to find each other, the Internet created new models for romantic relationships. You might say that it turned sexual and romantic energy into connectivity and relationships into interactions.
In the Eras of the Petting Party and the Steady, national advertising campaigns and nationally distributed magazines, books, and movies created archetypes for all daters to follow. Greek and Coed. Boyfriend and Girlfriend. Daters who did not conform to these types were clearly recognizable as deviating from them. They were either not dating, or they were “juvenile delinquents.” But in an age of protocols, there were suddenly infinitely many ways that one might date. The curious dater must simply learn how to communicate his or her desires, and find someone who is receptive to the things he or she wants.
Under these arrangements, a lot of the work of dating becomes the process of setting, testing, and resetting your own limits. I meet a woman at an academic conference who has been dating someone steadily for four years. They moved across oceans and continents to be together, then spent a year and a half “opening” their relationship. She says that it took nearly a year of discussing their fantasies and fears, and speculating about how they might react to certain situations, before either of them felt comfortable actually being with anyone else. They both took for granted that an open relationship—where each partner was allowed to sleep with others, and even to bring new lovers back to their shared home—was possible. They simply had to invest the time in articulating how these interactions would work. Eight months into opening her relationship, a younger acquaintance confesses to me that so far all she and her partner have done is talk.
Today, dating protocols seem to change so quickly that the end of even a medium-term relationship can leave you feeling like a Rip van Winkle. To be back on the market! is supposed to be exciting. And yet, like so many other dating phases, it often inspires anxiety and bewilderment.
“What do the kids do these days?” an old friend wants to know. He is only half joking. We are at a party, sometime in our midtwenties, and he has just broken up with the girl he had been with since we all went to high school together. “Do we just have sex now?” “Does who just have sex?” the rest of us ask. “Like, on what date is it normal to have sex at our age? The first? The fifth?” Having gone to bed with his prom date as a virgin geek and risen to find himself transformed into a well-dressed investment banker, the friend feels bewildered by the sheer number of his dating options. We can sympathize. Everyone agrees that there is no agreement on this subject.
To be adult today is to become responsible for determining the rules under which you will date. “I never lied to you” is a fair defense against many charges of misconduct, not that it makes having been not lied to feel much better. We must each spell out the terms of our own sexual and romantic encounters. Caveat dater. Many people my age first learned how to online.
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I cannot have been the only child of the Clinton era to have stumbled on the porn site www.whitehouse.com while doing social studies homework. I remember furtively clicking on thumbnail after thumbnail in an “Interns of the Month” gallery, watching spray-tanned haunches and balloon-taut breasts of girls posed around a faux Oval Office materialize, bit by bit. When my sister, searching for images of her favorite British pop stars, accidentally typed “Spicy Girls” into Yahoo, the search results made her run, shrieking, from the family computer.
Still, cybering was the safest sex around.
“It is probably no coincidence that this sea change comes on us at a time when AIDS lurks in the alleyways of our lives,” a writer for The Nation mused in 1993. Months later, The New York Times reiterated the point. “Computer erotica appears to provide many people with a ‘safe’ alternative to real, personal relationships in a world where HIV is deadlier than computer viruses.” This was in a book review. The book, The J
oy of Cybersex, argued that the World Wide Web was a godsend for this reason.
The author of The Joy of Cybersex, Deborah Levine, had spent several years counseling college undergraduates at the Columbia University Health Education program. Levine encouraged them to use their computers to flirt, start online relationships, and explore their farthest-fetched fantasies without taking real-world risk. “The driving source behind sex in the 1990s, whether you’re partnered or single, is the human imagination,” Levine declared. “Enter the world of cybersex. The place where imaginations go wild, anonymity is the rule, and desire runs amok.”
Like earlier safe sex educators, Levine used multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questionnaires to help readers take stock of what they wanted. She placed more emphasis on expanding your horizons than on safety. Online you had no body to protect. But the format looked almost the same. The chapter “Overcoming Sexual Inhibitions,” for instance, started with a quiz intended to help you assess how uptight you were.
“Are you ready to embark on a mission to learn about the expansive range of sexual expression?” Levine asked. “Answer a few questions and find out:
“1. If your best friend started unexpectedly talking about his or her sex life over coffee one day, you would:
a. Start choking and try not to spit up your drink.
b. Nod enthusiastically, and change the subject.
c. Ask lots of questions.
d. Feel relieved, and share your own experiences.
2. If a partner asked you (while undressed in the bedroom) to pretend to be something you’re not, say a cashier at a grocery store or a famous astronaut, you would:
a. Say: ‘Sure, honey, but I’d actually rather be a rocket scientist, okay?’
b. Hop to it, and get into role.
c. Think he or she had totally lost his or her mind, and suggest a visit to the therapist.
d. Think about it for a few minutes, fix yourself a drink, and succumb to the unknown.”
Like earlier safe sex activists, Levine used bullet point lists to introduce the sites her readers should know and to teach them the language that they would need to thrive there. The pages she cited ran the gamut from tutorials for geeks, like www.getgirls.com, to resources for free lovers like the Open Hearts Project and www.lovemore.com. A service called Tri Ess connected heterosexual couples who were into cross-dressing.
The chat abbreviations that Levine lists—like ASAP and LOL—now seem so obvious that it is hard to remember that they once needed defining. But mastering them was critical. Decent webcam technology and the bandwidth needed to transmit high-quality images were still a few years off. In the interim, using the right expression at the right time was the only way to flirt and bond.
Like The Joy of Cybersex, the first issue of Wired magazine came out in 1993. It contained an article about a woman whose prolific activity in “hot chats” transformed her from a “paragon of shy and retiring womanhood” into a bona fide “man-eater.” The author describes a female friend who spent hours a day in the 1980s on a service called the Source. He calls her by her handle: “This Is A Naked Lady.”
“The Naked Lady egged on her digital admirers with leading questions larded with copious amounts of double entendre,” the piece began. “When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to ‘just fooling around on the wires.’”
“‘It’s just a hobby,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll get some dates out of it.’”
Yet under the spell of her dirty-talking alter ego, the Naked Lady began to undergo a metamorphosis. She ceased to be “a rather mousy person—the type who favored gray clothing of a conservative cut … She became (through the dint of her blazing typing speed) the kind of person that could keep a dozen or more online sessions of hot chat going at a time.” The effects carried over into real life. “She began regaling me with descriptions of her expanding lingerie collection. Her speech became bawdier, her jokes naughtier. In short, she was becoming her online personality.”
Surfing was the new cruising, and it could change lives. In “health” class, the point of our endless discussions was to scare us off of sex for at least a few years. But the safer substitutes for sex to be found online offered whole new kinds of titillation. To talk (or type) about sex constituted its own kind of intimacy.
As more and more Americans got online in the early 1990s, they learned how to enjoy relationships that were text only. Pioneering “cyber citizens” developed forms of dating that were all talk.
* * *
In 1990, only 200,000 households in the United States had Internet connections. By 1993, that number was 5 million. (The upward climb has continued to 43 million in 2000 and 85 million in 2013.) When the price of personal computers dropped dramatically in the mid-1990s, many families acquired more computers and moved them out of their living rooms into bedrooms and private places. There, the experimentation could really begin.
In many ways, the liaisons between early online boyfriends or girlfriends followed the pattern set by earlier generations of daters. You met by chance. After crossing paths in a chat room, if you hit it off, you could start making appointments to come online at the same time and talk together.
This opportunity could be life-changing. In some chat rooms, disabled singles who found it physically challenging to go out or hook up in real life, connected and fell in love. In others, queer teens who felt isolated in the homes they were growing up in could do the same. This was no small thing. By the time he graduated, one in six gay kids who went to high school in the late 1990s would get beaten up so badly he needed medical attention at least once. But the ambiguous setting of these cyberdates made many people nervous.
At the turn of the twentieth century, “tough girls,” “charity cunts,” and other early daters upset their parents and the police by taking a process that had always been conducted in private to the streets. For the first time in history, dating let young people seek mates and life partners on their own behalf, in public places. Spaces like bars and boardwalks shared many features in common with chat rooms. Both were enticing despite being slightly dangerous. Or was it because they were dangerous? Risk was part of their appeal.
Sure, people worried about other people misrepresenting themselves. A cyberlover might say he was tall and strong when in fact he was short and skinny, or thin when she was fat. This was the price of freedom. Back in the day, in your parents’ parlor, or at a church- or synagogue-sponsored dance, any other young person you met would have been screened in advance. A penny arcade or nickelodeon was anonymous. The man who held your hand as you shuddered through the dark of the Tunnel of Love might be anyone. But daters soon discovered that the anonymity of being out in public offered its own kind of intimacy. Without family and friends hovering over you, you could be yourself and frankly express your feelings. It was the strangers-on-a-train thing. If she wasn’t into it, who cared? You never had to see a girl you had picked up at the dance hall again.
Early on, mental health professionals started observing that meeting strangers online often had a similar effect. The psychiatrist Esther Gwinnell decided to write a book about “computer love” after a string of patients came to her office reporting that they or their partners had fallen for a stranger online. In Online Seductions, she coined a phrase for the kinds of relationships that her patients struck up. They were “uniquely intimate” because they “grew from the inside out.”
Gwinnell’s patients said some version of the same thing again and again. “The relationship is all about what is happening inside of the soul and the mind, and the body doesn’t get in the way.” “We met our souls first.” This was the benefit of cyber-dating, especially for singles who felt insecure in the flesh. The downside was that in the absence of visual cues or social context, it was often difficult to tell your interlocutor from the person you hoped he or she might be. The cyberlove of your life could turn out to be little more than a mirage or a private psychosis.
“When internet lovers leave the computer to go to other activities,” Gwinnell reported, “they may feel as though the other person is ‘inside’ them.”
Finding your soul mate online could also leave you feeling dissatisfied in real life. The psychiatrists warned that cybersex addiction would mess up your preexisting relationships by giving you unrealistic standards and stimulating insatiable appetites. Your husband will never understand you as well as your online husband understands you, if the online one lives mostly in your head. Even the lithest and gamest wife will not be able to help you realize all the pornographic scenarios that alt.sex.bondage.golden.show-ers.sheep offers at a glance.
What’s more, the rapid-fire pace of online love raises the stakes of every communication. Gwinnell observed that her patients who were in computer love seemed to vacillate between paralyzing anxiety (when waiting to hear from their online lovers) and exuberance beyond all proportion (when they did hear back). We all know this cycle. Compose, write, revise, send, wait, fret, read, reread, repeat.
It is easier than ever now to spend hours poring over the online ephemera of a new crush or partner. Who has not attached operatic levels of hope and fear to the details of status updates and old photographs? Look at that guitar he is holding! We knew he had a good job, but he must also be artistic. The picture with his niece proves how good he is with kids. The problem of interpretation rarely occurs to us until later, when we realize that the guitar belonged to his ex-girlfriend and the child is his, from a previous relationship.
Love in this new medium trained people to let out sighs of ecstasy at every email. The age of Online Seductions left many computer users less in love with this or that particular partner than with the Internet itself.
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In the 1990s, mainstream news sources told two kinds of sensational stories about online romance. One focused on improbable triumphs of cyberlove—or, as countless articles punned, “love at first byte.” In April 1996, the “world’s first digital wedding” took place when a thirty-four-year-old man named Bob Norris married twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Smylie in Times Square. The couple had met in a chat room the previous August. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani officiated. Their vows were transmitted in real time on a message strip that the Joe Boxer company had added to its six-thousand-square-foot billboard for this occasion, and from there to the Internet.