Labor of Love (26 page)

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.

*   *   *

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.

Other tales of digital love were darker. There were accounts of online affairs splitting up previously happy marriages. Even more prominent were horror stories about online predators. In many ways fears that these inspired resembled the “white slave” panic that had struck around the dawn of dating, when many do-gooders warned young women that to accept a date was to put yourself in grave danger.

In the late 1990s, newspapers and magazines were filled with stories about online predators preying on white suburban children, in particular. Often, the heroes of these stories were online vigilantes who took it upon themselves to police chat rooms. In the early 2000s, the news show
Dateline NBC
created a whole reality series dedicated to this premise. Collaborating with a watchdog group called Perverted Justice, the staff of
To Catch a Predator
would impersonate underage people online. They approached users saying that they were thirteen or fourteen. After a few sessions of hot and heavy typing, the decoy kid would suggest meeting in real life. If the adult accepted, he would find himself confronted live on camera, and would be arrested by the police.

While a few cases of abduction and abuse surely did happen, they were hardly common. Early studies of chat rooms showed that some users misled the people they spoke to online, usually about their physical appearance or marital status. And of course cybersexters put on naughty personae like This Is A Naked Lady. But on average, people were in fact far
more
honest with strangers than they were in real life. It was this accelerated intimacy that was the problem. It was addictive.

Online dating addicts were often the butt of jokes, especially if they were still in high school. They made easy targets. But in retrospect, what was risible about cybersex was not that it was perverted. It was that it was so unproductive. It rarely created real-world couples; most participants never met IRL (“in real life”). And it squandered enormous amounts of potentially valuable attention.

The pioneers who commercialized the Internet rightly saw this wastefulness as an opportunity. When America Online and Prodigy introduced their services in the early 1990s, they offered a slew of “lifestyle” chat rooms aimed at singles, because they recognized that such conversations would be a huge draw. They quickly found ways to derive enormous profits from platforms where people could exchange erotic and romantic attention. Tech companies still do.

Let's be honest. It's not like we don't still spend hours using our computers and other devices to stalk our love interests. “He tweeted twice today and he still hasn't emailed me back,” a friend seethed to me recently. She stopped and shook her head at her own absurdity. “I know that and I don't even follow him on Twitter!” It's not like it's any less pathetic to check the account of someone you've met once than it was to log on to a chat room hoping that the handle you cybersexted with last week might turn up. It's no less lonely. It's just less stigmatized, because now the economy runs on these kinds of feelings.

*   *   *

The same factors that let retailers like Amazon cater to the “long tail” economy enabled dating subcultures to thrive. In the 1950s, if you were one of the statistically small group of people who long for a partner to smear food on them during orgasm, you would likely have to forgo that fantasy. However, the Internet made it easy to find others who shared your fetish, or at least propose it to others at lower risk. The safe sex movement gave daters the vocabulary to examine and define their desires. The World Wide Web helped make these desires central to dating identity.

If people had long thought of dating as a form of shopping, during the 1990s they became more educated consumers. They were more likely to know what kind of sex they were in the market for and to believe that having their desires met was an important part of feeling fulfilled. Instead of just happening upon a sexual position in the throes of passion, lovers were more apt to sample from a series of predefined positions they had seen described or depicted. And they were likely to seek relationships with others who had similar interests. As a growing number of niche media channels, on cable television and online, displayed different lifestyles, a growing number of “sex educators” blurred the boundaries between advocacy and advertising.

Every dating lifestyle had its own expert. As early as 1987, the feminist Betty Dodson sang the praises of female masturbation in her book
Sex for One
. Like other feisty feminist “sex educators” of the era, Dodson traveled around the country teaching women to give themselves pleasure—and to demand the same from their partners. The long tail economy ensured that anyone interested could buy the tools that Dodson and others demonstrated. In 1993, the sex educators Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning founded the sex toy boutique Toys in Babeland in Seattle. Their motivation was noble: There were few sex shops aimed at women, and the founders wanted to offer the curious information and encouragement. In 1995, Toys in Babeland started a mail-order business with a small print catalog; the website, www.babeland.com, followed soon after. The steady business it did generated the revenues that allowed them to open outposts in Los Angeles and New York.

The Internet made it possible to corner a national niche market, as long as you understood people's tastes specifically enough. Whatever your Thing might be, you no longer had to yearn for it alone. In 1991, a good friend of a gay video store clerk named Dan Savage told him that he was leaving Michigan, where they both lived, to move to Seattle and start a weekly newspaper. Savage jokingly pitched the friend an advice column and was invited to go with him. The column that he wrote for
The Stranger
was irreverent and hilarious. It got national syndication, and soon turned Savage into a celebrity. He went on to write books upon books of relationship advice, and, as of 2006, to host a podcast that still has thousands of followers.

Savage Love
brings the specificity of the checklist to the advice column genre, promising to help readers navigate a seemingly infinite array of sexual preferences. When readers inquired after sex acts that did not have names yet, Savage invented them. He coined terms like “pegging” to fill in the gaps in an already-intricate taxonomy that readers wrote in about. (Pegging referred to female-on-male strap-on anal sex.) With new words at their disposal, Savage's readers could describe the acts they hoped for or hated in more and more detail.