Future Sex (9 page)

The room was small, its walls painted gray. It had two yellow chairs, white curtains, and exposed wood-beamed ceilings. It was very warm in the room and Eli opened a window to let
in a breeze. We made small talk. I learned that he was twenty-eight years old and had quit his job at Apple to work for OneTaste. He asked me which direction I wanted to face, and then, perhaps sensing my inability to decide, said, “Or I can just decide.” I chose to have my head toward the window, feet toward the door. He announced each step he was going to take methodically. He was going to take
off his shoes. Then he said, “Now it’s the time when you take off your pants.” This was the moment, in a gynecological exam or a bikini wax, when the practitioner left the room, but Eli stayed, and I took off my pants. I asked if I should take off my socks. “Your choice,” he said. I took off my socks. “I’ll take mine off, too,” he said.

He guided me into a sitting position and took my leg over
his arm. I felt very secure. I could feel his leg against my leg; his arm supported my arm. He set the timer on his phone. He took several deep breaths and began massaging my legs. The pressure of his hands on my legs felt nice. He put on latex gloves. “Now I’m going to begin stroking,” he said.

Before he had begun, I had thought I was feeling aroused. I could feel the breeze from the window
over me. I thought of Justine’s boisterous display and I worried I might reveal something of myself I didn’t want to reveal to a stranger. Once he began touching me, however, I performed, and experienced, detachment. I didn’t have anything that resembled climax or an orgasm, or feel stimulation in the way that I would have with a vibrator. I felt no desire to have sex with the man holding my legs,
but feeling his breath rise and fall against my leg brought a feeling of deep, intense comfort. I was not transported by rapture. This was quiet and still. I concentrated on breathing and feeling the pressure of his body. At one point he said, thoughtfully, “I feel a deep swelling at the base of my cock.” Then the bell on his iPhone chimed and it was over. We shared “frames.” I had trouble thinking
of anything to say and remember only that whatever it was I said felt somewhat fictional. Then I put on my clothes and left. I did this two more times, both with Eli. I never reached the point of eagerness. I turned down several other invitations and canceled on people with whom I had scheduled appointments. The third time I tried orgasmic meditation was in a room with other people also practicing.
I climaxed, or “went over,” as the OneTaste people put it, as I stared at a coffee urn on a table. I felt sad afterward, as I did sometimes after sex. It had not been so different from sex, where some orgasms happened because I concentrated and willed them. A climax could be perfunctory. It could be just another form of service to another person, to give him a sense of satisfaction. I could climax
even during sex I did not enjoy.

*   *   *

For months I pretended that what I saw at OneTaste was so far beyond the boundaries of my day-to-day reality that it didn’t affect me. This was easy to do because what the people at OneTaste did was very strange. At the time, I would have rather socialized with any other group of people than them. I disliked them. I preferred the company of people who
did not insist on sympathetic eye contact, who did not need to talk about all of their feelings at every instance, who drank and smoked cigarettes. I felt more comfortable in situations where I had the right to remain maladjusted, to leave some feelings undisclosed, to acknowledge and enjoy the prospect of my own mortality. Their language made me cringe. They would describe themselves as feeling
“tumesced” and used the word
penetrate
to indicate a personal breakthrough. They liked to use
sex
as a verb instead of a noun: “My sexing changed,” said Rob Kandell. “So how I OM informed how I sex, and how I sex started to inform my OM-ing.”

I would see people I had met through OneTaste on the street in the Mission, or run into them at the Rainbow Food Co-op, the great temple of antioxidant
and raw snack foods. Once one asked me out, inviting me to a tea lounge on Fourteenth Street that many of them frequented. He wore a beaded necklace, and he stared into my eyes. “It’s an open space,” he said of the tea lounge. “It doesn’t have the darkness or oppression of a bar.”

“I like bars,” I replied snottily.

After I left San Francisco that summer, OneTaste kept calling. First it was the
occasional text message from Marcus or Eli or Henry asking if I wanted to OM, to which I would happily reply that I was no longer in San Francisco. Then members of the organization would occasionally call to invite me to a lecture or a workshop.

The updates of the meditators filled my Facebook newsfeed with their daily epiphanies. I continued to read them and would watch their video testimonies.

“The moment you realize you’ve built a life based on ‘stroke for your own pleasure,’” one would write.

“The (much earlier) moment when you realize that you haven’t. And that you could,” another would reply.

“Thank you,” the original poster would write. “And the much later moment when you realize there is no going back. And that you couldn’t.”

“So, so good!” someone else wrote.

But if their
followers, or those of the Esalen Institute (“pioneering deep change in self and society”) or the Landmark Forum (“create a future of your own design”) or the Zen Center (“may all beings realize their true nature”) or Lafayette Morehouse (“you are perfect, the world is perfect, and you are totally responsible for your life”) or the Pathways Institute (“the exploration of human consciousness leading
to your personal, professional and spiritual wisdom, skills and 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 with
when 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 oriented
toward 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 they
believed 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 websites
and 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 palm
tree 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 somatic
memories 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 was
just 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 might
have 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, and
what to say, and what our bodies should look like, than we might have had at a time when sexual imagery was less available to us.

People who liked porn described their desire to watch it as similar to wanting to watch videos of cats climbing into boxes in the middle of doing one’s taxes. Alternatively, it was like going to a café alone and eating a piece of cake in the middle of the afternoon.
It gave temporary fulfillment to a need. It primed them for masturbation, which they might do to relax, procrastinate, or fall asleep. But porn united all of the possibilities, including the ones we didn’t want to have.

*   *   *

Public Disgrace was an online pornography series that advertised itself as “women bound, stripped, and punished in public.” It was the creation of a San Francisco–based
porn director and dominatrix named Princess Donna Dolore. Princess Donna conceived of the project in 2008, during her fourth year of working for the pornography company Kink.com. In addition to directing, Donna performed in the shoots, though she was not usually the lead.

When Princess Donna scouted locations for Public Disgrace she looked for small windows (they needed to be blacked out) and
spaces (they needed to look crowded). For outdoor shoots she usually worked in Europe, where public obscenity laws are more forgiving. Before each shoot, Princess Donna coordinated with the female lead to establish what she liked or didn’t like and produced a checklist of what the performer would take from her civilian audience. Some models accepted only groping, some had rules against slapping,
and some were willing to be fingered or spat on by the audience.

Princess Donna had experience as an orchestrator of complicated fantasies of group sex, public sex, and violent sex. Such situations tended to be, as she put it, “kind of tricky to live out in real life.” Her role, as a director and performer, was to both initiate and contain the extremity. She was also a deft manipulator of the
human body. Female performers trusted her to extend the boundaries of their physical capacities.

The job description for Public Disgrace, posted at Kink.com, read: “Sex between male dominant and female submissive; domination by female and male dom; secure bondage, gags, hoods, fondling, flogging, and forced orgasms with vibrators.” For four to five hours of work, performers earned between $1,100
and $1,300, plus bonuses for extra sex acts with cameo performers who could show a clean bill of health.

A few weeks after I arrived in San Francisco, I attended a Public Disgrace shoot. The shoots were open to the public, a public that was encouraged to actively participate. Novelty matters in the world of porn, so audience members were recruited through the Internet but restricted to attending
one shoot a year. I say audience members, but the members of the public who attended the shoot were actually performers. Our job was to play the role of an unruly and voyeuristic crowd for the real audience, the people who paid to watch a series called Public Disgrace on the Internet.

The venue of the shoot I attended, a bar called Showdown, was on a side street haunted by drug addicts and the
mentally ill just south of the Tenderloin, next to a Vietnamese sandwich shop and a flophouse called the Winsor Hotel (
REASONABLE RATES DAILY-WEEKLY
). When I arrived, several people were standing at the entrance waiting to get in, including a group of young men and a straight couple in their thirties. We signed releases, showed our photo IDs, and a production assistant took a mug shot of each
of us holding our driver’s license next to our face. Then she gave us each two drink tickets that could be redeemed at the bar. “Depending on how wasted everyone seems to be I will give you more,” she said.

That evening’s performer, a diminutive blonde who went by the stage name Penny Pax, flew up to San Francisco from her home in Los Angeles especially for the Public Disgrace shoot. She had
told Donna that one of the first pornos she ever watched was Public Disgrace, and since she got into the business herself she had been eager to make one. Her personal request for the evening was that Princess Donna attempt to anally fist her.

The bar was a narrow room that recalled a bygone San Francisco of working-class immigrants. Old-fashioned smoked-glass lamps hung over the wooden bar. A
color-copied picture of Laura Palmer from David Lynch’s television show
Twin Peaks
hung on the wall, next to a stopped clock with a fake bird’s nest in the cavity where a pendulum should have been. A back room, dark and square, had black wallpaper patterned with alternating illustrations of two parrots on perches and a vase of flowers. The crew from Kink had rigged lighting overhead.