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I keep hearing about all the social transformations that are going to be unleashed by the internet, but the one transformation nobody wants to talk about is the changes that the internet is having on the nature of sex in modern society.
You don't need a credit card - porn site passwords are cracked on a daily basis and posted regularly. NetNanny types of programs aren't being used by many parents, and besides you can always just go over a friends house and get his porn archive on a Zip disk. You can use telnet and scoop images out of the alt.binaries newsgroups...the possibilities for a technologically savvy adolescent are endless. Ironically, the effect of easy availability of porn for adolescents should be fairly minimal - after all, Japan is awash in some of the raunchiest porn around - and they don't seem to suffer from many ill effects.
While much of the information about this stuff has been available in XXX bookstores, there was always the "transaction cost" involved with picking up one of these videos or magazines and taking it to the really gross looking guy behind the counter. This meant that only the most motivated would wallow in this type of material, while many others with guilt ridden kinky inclinations would for the most part stay away from this kind of stuff. Now the transaction cost has effectively been lowered to zero, with the vast wealth of pervy resources just a keyword search away. But the content itself has transformed significantly because of the internet. The vast majority of kinky print publications either have pictures of various encounters, or "Penthouse Letters" type written fantasies. You still get lots of that stuff on the internet, but now you have access to a virtual community of other practitioners. Now you can lurk in newsgroups or chat rooms, or explore the wide variety of personal websites that many kinksters have put on the web. The difference in understanding this enables for the curious is tremendous. One good example is the World Sex Guide, it's a searchable database that reviews hookers, callgirls, and massage parlors in different areas. What's the local scene in Mongolia, or Ukraine, or Waikiki? - the World Sex Guide will let you know in gripping detail. Apparently most of the contributors are horny businessmen that like to get a little action on the side when they take a business trip, so they "sample the wares" and write up a review. Their particular flavor of kink is discreet-married-guy-who-only-cheats-with-pros-on-business-trips. These guys might be dogs, but I get the sense that they are smart enough not to talk about their extracurricular activities. These guys would be nuts to talk about this stuff with buddies from work, or neighborhood friends, so without the internet they would all be rather isolated and alone in their sexual adventures. The internet ties these guys together and gives them a community of fellow cheaters that allows them to learn from others and feel that they are not alone in their preferences.
While many internet chatters may do this to some extent, some really take it to an extreme. The best example I've come across are the residents of the "Gorean" chat rooms. No, they're not debating the finer points of the vice-presidents campaign strategy . . . instead they chatting within a realm modeled after rather badly written Gor novels by John Norman, which are a blend of SciFi and S/M. The Gorean chat rooms have tried to translate the fantasy S/M world of the Gor novels into an elaborate male dominant/female submissive social hierarchy within the chat rooms. There are virtual Masters, virtual slaves, collaring ceremonies, a specialized terminology...the works. This isn't just a few people chatting as people and deciding to engage in a little online fantasy - it's much different than that.. Everyone stays "in character", and continuously props up the fabric of the fantasy. They are very serious about the whole thing and treat the experience as if their virtual identity is their "true" self, while their everyday persona is the mask they must wear in what they call the "mundane" world. Which is their "true" self? - who knows I suppose other people can assume similar types of identifies at Renaissance Faires or Society for Creative Anachronism gatherings, but only for brief periods of time. For some of the people in the chat room they can practically spend all their free time "in character" - which enables the lines between the "real" and "virtual" to be further blurred. Not everybody on the internet chat rooms is a swinging single - in many cases the chatter is married or in a relationship and doing their chatting on the sly. A bit of harmless flirtation or dabbling in cyber-sex is one thing...but when things progress to the point you have a on online "steady" with virtual dates, things get a bit more complicated. Is it a harmless form of release for an disgruntled partner that might otherwise choose to stray, or is a form of "imaginary cheating" that is disloyal to a relationship? Nobody seems to know, and the line of fidelity/infidelity seems to be being worked out on a case by case basis. I get the feeling that what seems to be the current laissez-faire attitude towards "cybering" in the chat rooms has more to do with one spouse being completely in the dark as to what their partner is actually doing in the chat rooms.
The internet became basically available to the masses after 1995, which means that the first kids to hit puberty in the internet age were born around 1982. This correlates pretty closely with the beginning of the Millennial Generation, so as the internet continues to increase its presence in the home, the effects will increase as each wave of the generation moves through puberty in an increasingly wired world. Inchoate sexual urges are primarily socialized during adolescence, leaving attitudes towards sex that often persist throughout a lifetime. But now parents, educators, and peers no longer have a complete monopoly in presenting their attitudes to and adolescent. If a teen has an unconventional sexual desire, he is now able to access a wealth of unbiased information, find positive adult role models , and even take tentative steps towards exploring their sexuality with others in internet chat rooms. A teenager with a troubling interest in cross-dressing that happens to live in some podunk town won't have to rely on the freakish depictions of transvestitism on Jerry Springer as the mechanism to identify their sexuality. Instead he and countless other teens with unconventional sexual desires can now bypass all the social filters and educate themselves directly. What this process may lead to is a Millennial Generation that is remarkably free of sexual hangups. Teens with conventional sexual desires but really screwy parents may be able to break free of anti-sex attitudes that their prudish parents try to install. But teens with unconventional sexual desires should be able to come to grips with their interests without accumulating much of the psychological baggage that comes with the socialization process. We might already be seeing this with the teenage fans of Marilyn Manson and other Goth acts - the fans seem to blend gender bending with imagery culled from sadomasochism and a half dozen different fetishes.
Of course much of this remains speculation since I'm not about to start going to chat rooms and start asking teens about their attitudes towards sex. That kind of stuff still gets you thrown in the slammer...especially down here below the Mason-Dixon line. So getting any sort of empirical data for this trend is a bit difficult to say the least. Written by Mark Justman Copyright 1999 Posted 11/05/99 http://go.to/futureplex |
