Future Sex (17 page)

On the road, they learned how to survive with less than ten dollars in their bank account. They learned how to work the food banks and tap into Wi-Fi networks and to live on
the fringes of a country bloated with caloric and technological excess. Their appearances changed: from a mop-headed, clean shaven young man in cargo shorts and Vibram barefoot running shoes, Max went full-on Allen Ginsberg in appearance. His beard grew black and thick, his hair long; he began wearing his black plastic glasses more often than not. Harper went from being a blue-eyed, strawberry-blond
sorority girl with a layered haircut and baggy jeans to having pierced nipples and long, wavy hair.

When Max and Harper got frustrated with their off-the-grid life, they usually evoked the specter of OfficeMax. Or, after a particularly enthusiastic session of sex on camera, they would high-five, and one would ask the other, “Want to quit and go work at OfficeMax?” The joke was about all that
was wrong in the world, to Harper and Max: big-box stores in concrete lots, the drudgery of the dead-end hourly wage, beige filing cabinets, obedience, the myth that hard work for a multinational corporation would be rewarded in any significant way.

They drove around the country. An investor gave them $4,000 to build their website. They decided to pass the winter in Mexico. Then all of their
equipment and laptops were stolen. Their investor was arrested for trafficking drugs and arms on Silk Road.

A video lingers on PornHub of Max and Harper having sex on a rainy afternoon in Puerto Vallarta. Through the curtained windows of what looks like a cheap hotel room, Mexico is a place of barking dogs and customized car horns. For the first time, Max and Harper showed signs of regret.

“The date is February 18, 2014,” they wrote on their blog. “Harper and Max are stuck in Mexico with 200 dollars remaining.” They renounced “Fucking in Fifty.” “I sought to build myself a pleasant future and once again I seem to have only succeeded in building myself a cage,” wrote Max.

Their fans bailed them out, and they returned to the United States. They landed in Idaho, renting a room from
a friend they made on FetLife, the social network for people who are into kinky sex. In the fall of 2014, Max and Harper helped their friend start a custom-made spanking paddle business to pay off some of the vast medical debts he incurred during the treatment of his eleven-year-old daughter’s leukemia. They experimented with fire play.

Chaturbate, meanwhile, changed its rules. Public sex, a
mainstay for Harper and Max, who broadcast from hay fields and rest stops, from McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmarts, and even a McDonald’s inside a Walmart—was no longer allowed. Tired of the hustle of Chaturbate, of the unpredictability of tipping, they found a new income stream, a website called Clips 4 Sale that catered to obscure sexual fetishes. Harper and Max began to spend their days recording
clips appealing to people with fetishes about women wearing aprons or ripping off their clothes. Harper climbed the charts and for a time became the number one belcher on the site. They made foot-fetish videos with Vibram barefoot running sneakers. They lived happily on an income that ranged from $400 to $2,000 a month. The last time I spoke with them, their plan was to buy a bus and eventually a
piece of land. They called it “the quest.”

As Max and Harper went deeper into their online sexual exploration, they learned that sex was no longer a thing either of them could define. “I know intercourse is definable as a thing but I don’t, like,
believe
in ‘sex,’” said Max. “I don’t think I could point to it, I couldn’t tell you what it is, because for some people, completely clothed just-pulling-at-your-nostr
ils-at-a-camera is sex, it’s a massive turn-on.”

Some people might have looked at Max and Harper, or anybody on Chaturbate, and disagreed. They might think of clean sheets, a well-made bed, a clearly defined “partner,” and a closed door and think that they know exactly what sex is—loving, maybe; monogamous, probably; dignified by its secrecy; more authentic for not being shared; sacred because
it’s not mediated through a cell phone. Such a view was starting to feel both rarified and unambitious.

POLYAMORY

For generations, young people had flocked to San Francisco for the promise of a queer community, or a rave scene, or Beatnik literature, or to adorn one another with flowers in the sunlit haze of Golden Gate Park. By 2012 the young people who came to San Francisco were neither dropouts nor misfits nor the victims of prejudice. They were children who had grown up eating sugar-free
cereal, swaddled in Polar Fleece jackets made from recycled plastic bottles. They had studied abroad in West Africa and volunteered in high school at local soup kitchens. They knew their favorite kinds of sashimi, and were friends with their parents. They expressed their emotions in the language of talk therapy. Unlike their parents, they commuted to the suburbs, and lived in the cities. As they
arrived, the cities they arrived in changed in their image, reshaped to receive the new generation’s disposable income.

San Francisco was one such city, but Denver, Boston, Portland, Austin, and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg all bore traces of the same cultural shift. It was as if the cities where the privileged youth flocked evolved in neatly parallel trajectories, the culmination of which were prancing
shih tzus, five-dollar toast, and healthy fast-food restaurants with names like Zeal, Thrive, and Lyfe. The young people went to coffee shops where the production of espresso was ritualized to resemble a historic reenactment of the hardships of nineteenth-century pioneer life. Nobody smoked cigarettes. They honed their bodies with the aim of either perfect homeostasis or eternal life. They
knew about the benefits of the iodine in wakame and the selenium in Brazil nuts. They ate red meat only once a month, to time their consumption of iron with the end of their menstrual cycles.

The young people dressed casually. They reverted on weekends to workout clothes, when they went hiking with their dogs. They enjoyed wholesome fun, and it was not surprising to see in San Francisco groups
of young men carrying around boxes of board games, going to play Settlers of Catan and drink beer, but beer that had been flavored according to the season, beer bottles that carried quaint illustrations on their labels. They started companies whose names referenced fantasy fiction. They were adults, but they could seem like children, because they were so positive, because they liked to play, because
they were marketed to with bright colors, clean, day-lit spaces, and nutritious snacks, and because their success was in part attributed to the fact that they had arrived in early adulthood and apparently had never broken any rules. Their sex lives were impossible to fathom, because they seemed never to have lived in darkness. They had grown up observing foreign wars, economic inequality, and
ecological catastrophe, crises that they earnestly discussed on their digital feeds but avoided internalizing as despair.

I’m not saying Elizabeth was all of these things but she described herself as an optimist. Elizabeth had a membership at a rock-climbing gym; she meditated; when practicing yoga she could do an inversion without the support of a wall. She organized activities: hot-air balloon
rides, weekend trips to Sea Ranch. She worked long, punishing hours, but had the energy and the vacation days to stay up all night on weekends, go on cycling excursions, or attend silent contemplative retreats.

A friend of mine had met her at a circus arts class. My friend had suggested I might want to speak with her but also tried to explain: “The thing about all the polyamorists I know…” my
friend started to say, as we sat in a karaoke piano bar in Oakland drinking greyhounds. It felt good to leave San Francisco, which was like visiting a planet made of pastel marzipan, for Oakland, which had garishly lit gas stations, community-police conflict, and prominent fast-food establishments. With my phone I took a picture of a business card taped to the wall that read:
GINA
:
READER AND ADVISOR, SPECIALIZING IN ALL MATTERS IN LIFE.
“The thing about polyamorists,” my friend continued, “is that they are all so
self-confident
.”

Elizabeth had moved to San Francisco after college. Her boyfriend from college moved to a mid-size city in the south to go to medical school. No matter how much she loved him, or how much her mother, an infertility specialist, urged her to have children
as a young woman, she was not yet ready to marry and start a family. She had a job offer as a consultant at an economics firm. So, in 2010, when she was twenty-two, she moved west, he went south, and they broke up.

Elizabeth had never before lived in a city. She knew the suburbs in Virginia where she had grown up, and the small New England town where she had attended college. She arrived in San
Francisco and made friends, some of them by Internet dating. She met Wes one night in late 2010, when he accompanied one of her co-workers to a board game party at her house. He flirted with her. They played a spatial reasoning game called Blokus. Elizabeth won.

For their first date, they attended “Nerd Night” at a local bar. They watched a lecture about the future of teledildonics. They ended
their date with a walk to the edge of Dolores Park, where the city spread out below, blinking on and off. On the walk home, they kissed on a street corner. Then Wes, with the transparency he thought of as mature and fair, gave a speech of preemptive relationship indemnity. He was still getting over his last girlfriend, he said. He did not want to be in a relationship. Elizabeth tried not to roll
her eyes—it was the first date! They said good night and parted ways.

Wes had grown up in San Francisco, studied computer science at Harvard, and returned west after graduation to work at Google. Like thousands of others, he rode the unmarked white bus each day to Google’s office park in Mountain View, where he grazed from multiethnic food stations in the cafeterias and stared at computers. Somewhere
along the upward incline of his precocious youth he had skipped a grade and was still only twenty-one, tall and handsome in a preppy J. Crew catalog kind of way.

Wes’s previous serious relationship, the one before he met Elizabeth, had ended his senior year of college. At the time he met Elizabeth, the discovery of how much he liked casual sex was therefore still new to him, less than a year
old. As a former shy person, his romantic eligibility was also a novel phenomenon. Women who once would have ignored him now paid attention to him. When he smiled at them they smiled back. Sex with them taught him about what he liked and what they liked and about the great diversity of women’s sexual interests. Now, back in San Francisco, he could click through OkCupid with the reassurance that he
had grown away from whatever he had once been: a studious child who had close friends but whose friends consisted of other boys who did math problems and read books. Casual sex allowed him to inhabit his newfound ease in the world. This was what he meant when he told Elizabeth that he was not interested in a relationship.

Still, Elizabeth and Wes lived only three blocks away from each other.
They began meeting once a week for drinks, dates, and sleeping over, always with a show of nonchalance. Given the choice, Elizabeth would have wanted a more serious commitment. She was only twenty-three but she had one reaction to Wes’s lack of interest in their relationship: he was acting like a baby. Girls, she felt, “age in dog years.” Fine, she decided. She would also continue to date. She would
also see other people.

A few weeks later, through a friend, she met Brian, a graduate of Stanford who also worked in tech. Soon Elizabeth had two nonboyfriends. Neither relationship had the expectation of exclusivity, or any defined path into the future. She kept the two relationships separate and never saw the men together. They balanced each other, with one providing security against the possible
failure of the other. The balance kept her calm.

The two relationships gave her two different social scenes, sentimental roles, and ways of being. With Brian, she had an intense sexual connection. She shared with him her interests in yoga and meditation. He was a few years older, and already had lots of friends in the city. He had gone to Burning Man for years running and introduced her to the
subculture of Burners in town, who had brought back from the playa certain principles of fast intimacy, do-it-yourself maker culture, and mind expansion.

With these new friends, Elizabeth tried drugs for the first time. She had not taken drugs before because she obeyed rules and thought that people who did drugs did not succeed in life. In college, the people Elizabeth had known who took psilocybin
mushrooms, LSD, and MDMA had done so, it seemed to her, to escape thinking about their problems, or simply to stay up all night. Brian’s friends did their exploration with a different intention: not to temporarily forget their reality but to better understand it. They took MDMA and psychedelics to form deeper connections with their friends. They stayed up all night, too. Doing drugs had not
affected their success in life. Few groups of young people in the history of the United States had ever been so successful.

Elizabeth did not love Brian. But Wes … Wes was also new to the city. He had graduated from college the same year. They shared a worldview. Friends noted their synchronized mechanization, two people rarely disrupted by uncontrolled emotion, as atomically stable as the noble
gases. With Brian, Elizabeth was the innocent pilgrim. With Wes she got to be the explorer and guide. One day in May 2011, six months after meeting each other, Elizabeth introduced Wes to psilocybin mushrooms. They went to Golden Gate Park, where the eucalyptus glades are redolent with the collective memory of half-envisioned entities and fragmented glimpses into other dimensions. Elizabeth has
a photo from that day of Wes, supine on a bed of brown pine needles and twigs. His gaze is upward, his sunglasses reflect tree branches and sky. He lies in a gray coat and blue T-shirt with one hand half-raised above him, the other in his pocket, a Moleskine notebook by his side still in its plastic wrapper. The mushroom trip shifted their relationship. They still did not use the word
love
, but
they now acknowledged what they referred to as “emotional involvement.”