"AIDS was caused by you depraved Westerners," a rather indignant Indian businessman told me on the train in Mumbai one day, "You are all having sex with one another, day and night — small wonder you make diseases!"
The lack of logic left me speechless and the other young, unmarried men in the carriage listened on with big grins on their faces, fondly imagining the non-stop orgy known as The American Dream. They had all seen the videos on MTV, after all, where women danced around in their underwear for anyone to take ... indeed, it was a miracle that anyone in America managed to get any work done at all what with all the sex we had to have each day.
A few years ago I would have laughed at such naiveté as an incredible flight of fancy — the provocative images of the movies or music videos clearly far removed from reality. While a majority of people I knew certainly had sex on the brain — up to a couple of hundred times a day, according to some psychologists — that was largely where it stayed. Sure, healthy libidos prompted people to spend time and money at bars and clubs hoping to get lucky, maybe even to work out or make more money to increase their prospects but sex itself usually remained a scarce resource.
Then came the internet.
Surely, it won't surprise most people to know there are some 11 million sex-related search queries on Google every day. Nor is it shocking that one in ten American men admits to having an online porn addiction. What's really different is how the internet is changing attitudes towards sex and sexual behavior — particularly among the young.
Most adults over the age of 30 grew up without much porn. Maybe there was a magazine stashed away under the bed or a friend who paid for the subscriber xxx channel with his dad's credit card, but mostly sex education was in the hands of parents and the schools. It may have been incomplete, even confusing, but essentially sex remained something of a mystery until you eventually came across it in the back of someone's car.
A click away
Today, however, sex in every conceivable form is just a couple of clicks away: blondes, boobs, lesbian, upskirts, Latina, Asian — sexual desire has been categorized into niche markets like shelves of produce in a superstore. Even particular sexual acts have pages and sites all their own, making a shrine of every act of copulation and accommodating every fetish.
Pornography has, of course, long been the favorite target of the feminists. Largely run and consumed by men, the pornography industry was seen as a classic example of male oppression and exploitation — the explicit, vulgar images of naked female bodies relegating women to the role of mere sex objects.
If the internet has shown us anything, though, it's that many women are quite prepared to become sex objects all by themselves.
Consider the success of pornographic Youtube clones such as Redtube.com or Boobtube.com where the general public upload their own homemade porn with a distinctly 21st century voyeuristic thrill. After all, the protagonists are certainly guaranteed a bigger audience than for a slideshow of their camping vacation.
Porn has seeped so deep into our lives that it's become an American cultural staple and lost a good deal of its stigma along the way. After all, anything that makes money can't be all wrong in America and each year the pornographic industry rakes in close to $3 billion.
With wealth comes a kind of respectability by default and while nude photo sessions might not be what you'd choose to highlight on your resume, porn itself has entered the mainstream. Witness the risqué thrill of middle-class women attending pole-dancing lessons to stay in shape or the commercial success of Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Mutating beyond control
So what's the problem? Times change and long gone are the days when husbands might enter the honeymoon bedchamber to find their bride chloroformed next to a note reading: "Mama says you are to do what you will with me."
What's happening is that as technology evolves at an ever-increasing rate, our social values and attitudes are also mutating beyond our control. Take dating, for example. Americans have long frequented singles' bars and drunk enough alcohol to sedate their better sense and find someone, often anyone, to spend the night with.
Today, though, adult dating sites allow us to hook up with strangers for sexual encounters with a few clicks. Post a photo, a quick flirt on Messenger and the hotel room is booked with a brief rendezvous in the lobby to make sure your date isn't carrying an axe.
Just reading the announcements can be mind-blowing. I came across one in the casual encounters section in the San Francisco Craigslist by a woman who wanted to develop her "oral sex skills." She wasn't looking for a relationship or even sexual kicks but simply wanted to improve her rating on a scale of 1-10. Males responding were required to give detailed feedback and agree to form "no emotional attachments."
Sex without love, as Woody Allen noted, is a meaningless experience. And though he also added that it wasn't bad as meaningless experiences go, what if you didn't know that feelings even came into it?
Cheap and easy
A few years ago I sat around a fire drinking beer with some buddies and we got talking to how we lost our virginity. I finished the tale of how I'd been seduced by the manageress of a cinema in Budapest and the turn came to Scott, a Texan.
"Well," he said, "the Mexican border was only 50 miles away so like all the guys in my area I crossed the border and went to a brothel."
It was cheap, easy and at the age of 17 it had seemed like a good idea.
Today's youth are facing a similar temptation. With an internet connection and a mobile phone and a few bucks for the membership fee they can hook up in hours.
Signing up with a site like adultfriendfinder.com, the most visited adult website in the US, they fill in profiles describing their bodies, upload a couple of revealing photos and maybe even write a little about their personalities for good measure. Some sites even ask them to tick boxes indicating which sexual acts they're prepared to engage in.
Years of watching porn has reduced the act of sexual union to a game of bells and whistles with points to be scored and batting averages to be maintained.
Author and feminist, Naomi Wolf put it this way:
"But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated — or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so."
With the deluge of pornography and adult dating we're forgetting what sex used to mean. It used to be where two humans had the chance to let down all of their defenses and meet one another naked — body to body, soul to soul, trembling vulnerably before the mystery of really opening the heart to another. Where, in this sacred space, enters the need to hold a camcorder while covering your partner's face with bodily fluids?
The other extreme
I've traveled and lived in countries where women are covered at all times and while in some places the young men did seem on the verge of exploding, sexuality became something so much more focused. After weeks of not seeing a female in public in Pakistan, when I finally crossed the border to India I got a little giddy each time a woman spoke to me.
In traditions where sexual contact is strongly controlled, it needs only a glimpse of eyes behind a veil or the sound of a voice to set the heart — and the hormones — in motion.
Of course in such cultures there's also the danger of total ignorance. I shared an apartment in Tel Aviv once with a gentle giant of a man who at the age of 27 was venturing out of his Orthodox Jewish background to have a little fun. Shortly after getting his first-ever girlfriend he knocked on my door one morning and, taking a shy seat on my couch, asked:
"Tom, why does a woman get a period?"
I did my best to explain but I really hadn't been anticipating that question until I'd been a father for at least ten years.
No one is suggesting a return to that kind of conservatism — certainly not all the young bloods glued to the porn sites in Delhi, Dubai and Cairo — but technology and commerce are exploiting some of our most basic instincts and crippling our emotional development. Just like junk-food profits from plying our taste buds with sugar and salt, swinger and porn sites tug on that old genetic imperative to get laid.
Some sites just play on our insecurities. Ratemybody.com is a site where you can upload pictures of yourself and find out just how hot you really are. You fill in a profile, upload some photos of suggestive poses that make the most of your anatomy and wait for other users to visit your profile and give you marks out of ten. Seriously.
Who would want to do such a thing?
Answer: Your average 21st century teenager. Checking out the first 20 girls I found the average age was 22.4 and half of them were 19 or younger. No longer content to compete for attention in their schools or neighborhood hangouts, now strangers around the world are invited to comment on whether their ass looks big in that dress.
Sure, maybe it's the kind of thing you grow out of. But photos and videos posted on the internet could potentially turn up 20 years further down the line.
And on the other hand it might not stop there. While surfing adult dating sites I came across an ad for Seekingarrangement.com, a site that invites the young and beautiful (Sugar Babes) to sign up to meet the old and wealthy.
Attractive, ambitious and young, sugar Babes are college students, aspiring actresses or someone just starting out. You seek a generous benefactor to pamper, mentor and take care of you — perhaps to help you financially?
Aimed primarily at rich businessmen, the female profiles listed enticing erotic promises and their minimum monthly upkeep. If feelings don't come into it then it's a small step from adult dating to something not that far removed from prostitution, all in the time it takes to fill in a profile.
No stopping change
There's no stopping change. The burkah is unlikely to make it to the catwalks any time soon and the internet will only become more an integral part of our daily lives with each passing year. But as with all technology the key is knowing the point at which it stops serving us and we become slaves to its vision of our needs and desires.
I'm writing this in the house of an old friend, an open-minded 62 year old woman who was pretty lonely until the internet came along. Since signing up with an internet dating site she's been on a hundred dates in the last couple of years and several full-blown raunchy affairs. She's in good shape for her age and gets emails every day from men — some only in their 40's — looking for some tenderness. Some, however, ask her which sexual positions she's prepared to do and how long it takes her to reach orgasm.
"I don't believe it," she laughs, "What happened to sex these days? It used to be a voyage of discovery. Not knowing what would happen was part of the thrill..."
---Tom Glaister is the author of children's books www.bozoandthestoryteller.com and is also the founder and editor of www.roadjunky.com — The Online Travel Guide for the Free and Funky Traveller.
