Labor of Love (25 page)

Communication was paramount. Not formal commitment or community approval. Marriage itself provided no guarantees. Wedding bells did not toll the end of talking about sex. “Do Married People Get AIDS?” an insert on the page dedicated to dating asked. Of course they did. “If you feel your spouse may be putting you at risk, talk to him or her. It's your life.”

The country had been through a lot since Reagan smirked to voters that free lovers at Berkeley engaged in “orgies so vile I cannot describe them.” Public health officials now spoke with a degree of frankness that would have been unthinkable during the wildest years of the freedom era.

In 1994, Bill Clinton was forced by Republicans to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for saying—at a UN conference on AIDS—that perhaps schools should teach young students to masturbate. But two years later, her replacement, Audrey F. Manley, went on television to talk about “outercourse”—all the sexually pleasurable activities that one could enjoy without exchanging bodily fluids. And in January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and everyone in America started obsessing over whether or not penetrating someone with a cigar or fellating him in the highest office in the nation constituted “sexual relations,” even those of us who were still children had opinions. Sure, it may have felt a little cringeworthy to debate the ins and outs over family dinner. But we had already discussed them in sex ed.

*   *   *

American public schools began offering classes in sex education precisely during the years when dating first became mainstream: the 1910s. As courtship moved out of family living rooms and church basements into public settings, progressive educators recognized that young people might no longer be able to rely on their parents and pastors to tell them what they needed to know, when they needed to know it.

What exactly should be included in the curriculum of sex ed courses had always been controversial. The Chicago teachers who developed pilot programs for the city in the 1920s, for instance, hotly debated whether information about puberty, sex, and family planning should simply be added to existing biology and home economics courses or whether the school should invite doctors and nurses to speak to students during dedicated sessions. Educators bounced back and forth between versions of these two approaches for years. But in the 1980s and '90s, sex education became a political battlefield.

The effects were paradoxical. During these years, the absolute number of programs grew dramatically. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of states that mandated public schools to teach sex ed went from six to seventeen, plus the District of Columbia. But the fact that federal law left it up to local school boards to set the curriculum meant that students from different parts of the country learned very different things. In many places, conservatives managed to restrict what they were taught to “abstinence only.”

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.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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 Joy 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.