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WORK TITLE: Future Sex
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1981
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://emilywitt.net/#about * http://us.macmillan.com/author/emilywitt * http://www.slate.com/articles/life/interrogation/2016/10/future_sex_author_emily_witt_on_tinder_pornography_and_locker_room_talk.html * http://www.vogue.com/article/future-sex-emily-witt-interview
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1981.
EDUCATION:Brown University, graduated; Columbia University, graduated; Cambridge University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Served as a Fulbright Scholar in Mozambique.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Times, n+1, and the New York Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Emily Witt is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She has written articles that have appeared in publications, including the New Yorker, London Review of Books, New York Times, n+1, and the New York Times.
In 2016 Witt released her first book, a collection of autobiographical essays called Future Sex. In an interview with Julia Felsenthal, a contributor to the online version of Vogue, Witt explained how she came to write the book. She stated: “When I turned thirty, I thought of myself as a pretty conventional person. I thought I would get married someday. Then when my life wasn’t conforming to that idea, I began to look for other possibilities. I [wanted to] learn about people who had defined their lifestyles outside of that model. It’s less that I ended up declaring myself non-monogamous, or about going out and living a free sexual lifestyle, so much as the idea of what I want has expanded.” In the book, Witt describes attending a taping of a porn film, using dating apps, and taking part in group sex. She also interviews women who are paid performers on a Web site called Chaturbate. Witt considers the concept of polyamory and includes interviews with people who are involved in non-monogamous relationships. In one essay, she meets up with a past lover at Burning Man, the epicenter of the current free love movement. Discussing the meaning of the book’s title, Witt told Isaac Chotiner, a writer on the Slate Web site: “There are two ways of thinking about it. One was just my own personal future and trying to discern that. The other is trying to articulate a vision of futuristic sex. On the one hand, there’s nothing new that can really be done with sex.” Witt continued: “On the other hand, there’s a lot of new technology, and new language, and different demographic changes that have happened, with people getting married later in life and increasing moral tolerance for diverse ways of living. The futuristic generally gets interpreted as having something to do with machines, or technology, or robots, and I wanted to point out that futuristic thinking can also be about social arrangements, about new ways of envisioning your family, more analog experiences of life.”
Future Sex received mixed reviews. Jessica Cutler, a critic on the Washington Post Web site, suggested: “Many of the essays in Future Sex have been published previously, and they struggle to come together in a seamless narrative arc. Still, Witt should be applauded for avoiding the trap of self-absorption and for expanding our knowledge of sexual culture. She has in her own way reinvented the sex memoir.” Writing on the Slate Web site, Mark O’Connell commented: “Witt could be seen as focusing too restrictedly, in these essays, on the experience of a particular social world: The book is peopled overwhelmingly by upper-middle-class heterosexuals. But her own centrality to the stories she is telling, the fact that they all work outward from her inner life, largely exonerates this sociological narrowness. And this personal grounding is, in the end, the book’s greatest strength; it’s Witt’s distinctive presence as an observer and protagonist, in other words, her simultaneous openness and ironic detachment, that makes Future Sex such an engrossing and illuminating experience.” Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a contributor to the New York Times Online, described the book as a “thoughtful and deeply personal exploration of ‘the possibilities of free love’ in twenty-first-century America.” Denizet-Lewis added: “If Witt struggles at times as a memoirist, she succeeds as a meandering journalistic voyeur, one with a deeply empathetic and nuanced appreciation of sexual renegades and outcasts. Though Future Sex isn’t as much about the future as its title suggests, it is a smart, funny, beautifully written account of contemporary women trying to understand their sexual desires—and fashion physically and emotionally safe ways to express them.” In a favorable assessment of the volume on the New Yorker Online, Alexandra Schwartz remarked: “Witt is a sharp observer of the behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal place they belong to. Among other things, Future Sex offers a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first half of this decade, a bouncy castle of a city where the private pleasures of the conquering tech class are construed (and marketed) as social benefits for all.” “Witt is an engaging writer and a keen observer of her own responses to the sexual subcultures she investigates,” asserted Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook in Library Journal. Olivia Laing, a reviewer on the London Guardian Web site, suggested: “Witt is an unusually immersive journalist, and her account of the shifting fortunes of a three-way relationship is beautifully alert to irony and tenderness. Whatever you might think of polyamory, it’s hard not to admire the sheer labour–the shared Google docs, book groups and endless, wrangling conversations–that sexual liberation entails.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Cosmopolitan, October, 2016, Angela Ledgerwood, “Sexperiment,” review of Future Sex, p. 35.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, review of Future Sex, p. 112.
Publishers Weekly, June 27, 2016, review of Future Sex, p. 70.
ONLINE
Emily Witt Home Page, http://emilywitt.net/ (April 9, 2017).
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 6, 2017), Olivia Laing, review of Future Sex.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (December 6, 2016), Madeleine Watts, review of Future Sex.
Macmillan Web site, http://us.macmillan.com/ (April 9, 2017), author profile.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 18, 2016), Benoit Denizet-Lewis, review of Future Sex.
New Yorker Online, http://www.newyorker.com/ (October 17, 2016), Alexandra Schwartz, review of Future Sex.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (April 9, 2017), Mark O’Connell, review of Future Sex; (April 9, 2017), Isaac Chotiner, author interview.
Vogue Online, http://www.vogue.com/ (October 12, 2016), Julia Felsenthal, author interview.
Washington Post Online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (October 28, 2016), Jessica Cutler, review of Future Sex.
QUOTED: "When I turned 30, I thought of myself as a pretty conventional person. I thought I would get married someday. Then when my life wasn’t conforming to that idea, I began to look for other possibilities. I [wanted to] learn about people who had defined their lifestyles outside of that model. It’s less that I ended up declaring myself non-monogamous, or about going out and living a free sexual lifestyle, so much as the idea of what I want has expanded."
Future Sex Author, Emily Witt, on Female Sexuality in a Post-Internet World
Julia Felsenthal's picture
OCTOBER 12, 2016 1:38 PM
by JULIA FELSENTHAL
Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, October 2005
At the beginning of Future Sex, Emily Witt’s probing investigation into 21st-century female sexuality, the author is single, 30, and not thrilled about it. She occasionally has sex with men she knows, friends, and friends of friends, casual entanglements that she dismisses as distractions. She and her partners are “souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, awaiting the brass trumpets and wedding bells of the eschaton.” Witt feels keenly that she’s missing out on the kind of committed monogamous partnership that had always seemed part and parcel of adulthood, reward for a life of rules followed. “I nurtured my idea of the future,” she writes, “which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice. The vision remained suspended, jewel-like in my mind, impervious to the storms of actual experience, a crystalline point of arrival.”
By the book’s end, Witt is several years older and in a different headspace. “I now understood the fabrication of my sexuality,” she writes, “I saw the seams of its construction and the arbitrary nature of its myth.” Her circumstances aren’t markedly changed; the evolution is psychic and semantic. “I knew,” she writes, “that naming sexual freedom as an ideal put the story I told myself about my life in greater alignment with the choices I had already made. It offered continuity between my past and the future. It gave value to experiences that I had viewed with frustration or regret.”
It’s a subtle shift, but the experiences that catalyze it are not so subtle. Future Sex, as the title suggests, takes Witt to the furthest extremes of the erotic vanguard on a quest to establish the contours of her own sexuality, and of female sexuality more generally, in an age of Internet dating and abundant, diverse pornography, of delayed reproduction and more open relationships. The author embeds with an orgasmic meditation community and allows herself to be brought to climax at the latex-gloved hands of a stranger. She attends a Kink.com hardcore video shoot at a dive bar in which the boisterous attendees are encouraged to fondle and spank a bound, gagged, naked woman. Witt obsessively watches a live webcam site called Chaturbate, and flirts with the idea of broadcasting her own feed. She studies the dynamics of a millennial polyamorous couple and experiments with entry-level free love at Burning Man.
This may sound egregiously stunty or creepily prurient; it’s not. Witt is as thoughtful as she is audacious, and Future Sex is ultimately a carefully crafted literary and intellectual endeavor. Chaturbate leads the author to a dissection of the sociology of the dirty movie theater in forging 20th-century male sexuality, Kink.com to the history of the feminist objection to pornography, polyamory to the politics of birth control and fertility. Witt enters each new milieu with an open mind and a reporter’s ear for nuance and humor. There’s something Joan Didion–esque about Future Sex, in Witt’s lovely writing and in her skeptical authorial remove, a sense of reserve she maintains even while dissecting her most intimate escapades.
When I made the comparison by phone earlier this week, Witt laughed—“I obviously love Joan Didion”—and identified the quality as Didion’s ability to “hold herself in the middle distance. What I was looking for as a literary model were these writers who wrote through their own perspective without it necessarily being about them.” We chatted more about whether Future Sex is a memoir, why Witt was nervous about being labeled a sex writer, and how watching porn can be empowering.
Noah.Kalina
How would you define the arch of the book? When I turned 30, I thought of myself as a pretty conventional person. I thought I would get married someday. Then when my life wasn’t conforming to that idea, I began to look for other possibilities. I [wanted to] learn about people who had defined their lifestyles outside of that model. It’s less that I ended up declaring myself non-monogamous, or about going out and living a free sexual lifestyle, so much as the idea of what I want has expanded. I feel like I don’t know what life is going to throw my way, but if marriage isn’t a thing, or if I’m not in love for another long stretch of my life, I feel open to all these other ways of living that I didn’t feel open to before.
**You refer to using journalism as your alibi for this project. Did this start out as a journalistic endeavor, and only later get personal? What was the evolution of the project?**Initially the book was going to be a third-person reported cultural history of the last 20 years of post-Internet sexuality from a female perspective. It wasn’t about me. I really didn’t want to write a memoir. My model was Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese. But as the book went on, I published a piece about Internet dating in the London Review of Books, and that got a big response. My editor encouraged me to write more in the first person. Partially because the tone of those ’70s-style non-fiction novel books—it just somehow doesn’t feel right anymore. It feels artificial. I was publishing pieces as I went along, mostly to earn money, and those ended up defining the tone of the book. It seemed like the voice of the book was more compelling if I filtered it through my own experiences.
I had a really hard time writing about things like watching porn. It took me a long time to feel comfortable writing about that. It always seemed that my experiences were sort of banal. And the way I saw it was that I’m still writing a reported book; I’m just using myself as the filter and the vantage point.
You quote a porn star who speculates that lots of people who work in the sex industry are people with fractured families; the rules weren’t made for them, so they make their own rules. You’re not really an over-sharer, but you do discuss your sexual experiences in a really frank way. Did you worry about your family reading this? Did you worry about overexposing yourself? Absolutely. Worrying about my family was real. My parents were married in their mid-20s. They’ve been married for more than 40 years. They’re liberal people, they’re open-minded, but my dad has told me he just can’t bring himself to read the book all the way through. I was a good kid. I knew this was going to be the first time in my life where I was doing something that was going to disappoint them.
And I was really worried that in my career I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a journalist, that I would publish this stuff and lose credibility, or be slotted as a sexuality writer. That fear was reinforced by the fact that I had a lot of trouble selling the pieces [from the book as articles]. When I did sell them they would get killed as soon as I handed them in.
There’s this narrative: Now we live in this free sexual world where you can say whatever you want [and where] we all watch porn. I knew that wasn’t true. There was definitely a feeling as I was writing it that I might be irrevocably damaging my reputation in some way.
Where do you stand on that now? Now I’m just much more confident and older, and my career is much more established. I get to decide how I’m defined. I do think that people, publishers, and editors sometimes need to see the public reaction to something before they accept that it’s okay.
You live in New York now, but you wrote this book during a stint in San Francisco. You write: “Strange lives are led in northern California where one intellectual stumble can turn you into a wild-eyed apostle of pet acupuncture or shadow healing.” Did you ever worry that you had crossed that line, lost yourself in what you were exploring? Definitely during the course of writing this, I became way more of a hippie. I’ve always been a secret hippie. I’m a seeker of unusual experiences. I started using psychedelic drugs for the first time. I was hanging out with people that I’d previously judged as kind of woo-woo. I’d made fun of certain self-help subcultures. And then I realized during the course of writing that you can try those things; it doesn’t mean you’ll become subject to cultish indoctrination, or start believing in things that aren’t real.
So that was half a gesture to the skeptical reader, and half illustrating that part of opening myself up to new ideas was letting go of some of my judgment.
Photo: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
A lot of the book is a challenge to conventional wisdom about male vs. female sexuality. “What men wanted from sex was assumed to be sex. What women were described as wanting never seemed to be sex at all, but rather a relationship in which one had sex, a structure in which sex happened.” Where did you come out on that dichotomy? I guess my default is to suspend any innate gendered way of thinking. To just assume that me and the man I’m sleeping with, the intensity of our desire is the same, the things that turn us on are particular to our styles as individuals, and not because he’s a man and I’m a woman. I like to meet people as they are. But that might be naive of me or willfully optimistic.
The narrative that female sexuality is less desire, it’s less volatile, that it’s turned on by stories rather than images, that it thrives best in monogamous environments, in comfortable and safe environments, all of these ideas in the culture about what makes women sexually happy; for me, suspending those ideas allowed me to experience the feelings in my body, to name them for what they were, and to be surprised by what could make me happy. If I pushed myself a little bit outside of my comfort zone, outside what I was taught to want, I was able to feel a greater sense of agency over my own happiness.
The chapter on porn was really interesting and complicated. Can you unpack the argument for me? That chapter was by far the hardest one to write. The Internet liberated porn. All you have to do is open up a search engine and type words in. Pretty much anything you want that’s legal is available to you.
There’s a lot of consternation—in general, in the media, among my friends—about what it has meant. If theory and practice are related in some way, what does it mean that you can see violent or misogynistic or racist fantasies? Is that going to translate to a more misogynistic, racist, [violent] society? I just kind of understood that the question of whether you were for or against it was really unhelpful. You can’t do anything about it. If you believe in democracy you’re not going to censor it. If you choose not to watch it, someone else in your life is.
So the question for me became: How to live with this reality? And what might it offer me in a good way, this vast repository of sexual imagery and video? So that meant examining why I thought it was bad, why when I had turned on porn before and half watched it, I was filled with feelings of being offended or disgusted, even though I was also stimulated by some of it. What if I just suspended that disapproval for a while, and just watched it: What would I find out?
That’s what the chapter is about. I realized that you can be turned on by sex that isn’t the kind of sex that you want to have. For me watching porn was surprisingly comforting. We’re taught to hate so much about our bodies, and to see them as disgusting. So much of the things we’re sold are about not smelling bad, not being hairy, hiding every blemish. When you watch porn you see everything, and clearly that’s really sexy to some people. That was kind of liberating to me.
I’m a feminist for sure, but that anti-porn feminism school of thinking had trapped me in a place where I couldn’t idealize a feminist sexuality. If I suspended the part of my mind that says, Okay, pornography isn’t feminist, I just saw sex. And sure it’s from a male perspective a lot of the time. But that’s okay—so we need more pornography. And it doesn’t mean that feminist pornography has to be this nebulous, clean, aesthetically pleasing kind. It can still be kind of obscene.
Not to connect everything to Donald Trump, but the language he used in last weekend’s leaked Access Hollywood video felt ripped straight from a cheesy porno. It’s not the first time pornography has played into this election. We’re at this moment where we’re really angsty about whether this sort of porn culture is infecting us even at the level of our presidential election. It’s true. [Trump] kept saying “locker room banter.” What he meant by that was a specifically male space, and a specific idea of male sexuality as a thing that has to be contained in civilization, but then you go to the strip club, you watch porn, you hang with your bros in a locker room, and in this space, this volatile, animalistic part of you gets to be free. As long as we let this idea stand that porn is a gendered experience and that a certain kind of raunchy sexuality belongs only to men, then it can be used as this kind of exclusionary power play.
The other weird thing that’s been going on: There’s no discussion of Hillary’s sexuality. When they want to bring up sex, they bring up her husband. It’s so weird that she’s presented as this asexual [creature]; it’s Bill Clinton’s sexuality that’s this volatile, crazy thing that has to be contended with. Hillary is just assumed to be this stoic celibate who has only ever had sex with her husband.
Part of the reason I wanted to talk about porn the way I did, and other things in the book, is to wrest it away from this idea that it’s a masculine space, that female sexuality can’t be described or named, or that it doesn’t translate into any visual desire or crass language. Not that we need to talk about it in a crass way, or talk about sexually harassing men. [But] I don’t like the idea of a dignified feminist sexuality that’s invisible and secret and only happening behind closed doors.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
QUOTED: "There are two ways of thinking about it. One was just my own personal future and trying to discern that. The other is trying to articulate a vision of futuristic sex. On the one hand, there’s nothing new that can really be done with sex."
"On the other hand, there’s a lot of new technology, and new language, and different demographic changes that have happened, with people getting married later in life and increasing moral tolerance for diverse ways of living. The futuristic generally gets interpreted as having something to do with machines, or technology, or robots, and I wanted to point out that futuristic thinking can also be about social arrangements, about new ways of envisioning your family, more analog experiences of life."
The Future of Sex
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Emily Witt on Tinder, pornography, and locker room talk.
By Isaac Chotiner
Emily Witt.
Emily Witt.
Noah Kalina
In her new book, Future Sex, the writer Emily Witt examines the many ways in which 21st-century Americans discover and express their sexual desires. The book combines reported narrative—there are dispatches from Burning Man and a kinky porn shoot—and accounts of her own experience with internet dating and orgasmic meditation. In the course of these excursions, Witt begins to think differently about what kind of romantic and sexual life she might want for herself.
Future Sex is neither gloomy nor unduly sanguine about the way in which our desires can be shaped by an evolving sexual marketplace. During the course of a phone conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the difficulty of writing about sex, why she finds watching pornography less oppressive than looking at a fashion magazine, and what Donald Trump really means by “locker room talk.”
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Isaac Chotiner: What do you mean by the term future sex?
Emily Witt: There are two ways of thinking about it. One was just my own personal future and trying to discern that. The other is trying to articulate a vision of futuristic sex. On the one hand, there’s nothing new that can really be done with sex. On the other hand, there’s a lot of new technology, and new language, and different demographic changes that have happened, with people getting married later in life and increasing moral tolerance for diverse ways of living. The futuristic generally gets interpreted as having something to do with machines, or technology, or robots, and I wanted to point out that futuristic thinking can also be about social arrangements, about new ways of envisioning your family, more analog experiences of life.
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You write a bit about porn, and in one passage you say, “Watching porn left me more confident about my body.” That feels very different from what many people feel about porn.
Spending a lot of time at watching people make porn made me realize they were beautiful people, but they weren’t models. They weren’t Cindy Crawford or something. They were normal people with attractive bodies, and their bodies have imperfections and asymmetries, and they were really comfortable being naked, and joking about the noises their bodies made or the weird things that they might do during sex.
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And then, watching porn, when you go on these tube sites, you just realize it’s so much less oppressive than it is to look at a fashion magazine. For me, as a woman, I guess the range of fetishes is vast. The things that I had always thought of as shameful or gross parts of my body are just really celebrated in porn. I don’t know. There’s just a lot of assholes. There’s a lot of hair. There’s a lot of things that, for me, compared to fashion and the world of fashion or reading Vogue where you have this vision of beauty that is unattainable and unrealistic, and makes you feel inferior. Porn didn’t create that feeling in me.
Is that because of the impersonality of porn? The fact that you aren’t paying attention to beauty, but instead just to people having sex.
Porn is meant as sexual stimulation. It’s not about a narrative experience, and I think a lot of people don’t want to accept that. What works is not going to be beautiful, necessarily. I think also there was a way for me in which I watched it and it resonated with my real-world experience where I would always be surprised by what people were actually turned on by in sex. I think a lot of women have this experience where they grow up, where when they’re young they think you need to wear a certain kind of underwear, or be groomed in a certain way, and that that’s what’s going to turn on their partners, and then you have this realization that seriously almost nobody gives a shit about any of that. All this stuff you’ve been taught about what sexiness is: Sure some people are going to be into that, but it’s limited. What is actually sexy to people is something much more ineffable and not commodifiable. Porn confirmed that for me in some way.
Donald Trump embodies a kind of male sexual entitlement that porn is often accused of normalizing. What did the response to the latest tapes say to you about the way Americans perceive sexuality?
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There is something really dark about how power for a man—and Trump said that he could do what he wanted as a powerful man—is something that feels so familiar. The words “locker room banter”: Even though everyone is saying it is ridiculous because no one talks like that in a locker room, there is still the locker room, the strip club, the porn website. There is a place where male sexuality gets to go to express its true savage nature, and it’s exclusionary and women don’t belong there. They don’t have that need. It’s ridiculous and wrong, in addition to all the obvious stuff.
Not to bring up Foucault, but there is this idea that knowledge and access to a space and knowing it in a way that another person can’t know it gives you a kind of power. That’s what is being asserted with the locker room and the idea of pornography; as long as these are thought of as male things, there is an expression of power that is happening.
I think it would shock people to hear Hillary express sexual desires, even ones that weren’t criminal like her rival’s.
There’s this idea that volatile male sexuality is exclusively male and an uncontrollable force in the universe. And the fact that it is resistant to any social norms is related to the fact that it is exclusively male. Hillary’s sexuality—she’s presented, and has to present herself probably, as this completely asexual being. It is taken for granted that she is a celibate grandmother.
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One of your experiences was with internet dating, about which you write, “The technology itself promised nothing. It brought us people, but it did not tell us what to do with them.” Does the technology not promise something—specifically the promise of quick sexual interactions?
It allows you to meet more strangers. It allows you to find people that you might have something in common with and to access more of them, and to have a group of people with a set of declared interests find each other. But what I meant was that there’s nothing on Tinder that says, “This is a casual sex platform.” We’ve imposed that story on Tinder. For many people that use Tinder, it’s not about casual sex at all. It’s about looking for a boyfriend. Technology doesn’t tell us how we’re going to end up at the end of the night.
OK but to what degree does the technology, and the anonymity of it, by its nature make them more likely to become sexual platforms?
I guess I personally never found anything in the technology that promised that. I think it was much more of a widely held belief and desire on the part of many people that the technology would make it easier for us to have those kind of encounters, and the technology can become an alibi or an excuse if you’re not the person that would go home with somebody from the bar at 2 a.m. Now you can go on a Tinder date and tell yourself, “Oh, it was the app. Because I was using the app … ” It can be an excuse for people to engage in behaviors. I still don’t think there’s anything inherent in it.
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How did working on this book affect your feelings about marriage?
One of the things that came out of feminism was the recognition of marriage as a patriarchal institution, and the recognition that a lot of the rituals and rites in marriage were about thinking of a woman as property. Because of feminism, marriage has been refashioned, and I describe going to these weddings where people would write their own vows and do all these things that were specifically done to reject patriarchy. But I did come to wonder if you can really do that. Can you really clean up this institution? Can it really be a place for equality? I don’t know that I can answer that question, but I think that’s a generational question that people are experimenting with in different ways.
Did you find writing about sex difficult?
It was really difficult for me. The book took me four years. At first I didn’t write about myself at all. I didn’t want to. I was encouraged by my editor and publisher to get more personal, and I also came to understand that there was a way in which it was dishonest and skimming the surface of things if I didn’t speak directly about my own feelings, my own experiences. It wasn’t easy for me. I was even embarrassed to interview people in the beginning.
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Did the actual reporting make you more comfortable?
Yeah, all of it. I just got better at talking about it. As I wrote the book, I became more comfortable and aware of my own sexuality, so then that made me much more confident talking about it and thinking about it.
Top Comment
Um, I believe it's spelled pr0n More...
33 CommentsJoin In
When you confront taboos, sometimes you realize that they don’t exist for any good reason.
Yeah, exactly, or they exist because of some catastrophe you imagine will happen if you speak about them or live them. I learned that I can experiment not only in the world, but I can allow myself some experimental ideation, and that I won’t lose myself. I’m not going to join a cult. There are things that I can try without everything falling apart, hopefully.
Well now you also now if you do join a cult, you can eventually write a book about it.
Yeah, exactly.
Read Mark O'Connell's review of Future Sex in the Slate Book Review.
EMILY WITT
Emily Witt
Noah Kalina
Emily Witt has written for The New Yorker, n+1, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She studied at Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Cambridge and was a Fulbright Scholar in Mozambique. She grew up in Minneapolis and lives in Brooklyn.
Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. For publicity inquiries, please contact Brian Gittis at brian.gittis@fsgbooks.com. [Photo by Noah Kalina] (less)
Sexperiment
Angela Ledgerwood
Cosmopolitan. 261.4 (Oct. 2016): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Hearst Communications. Reprinted with permission of Hearst.
http://www.hearst.com
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
AFTER Emily Witt's vision of happily-ever-after is thrown off-kilter, she decides to use herself as a test subject. Future Sex is her exhaustive study of how we seek love and sex in the digital age. Dating apps, porn, polyamory ... she decodes all the ways we get turned on--and off.
QUOTED: "Witt is an engaging writer and a keen observer of her own responses to the sexual subcultures she investigates."
Witt, Emily. Future Sex
Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook
Library Journal. 141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p112.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Witt, Emily. Future Sex. Farrar. Oct. 2016. 224p. ISBN 9780865478794. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780865478800. SOC SCI
Situated within a long tradition of sex writing by straight, white women, this work blends personal memoir with cultural commentary. Journalist Witt positions herself as a young (anxiously growing older) single woman, slightly embarrassed by both her own yearning for the conventional and her curiosity about the outre. In eight thematic chapters, the author ambivalently explores such topics as orgasmic meditation, webcam sex, and polyamory. Witt is an engaging writer and a keen observer of her own responses to the sexual subcultures she investigates. Unfortunately, her skepticism and recurring disappointment leaves the overall impression that nonnormative sexual pleasures are weird experiments doomed to failure. This work does little to pull readers' attention beyond the privileged perspective of young white professionals with enough education and disposable income to explore the future of sex through meditation workshops, sex parties, and dates attending concerts at Juilliard. While we catch glimpses of nonstraight, nonwhite, or poor people, their sexual subjectivity is never brought fully into focus. VERDICT While no single title can be expected to counteract an industry-wide lack of diversity, this book is a disappointing reminder that American culture continues to promote a narrow range of voices on the subjects of sexual desire and experience.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston
Clutterbuck-Cook, Anna J.
QUOTED: "Witt explores it with remarkable nuance, intelligence, and an admirable commitment to experimentation."
Future Sex
Publishers Weekly. 263.26 (June 27, 2016): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Future Sex
Emily Witt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (224p) ISBN 978-0-86547-879-4
Witt's debut provides an illuminating, hilarious account of sex and dating in the digital age, when hook-up culture and technology have vastly altered the romantic landscape. As a 30-something single woman, Witt explores her own sexual and romantic ambivalence as a symptom of society's expectations and challenges herself to abandon her comfort zone. She gamely participates in an orgasmic meditation session and a public BDSM performance, uses nitrous oxide at a group sex party, and guides readers down the rabbit hole of Chaturbate, a website where women on camera get paid to perform everything from naked yoga routines to ennui-laden existential monologues.
Witt is a master at pithy observations, describing a bland man as having "the human neutrality of an Apple Store or IKEA" and the Northern California New Age atmosphere "where one intellectual stumble can turn you into a wild-eyed apostle of pet acupuncture or shadow healing." While discussing polyamory, Witt hits on the crux of her problem: being part of a reactionary post-sexual revolution generation culturally molded to push back against certain rules while maintaining the legitimacy of others, to embrace change but "not to tamper with the fundamental structures of the family and society." This is a vital conflict at the center of many women's lives, and Witt explores it with remarkable nuance, intelligence, and an admirable commitment to experimentation. (Oct.)
QUOTED: "Many of the essays in "Future Sex" have been published previously, and they struggle to come together in a seamless narrative arc. Still, Witt should be applauded for avoiding the trap of self-absorption and for expanding our knowledge of sexual culture. She has in her own way reinvented the sex memoir."
If David McCullough wrote about dating apps...
Jessica Cutler
Washingtonpost.com. (Oct. 28, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
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Byline: Jessica Cutler
Let us look into the future, all the way to the year 2012. That's the year author Emily Witt moved to San Francisco and about the time her memoir, "Future Sex," begins.
Witt was then a 30-something journalist in a state of romantic limbo, her friends and lovers "piling up against one another like dried leaves, awaiting brass trumpets and wedding bells."
San Francisco was an especially welcoming place to try new things, and technology -- dating and sex sites -- presented exciting new possibilities. "I could behave as I wished," Witt writes. "Without breaking any laws I could dress as a nun and get spanked by a person dressed as the pope. I could watch a porn starlet hula-hoop on my computer while I had sex with a battery-operated prosthetic."
In fact, she did none of these things. Though her book has the racy cover and title of an X-rated sex memoir, it is more cerebral than salacious. And though she does experiment in some risque activities -- Internet porn and orgasmic meditation -- her book doesn't read like a stunt memoir.
Instead Witt, a Fulbright scholar and cultural critic whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, turned her personal malaise into something beyond herself and beyond shtick: a serious exploration of American sexual culture, from birth control and polyamory to Burning Man and Internet porn. Witt bravely plays guinea pig, taking readers inside sexual subcultures without pre-judging or snarking at them.
Though not quite a feminist manifesto, Witt's search is very much driven by her desire as a 21st-century single American woman to understand love and sexual fulfillment in the Internet age -- or, as she puts it, "to pursue emotional experiences that could not be immediately transposed to a party of young people in a cell phone ad, even if it meant delving into ugliness, contracting an STD, or lifting my shirt to entice someone jerking off over the Internet."
That passage is a tip-off: Witt is both daring and serious. Her writing would not be described as bubbly, sassy or any other patronizing adjective usually associated with books of this kind. Witt treats her subjects (even her bad Internet dates) with respect instead of the judgment or mockery you might expect. It's like reading something by David McCullough if he wrote about dating apps.
Witt's stories are not entirely without humor, though, since sex is so often a comedy of errors. She just deals with her disappointments and awkward moments in a different way: She plays them down, looking for answers in books and interviews rather than her own navel -- or below.
In one memorable chapter, for example, Witt goes into an "orgy dome" at Burning Man. This sounds like material ripe for comedy. But Witt tells it straight: She and her male companion enter the dome and first watch, disappointedly: "It was all heterosexual couples having sex with each other." Realizing that they should either "do something" or leave, they decide to "do something":
"'Should we have sex?' I asked.
"'Yes ...' he said. 'Do you want to?'
"'Yes,' I said.
"'Are you sure?' he said.
"'Yes,' I said. The woman who greeted us at the door had advised us to express loud, enthusiastic consent.
"When we left the dome, we walked over to a nearby shade structure where sitar music was playing."
It's almost a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. To some readers, that may feel prudish or like a cop-out; to others it may seem like superior judgment.
Witt's spare, level-headed reporting contrasts strikingly with some of the things she does, like trying whip-its for the first time at a sex party or spending time on Chaturbate (a live webcam site). Readers will find this approach either droll or dull.
What "Future Sex" does better than a typical sex memoir is go out of its way to understand things that would make many people blush. Witt explains how entertainments like Chaturbate and Public Disgrace (an online pornography series) have come to be, what purpose they serve.
Her chapter about Internet porn is another highlight. After a graphic recount of a porn shoot, she admits, "I had never tried masturbating to porn on my computer." What comes next is a brief history of the women's movement's challenge to pornography, which Witt identifies as the source of her aversion to it. She comes to realize that feminism cannot decide what kinds of sex its adherents are allowed to enjoy. Witt concludes: "You couldn't have nun porn without Catholicism. You couldn't have Public Disgrace without feminism."
While acknowledging new sexual freedoms, Witt isn't necessarily celebrating them. For as much as the reader gets to learn about the online dating business, for example, that chapter ends on a despondent note: "It brought us people, but it did not tell us what to do with them."
Many of the essays in "Future Sex" have been published previously, and they struggle to come together in a seamless narrative arc. Still, Witt should be applauded for avoiding the trap of self-absorption and for expanding our knowledge of sexual culture. She has in her own way reinvented the sex memoir.
QUOTED: "Witt could be seen as focusing too restrictedly, in these essays, on the experience of a particular social world: The book is peopled overwhelmingly by upper-middle-class heterosexuals. But her own centrality to the stories she is telling, the fact that they all work outward from her inner life, largely exonerates this sociological narrowness. And this personal grounding is, in the end, the book’s greatest strength; it’s Witt’s distinctive presence as an observer and protagonist, in other words, her simultaneous openness and ironic detachment, that makes Future Sex such an engrossing and illuminating experience."
Lonely Hunters
139
75
4
Emily Witt’s Future Sex irresistibly explores the mournfulness and hopefulness of singledom today.
By Mark O'Connell
future sex.
John Martz
The opening sentence of Emily Witt’s Future Sex—“I was single, straight, and female”—might, in a different sort of book, set the reader up for the narrator’s quest to transcend the first element of that self-identification. The condition of singleness, after all, is traditionally understood as a sort of existential antechamber to the Valhalla of marriage, or of otherwise “settling down.” Early in life, the single person is thought of as not yet settled down; as he or she ages, this becomes seen as a failure to do so.
Mark O'Connell
MARK O'CONNELL
Mark O’Connell is a Slate books columnist and a staff writer for the Millions. His book To Be a Machine is now available from Doubleday.
In the early pages of her book, Witt writes of turning 30, and of conceiving of her singleness as an interim state; she describes a condition of objectless longing, a special form of loneliness that can only be generated by the technologies of connection. “I stared at rippling ellipses on screens,” she writes. “I forensically analyzed social media photographs. I expressed levity with exclamation points, spelled-out laughs, and emoticons. I artificially delayed my responses. There was a great posturing of busyness, of not having noticed your text until just now.” Her friends express a quasi-mystical belief that she will indeed find love, or be found by it, and cease to be a soul “flitting through limbo [...] awaiting the brass trumpets and wedding bells of the eschaton.”
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There’s probably no need for a spoiler alert in my telling you that the pages of Future Sex at no point resound with any such trumpets or bells. Despite her irresistible title, Witt isn’t primarily interested in the future—either her own, or that of sex and relationships in general. Which is not to suggest that she isn’t anxiously curious about these matters, but rather that her book is an attempt to encounter singleness on its own terms, as a mode of being in the world—or the world, at any rate, as it’s presently experienced by more or less young, more or less privileged, and more or less straight Americans.
“I stared at rippling ellipses on screens,” Witt writes. “I forensically analyzed social media photographs.”
Although the book is framed by its author’s own experience, it wouldn’t be accurate to describe it as a memoir. The action—and it contains, let me assure you, a great abundance and diversity of action—begins in earnest with Witt leaving New York and striking out West for San Francisco, there to seek her sexual fortune. She begins internet dating, but seems unable to work up the enthusiasm, with any of these algorithmically selected potential mates, for the kind of casual sex that flows naturally enough from going to parties and meeting men IRL. There are more rippling ellipses, more unanswered messages. Witt delicately and skillfully summons the muted mournfulness of these failures to connect, the doubled alienation of technologically mediated distance. OkCupid delivers her a sensitive composer with whom she shares an interest in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, but the encounter fails to develop into anything exciting, and she eventually stops responding to his increasingly plaintive messages. “In the months that followed,” she writes, “he continued to write, long e-mails with updates of his life, and I continued not responding until it came to seem as if he were lobbing his sadness into a black hole, where I absorbed it into my own sadness.”
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Witt’s desire to get beyond this stasis, her curiosity about what it is she really wants, opens out onto a vista of sexual otherness, and an episodic series of journalistic engagements with that otherness. As such, the book is largely comprised of a sequence of more-or-less-standalone essays reporting from various points on the Bay Area sexual panorama. There’s a chapter in which she attends meetings organized by a San Francisco–based group called OneTaste, an apparently thriving business dedicated to the practice and promotion of something called Orgasmic Meditation. This involves a ritual whereby a woman lies down pantsless next to her partner, who must first describe the woman’s vulva in poetic detail and then, wearing a pair of heavily lubricated latex gloves, slowly and gently manipulate the clitoris for precisely 15 minutes before stopping, orgasm or no orgasm, at the behest of an iPhone stopwatch. The whole setup seems weirdly, almost creepily, de-eroticized, and Witt navigates her ambivalence about it with fascinating honesty and deftness. The piece culminates, perhaps inevitably, with her own experience with the practice, under the detached ministrations of one of the organization’s blandly handsome personnel. The episode is literally anti-climactic, and is exemplary of the combination of irony and pathos that makes the book such an astringent pleasure to read:
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.
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Although she is often at the periphery of the action, Witt is mostly central as a nonfiction observer-narrator figure. Even at its funniest (and it’s frequently very funny) there is a curiosity and an openness to her writing that prevents the laughs ever feeling as though they are imposed by force from above. She attends a porno shoot—a hardcore sadomasochistic deal, filmed in front of a crowd, involving the binding and scrupulously staged humiliation of a young woman—and reveals a strange, awkward humanity at work in what might easily be portrayed as a crowd of baying misogynist weirdos. (“ ‘You are beautiful and I’d take you to meet my mother!’ yelled one man who had been particularly enthusiastic about yelling ‘worthless cunt.’ ... The crowd was drunk and excited, although not entirely unembarrassed. ‘Make that bitch choke,’ shouted the shouty man. Then: ‘Sorry!’ ”)
The book’s longest section concerns a group of San Francisco polyamorists, but—like the book as a whole—it just as crucially concerns the culture of boundless optimism and self-enclosed privilege around Bay Area techies. Some of the book’s best writing sees Witt firing on all essayistic cylinders on the peculiarity, and pervasiveness, of this culture:
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.
Part of what makes Future Sex so compelling, and so fascinating, is the indeterminacy of its author’s own position in relation to the world she’s writing about. She’s usually more than just an observer, but she’s also rarely an insider. (She alludes to this ambivalence from time to time, describing herself at one point as “just a visitor, or rather neither here nor there, someone undertaking an abstract inquiry but not yet with true intention.”) She’s a little older than this particular group of free-loving techies, but in writing about the people around her, she’s as often as not also writing about herself.
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The book is at its most conventional, and least interesting, during a handful of longish stretches—most notably in that exploration of the polyamorist scene—in which she straightforwardly narrates stories in which she herself has no real personal involvement. There is a subtle drop-off in style and energy in these parts, a kind of journalistic dutifulness which creeps into the writing, and reading them I found myself impatient for Witt to reassert herself as an embodied presence in the book.
The book’s highpoint comes near the end, in the form of a personal essay about attending Burning Man with a bunch of well-heeled Silicon Valley types—on the face of it, about as unappealing a prospect for a piece of writing as it’s possible to imagine. Not all that much happens: She travels there with a guy she previously hooked up with at a wedding in Portugal; she cycles around; she gets high; she meets a charming anarchist at a pop-up library and they bond over Ursula K. LeGuin and Claude Levi-Strauss; they take a naked steam bath together and eventually have sex (an event which is passed over in decorous silence). But the piece, a version of which previously appeared in the London Review of Books, is filled with superb observations, and distinguished by Witt’s characteristic combination of openness and skepticism. Her own experience of the festival is positive and expansive, but she is far from wide-eyed about the utopian pretensions of the techies who have made Black Rock City a holiday outpost of Mountain View, a kind of TEDx Ibiza:
The hypocrisy of the “creative autonomous zone” weighed on me. Many of these people would go back to their lives and back to work on the great farces of our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalization of the drugs they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time in the orgy dome. That they had cheered at the funeral pyre of a Facebook “like” wouldn’t play well on Tuesday in the cafeteria at Facebook.
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Witt could be seen as focusing too restrictedly, in these essays, on the experience of a particular social world: The book is peopled overwhelmingly by upper-middle-class heterosexuals. But her own centrality to the stories she is telling, the fact that they all work outward from her inner life, largely exonerates this sociological narrowness. And this personal grounding is, in the end, the book’s greatest strength; it’s Witt’s distinctive presence as an observer and protagonist, in other words, her simultaneous openness and ironic detachment, that makes Future Sex such an engrossing and illuminating experience. By the end of the book, neither Witt’s own future nor that of sex itself seem any closer to being known. (“The future was a discomfiting cultural story,” as she puts it, “and difficult to discern.”) But the present seems nearer, and stranger, and more intimately known.
QUOTED: "Witt is a sharp observer of the behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal place they belong to. Among other things, “Future Sex” offers a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first half of this decade, a bouncy castle of a city where the private pleasures of the conquering tech class are construed (and marketed) as social benefits for all."
“FUTURE SEX”: ADVENTURES IN AN EROTIC WONDERLAND
Emily Witt’s book examines how, for those who grew up in the era of the sexual supermarket, the abundance of options can be less an allure than a challenge.
By Alexandra Schwartz
Witt’s sexual quest leads her to Burning Man’s “orgy dome,” a B.D.S.M. video shoot, an orgasmic-meditation workshop.
Witt’s sexual quest leads her to Burning Man’s “orgy dome,” a B.D.S.M. video shoot, an orgasmic-meditation workshop.
Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli
Few places are less conducive to erotic optimism than the packed waiting room of a public health clinic in Brooklyn. Sitting on a hard plastic chair under a fluorescent buzz as an employee lectures on proper condom use—a catechism you know by heart yet sometimes fail to heed—you may conclude, as Emily Witt did, that the time has come to change your life. It was March of 2012. Just before Valentine’s Day, Witt had slept with a friend. She was single; he was not. A few weeks later, he called to report that he might have chlamydia. He was overcome with guilt. His girlfriend was enraged. Witt didn’t feel too great, either. She was thirty, and depressed after a recent breakup. Though she had spent the ensuing months hooking up with various acquaintances, her hopes were set on long-term monogamy. “I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center,” Witt writes in “Future Sex” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), her gutsy first book. Instead, she found herself enmeshed in “sexual relationships that I could not describe in language and that failed my moral ideals.” She didn’t have chlamydia, it turned out. What she caught was worse: a dismal self-accounting of her existential shortcomings.
Marriage, for many, signals the start of a new life stage. As Witt’s image of the Epcot monorail suggests, she preferred to see it as an endpoint, the moment that would bring the aimless liaisons of her single years to a full stop. Witt grew up in Minneapolis, went to college at Brown, and got a master’s degree in investigative journalism at Columbia. She was raised by liberal boomer parents who came of age in the sixties. Influenced by that decade’s liberties, and chastened by its excesses, they encouraged her to think of youthful sexual experimentation as a healthy prelude to a coupled life. In this, Witt was hardly alone. For young, straight, well-educated American women, sleeping around for pleasure and experience has become a social convention, the way dancing the cotillion at a débutante ball once was.
Witt was ready to move on. Following her visit to the clinic, she fantasized about giving herself over to “the project of wifeliness,” as she saw many of her peers doing, indulging in the sort of triumphal social-media posts—engagement photos, wedding photos, baby photos—that advertise the twenty-first-century life cycle of young couples. Monogamy, she felt, would be all the more satisfying for being obviously traditional, a path she could see as a “destiny rather than a choice.” She was tired of choosing. Better, she thought, to fall in love with one person and have sex with him for the foreseeable future.
But love failed to arrive. Her monorail glided on, Epcot nowhere in sight. Without the pressure of emotional commitment, Witt was free to do what she liked sexually, but she had little use for a freedom she had already decided to give up.
Maybe the problem had to do with a failure of imagination. Sexual freedom can be put to more interesting uses than sleeping with your friends. Those of us born in the nineteen-eighties belong to the first generation whose experience of pornography comes almost exclusively from the Internet, which, Witt points out, constitutes “the most comprehensive visual repository of sexual fantasy in human history.” Never before has such a wide variety of sexual preferences and behaviors enjoyed such social sanction, or been so easy to explore by typing a few words into a search engine in the privacy and the safety of one’s own home. Google may be the great sexual equalizer. “The answers its algorithms harvested assured each person of the presence of the like-minded: no one need be alone with her aberrant desires, and no desires were aberrant,” Witt writes. She began to see that she was living in a time of unprecedented erotic possibility, a sort of sexual future. Might she have a particular set of unrealized desires, a sexual identity she hadn’t yet discovered?
Witt decided to take action. She bought a ticket to San Francisco in order to report on the sexual subcultures she had reason to believe she would find there. (Parts of “Future Sex” first appeared in n+1, to which Witt is a frequent contributor, as well as in the London Review of Books and Matter.) “They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual tradition,” she writes, with a touch of the East Coaster’s skepticism toward the Bay Area’s positive-thinking citizens. “They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements.” But she is honest about her true motivations: “I used the West Coast and journalism as alibis.” She was going to see how strangers in California used the Internet to organize and make sense of their desires, but the life she intended to hack was her own.
Witt’s first stop was online dating. She used OkCupid—Tinder was months away from launching —and discovered that, though its matchmaking algorithm could be eerily accurate about the sorts of people she would like, it couldn’t predict whether the sight of those people in the flesh would flood her with desire or leave her cold. This is understandable. Even if you’ve been happily partnered for years, let me recommend that you fill out an OkCupid profile to see what it’s like to squeeze your personality and desires through the sieve of questions posed by its jovial anthropomorphic algorithm. How much influence do your parents have over your life? Do you think you’re smarter than most people? Which are worse, starving children or abused animals, and which answer would you accept in a prospective match? Will your sanity be intact at the end of this interrogation?
While still in New York, Witt went out with a composer, a woodworker, and a hair stylist. In San Francisco, she met a Brazilian who showed her his marijuana plants. Even when her dates exceeded what Witt calls, in self-deprecating scare quotes, her “standards,” attraction failed to materialize. “Until the bodies were introduced, seduction was only provisional,” she writes.
Witt found that she often couldn’t discuss sex with her OkCupid prospects. It struck her as too direct. In this, she was not alone. One way that companies mitigate their female customers’ sense of vulnerability, Witt learns, is through the notion of “the clean, well-lighted place.” Women are more likely to go for sex, entrepreneurs have found, if it’s not presented with a louche, porny aesthetic. When Witt was using OkCupid, she felt that “the right to avoid the subject of sex was structurally embedded” in the site. Feminist sex-toy shops long ago discovered that women prefer to buy dildos and vibrators if they are displayed like Brancusi sculptures, the kind of objet d’art that you might find on a coffee table at West Elm rather than at an XXX peepshow den in pre-Giuliani Times Square. It’s a marketing tactic meant to give women a sense of order in their lives, akin to Marie Kondo’s teachings on “decluttering.”
The cleanest, best-lighted place Witt finds is OneTaste, a San Francisco company specializing in “orgasmic meditation.” At an open house at the organization’s headquarters, a man and a woman projecting “the human neutrality of an Apple store or ikea” lead a group of visitors in the sort of ice-breaker games that recall college orientation, mildly spiked with eros. Going around a circle, participants describe their “red hot desire”; one after another, they agree to sit in the “hot seat” and answer questions posed to them by their fellows, who are instructed to limit all responses to “thank you.” Eye contact is encouraged.
The orgasmic-meditation “practice”—a word, Witt notes, meant to signal “an ongoing, daily ritual in which one gained incremental expertise and wisdom over time”—is so simple that you might wonder why anyone would pay the hundred and forty-nine dollars it now costs to be certified to engage in it, never mind the twelve thousand that it costs to become a OneTaste coach. With a partner, a woman sets up a “nest” of pillows and blankets on the floor, then lies on it, naked from the waist down. Her clothed counterpart sits on a cushion to her right, puts on a pair of latex gloves, applies lube to a finger, and, after asking for permission to touch her and “poetically” describing her vulva, proceeds to stroke her clitoris. An iPhone timer is set for fifteen minutes; when it goes off, the stroking stops, the partner covers the woman with a towel, and the pair verbalize their reactions.
At the certification Witt attends, the stroking is performed by OneTaste’s founder, a woman who had been on the verge of committing herself to celibacy at the San Francisco Zen Center before a Buddhist she met at a party gave her the idea for orgasmic meditation. After the demonstration, the audience is separated by gender into two lines and shuffled along at intervals, speed-dating style, under instructions to describe the face of each new person to appear opposite. “As a man described to me the traces of my makeup, a blemish on my chin, and other flaws in my appearance that I had convinced myself were too small to be noticeable,” Witt writes, “I felt a unique experience of horror.”
Witt sees the appeal of orgasmic meditation. The timed stroking was a “sexual technique that allowed for an intimate connection but preserved an emotional distance,” a way of establishing a clear set of boundaries to allow women to give themselves over to pleasure without the pressure to reciprocate. Its terms, unlike those of casual sex, didn’t have to be negotiated every time. The woman didn’t have to wonder about her partner’s character or intentions; she didn’t even have to be attracted to him. The artificiality of the structure was its point.
The same is true, in a very different way, of the experience Witt recounts in her best chapter, “Internet Porn.” Kink.com is a B.D.S.M. (bondage, domination, submission, and masochism) Web site based in a landmarked armory in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was founded by a man, but the person of particular interest to Witt is a woman: Princess Donna Dolore, an accomplished dominatrix who has presided over the site’s Public Disgrace channel since she came up with the idea for it, in 2008. In Public Disgrace videos, a woman (or a few) is stripped, bound, and subjected to a series of torments, such as getting zapped with electrical current or flogged, while another performer (or a few) prods and penetrates her body to the cheers and enthusiastic insults of onlookers. Immediately afterward, the submissive performer records a testimonial to assure viewers that she thoroughly enjoyed herself.
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The shoot that Witt describes took place at a bar in a seedy neighborhood south of the Tenderloin. The female performer, a five-foot, twenty-three-year-old blonde who goes by the stage name Penny Pax, has discussed ahead of time with Princess Donna what she will and will not do, and what kinds of things she especially wants done to her. Her partner for the evening is a Spaniard with the palindromic nom de porn Ramon Nomar and a penis, in Witt’s memorable description, “like the trunk of a palm tree.” Members of the public are recruited to be spectators in Public Disgrace videos and are directed by Princess Donna, who both riles them up, encouraging them to slap or spit or jeer, and keeps them in check, lest the abuse go too far. Their presence gives the scene its veneer of reality. “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,” Witt writes, though she has the additional job of jotting the whole thing down, coming as close as anyone has to embodying Nora Ephron’s epithet for a journalist: the “wallflower at the orgy.”
Witt’s account of the scene is terrifically done, an oddly sweet exercise in descriptive economy and dry comic timing. Paying attention to the start-stop momentum intrinsic to any film shoot, she captures the moments of tenderness and restraint that have no place in the final cut: Princess Donna gently wiping Penny’s sweat during a break, giving her water and a kiss on the cheek; Ramon, wearing only combat boots, pacing and shaking out his arms “like a long-distance runner who has just crossed the finish line,” ignored by the crowd as Princess Donna fulfills Penny’s special request to be anally fisted.
Then, there’s the crowd—mostly men, though there are women, too, in pairs or with their boyfriends. One in particular catches Witt’s eye, or, rather, her ear. She calls him “the shouty man.” He seesaws between raw id, when the camera is rolling (he is “particularly enthusiastic about yelling ‘worthless cunt,’ ” Witt notes), and bashful superego, when it’s not. “You are beautiful and I’d take you to meet my mother!” he calls out during a break, as if to reassure himself that he’s still a nice guy. Like the Public Disgrace scene itself, the shouty man’s performance is a compound of fiction and reality, though he seems uncertain which part is which. It all works in the regulated fantasy of the dungeon, but you might want to keep your distance from him at an actual bar.
Witt is a sharp observer of the behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal place they belong to. Among other things, “Future Sex” offers a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first half of this decade, a bouncy castle of a city where the private pleasures of the conquering tech class are construed (and marketed) as social benefits for all.
But where is she in these exploits? What progress has she been making in her quest to discover and express new desires? “I, personally, was not having sex while all this was going on,” she confesses, after the Public Disgrace shoot:
The Kink actors were more like athletes or stuntmen and -women performing punishing feats, and part of what I admired was the ease with which they went in and out of it, the comfort with which they inhabited their bodies, their total self-assurance and sense of unity against those who condemned their practice. I possessed none of those qualities. I was, at that time, so miserable about being alone, and half-convinced by the logic that I could somehow solve the problem of loneliness by avoiding sex until I fell in love, that I was in the middle of a long and ultimately pointless stretch of celibacy.
This is a surprising admission. Witt’s adventure started because she decided that she had better get ahead with the physical side of things in case the love part didn’t happen for her. It seems that she’s been holding out for love anyway. “I performed, and experienced, detachment,” she says, of her first attempt at orgasmic meditation. Detachment, though a useful quality for a reporter, is an affliction for a person in search of a sex life.
Witt does sometimes push herself to participate. In a chapter on live Webcams, she tries out Chaturbate, a site that allows users to stream videos of themselves that others can watch for free. Writing wistfully of the gay cruising scene of pre-aids New York, she makes the case that a voyeuristic platform like Chaturbate can let women experience similar anonymous encounters without worrying about physical danger, though when she finally initiates a private video chat with a naked man she’s too embarrassed to take her clothes off. At Burning Man, the annual festival in the Nevada desert that’s awash in hallucinogens and tech money, she meets a guy she likes; they enter the “orgy dome,” where they have sex together as other couples and groups do their thing. In a novelistic chapter on a young polyamorous couple she spent time with in the course of a few years, she writes, “I envied their community of friends, the openness with which they shared their attractions.” But she’s not so sure that she envies the nature of the attractions themselves. Like Alice making her way through Wonderland, she is a visitor deciphering the codes and customs of a world she’s bound to leave behind.
In that chapter’s final scene, Witt is at a sex party arranged by Elizabeth, one of the polyamorous pair, inhaling whip-its, nitrous oxide dispensed through the nozzle of a whipped-cream can. The gas leaves her giddy and relaxed. A man touches her. It feels nice. They kiss, and smack each other playfully with a riding crop. Around them, people cuddle and spank. A paragraph later, still warm with the evening’s glow, Witt reveals that she has a boyfriend back in New York who didn’t want her to go to the party. A boyfriend! The time line is hazy, but we seem to be a few years past Witt’s lonely celibate phase. She found what she had been looking for. Now she may not want it after all. She regrets her shyness at the party; she’s sorry that she kissed only one person rather than join the group cuddling on a satin-sheeted bed. “I was still thinking of myself as just a visitor, or rather neither here nor there,” she writes, “someone undertaking an abstract inquiry but not yet with true intention.”
Witt has said that one model for “Future Sex” was “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” (1980*), Gay Talese’s account of sex in the nineteen-seventies. The books are markedly different in approach and style. While Witt is relatively narrow and idiosyncratic in her selection of topics—Kink.com represents a sizable sexual subculture; OneTaste does not—Talese set out to write an encyclopedic account of the effects of the sexual revolution on American life. A reluctance to join in was, notoriously, not his problem. Talese was born in 1932. When he married, in the late nineteen-fifties, essentially two sexualities were available to him: “normal” and “deviant.” A couple of decades later, that picture had irrevocably changed. He had decided on his sexual future during a time of relative scarcity. Now that there was a surplus to sample—massage parlors and swingers’ parties—he wanted to feast.
To Witt, who grew up in the era of the sexual supermarket, the abundance of options was less an allure than a challenge. Through Chaturbate, she meets Edith, a young woman who likes to bare her body to strangers on her Webcam but is not sexually active off-line. Edith is “Internet-sexual,” she tells Witt. She has found her niche, while Witt is still searching for hers. As Witt realizes, the problem may lie with the very notion of choice—the idea that there’s always something better to select, that one’s experience can be optimized if only the right search terms are found. In the “red hot desire” orgasmic-meditation exercise, Witt tells her partner that her wish is “to surrender to another person without having to explain what I wanted.” The expectation that a person learn to articulate his or her pleasure is crucial to contemporary sexual mores, the key to consent. It also means that you have to know the right words for what you want. If you don’t, the Google-era Internet, built to catalogue and categorize and suggest based on previously expressed preferences, can’t be of much help.
Witt leaves her Wonderland without being able to say exactly how it has affected her. “Five years passed, and my life saw few structural changes,” she reports. She now sees sexuality as being determined not by a set of actions but by the way those actions are framed. A husband who cheats on his wife and a polyamorist who sleeps with a person outside his primary couple do much the same thing, but their behaviors have different meanings. Witt remains, as ever, unsure of where she fits in. She likes the idea of pledging herself to “the principle of free love,” though she seems to mean this as a statement of political solidarity, a way of allying herself with a set of values—feminism, gender equality, the erosion of the primacy of marriage.
Witt, in short, has made the search for identity her identity. In this light, her forays into the world of future sex gain a certain retroactive moral glamour. “I had wanted to seek out a higher principle of life than the search for mere contentment, to pursue emotional experiences that could not be immediately transposed to a party of young people in a cell phone ad, even if it meant delving into ugliness, contracting an STD, or lifting my shirt to entice someone jerking off over the Internet. There was no industry of dresses and gift registries for the sexuality that interested me in these years,” she writes. This pronouncement has a nicely engagé ring to it—it’s certainly not detached—but it doesn’t entirely convince. For one thing, the sexualities that interested her have all been commercially co-opted in their own way. (B.D.S.M. has its own apparel industry, and its tropes grace many an advertisement.) For another, the people whose commitment to unconventional sexual principles Witt admires most are motivated by their own search for contentment. They’re following their bliss, not choosing it from a drop-down menu. After the Kink shoot, Witt skeptically asked Penny Pax if she had experienced “moments of genuine pleasure.” Pax, she reports, “looked at me like I was crazy. ‘Yeah. Like the whole thing!’ ” What Witt considers extreme is heaven to Pax. Everyone has her own garden to cultivate.
Contentment doesn’t have to mean complacency. The best sex Witt describes in her book is with a man she had encountered at a wedding and agreed to meet up with at Burning Man. He works in tech; the two of them have nothing in common aside from a thrilling mutual attraction. “I want to have sex with this person forever,” she thinks, after they hook up in the R.V. they are sharing with half a dozen other people. It’s a relief to read this, and not because the idea of having sex with someone forever suggests that Witt has surrendered to conventional monogamy. If you need to label it, call it happiness. For the first time, she sounds like she’s enjoying herself exactly where she is. ♦
*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year that “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” was published.
QUOTED: "thoughtful and deeply personal exploration of 'the possibilities of free love' in twenty-first-century America."
"If Witt struggles at times as a memoirist, she succeeds as a meandering journalistic voyeur, one with a deeply empathetic and nuanced appreciation of sexual renegades
and outcasts. Though “Future Sex” isn’t as much about the future as its title suggests, it is a smart, funny, beautifully written account of contemporary women trying to understand their sexual desires—and fashion physically and emotionally safe ways to express them."
The Joy of Mass
Intimacy: A Look at
‘Future Sex’
By BENOIT DENIZETLEWIS OCT. 18, 2016
FUTURE SEX
By Emily Witt
210 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
I read Emily Witt’s “Future Sex” over the course of three days in Provincetown,
an eccentric beach town and art colony on Cape Cod — and a fitting place to delve
into a book about polyamory, kink, group sex and orgasmic meditation. As I read
Witt’s thoughtful and deeply personal exploration of “the possibilities of free love” in
21stcentury America, some of her themes played out around me.
A handsome gay couple discussed the rules — nearly broken after some daydrinking
— of their open relationship. A young Bulgarian woman lamented to a
friend that she hated her summer job, and wondered whether she could make more
money webcamming for lonely men instead. A middleaged woman visiting with her
husband and kids took advantage of a momentary distraction (a drag queen on a
bicycle) to catch her husband’s eye and point suggestively to an upscale sex shop,
where it seemed they might return later. And, after the bars let out, some gay and
bisexual men biked, skipped and stumbled to a notorious cruising spot where
strangers and couples looking to spice things up meet under the moonlight for an
orgy on the beach.
3/5/2017 The Joy of Mass Intimacy: A Look at ‘Future Sex’ The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/futuresexemilywitt.html 2/4
Before moving to San Francisco in her early 30s, Witt didn’t think of herself as
the orgyattending type. She dislikes sex with strangers, so she has spent much of
her adult life having sex in a way that will feel familiar to many millennials: She
alternates between relationships and periods of singlehood during which she has sex
with many of her friends in “a flexible manner that occasionally imploded in displays
of pain or temporary insanity, but for the most part functioned peacefully.” Witt
doesn’t want to be single forever, “but love is rare and it is frequently
unreciprocated,” she reminds us.
Witt’s move to San Francisco in 2012 coincides with her temporary experiment
in alternative sexuality before what she assumes will be her monogamous future.
“The thought of not having examined the possibilities filled me with dread,” she
writes. So Witt examines them with gusto, including an orgy featuring a “spanking
train” and “electrified wand,” organized in part by a charming 20something woman
in a polyamorous marriage. (Witt also attends her wedding, where the officiant says:
“By the power invested in me by the internet, you are now married. You can kiss
each other and other people.”)
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When not attending orgies and polyamorous weddings, Witt visits orgasmic
meditation classes, BDSM pornography film shoots and insular communities of
webcam enthusiasts. Though Witt initially positions “Future Sex” as a journey of
selfdiscovery, I found that to be the least satisfying part of her book. Very little of
what Witt tries turns her on, and she ends the journey in much the same place she
begins — introspective and breathtakingly honest, but seemingly still uncertain
about her sexual future.
If Witt struggles at times as a memoirist, she succeeds as a meandering journalistic
voyeur, one with a deeply empathetic and nuanced appreciation of sexual renegades
and outcasts. Though “Future Sex” isn’t as much about the future as its title
suggests, it is a smart, funny, beautifully written account of contemporary women
3/5/2017 The Joy of Mass Intimacy: A Look at ‘Future Sex’ The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/futuresexemilywitt.html 3/4
trying to understand their sexual desires — and fashion physically and emotionally
safe ways to express them.
Witt introduces us to a broad cast of memorable women. In a chapter focused
on the webcamming site Chaturbate, for example, Witt meets Wendy, an introverted
44yearold artist from Iowa who relishes the “mass intimacy” of Chaturbate and
who finds community, meaning and sexual satisfaction by helping guide “people
through their masturbatory fantasies.” There’s Karaste, a largebreasted webcam
performer who says she only felt good about her body once she got on the internet.
Without it, Karaste suspects, she “would have been reading Good Housekeeping and
working out how to fake an orgasm better.” Then there’s Edith, a 19yearold college
student and popular performer on the site who describes herself as “internet sexual,”
quotes Albert Camus during her cam sessions and masterfully makes each male
viewer “feel as if he and only he were the person who might understand and rescue
her from both her tortured soul and her vow of celibacy.”
Speaking of men, Witt finds them less interesting to watch on Chaturbate. They
invariably recline on a computer chair in a dimly lit room, the camera aimed at their
crotch. “It was amazing,” Witt writes, “the diversity of what men wanted performed
for them and how little they offered to others, except for a few of the gay guys, who
seemed to understand that some form of flirtation might exhilarate the spirit.”
In a chapter about internet porn, one that includes a fascinating history of both
femaledirected porn and antiporn feminism, she turns her focus to the men
attending a live filming of a kink porn shoot, where the audience is expected to
actively participate in the sexual humiliation of the female performer: “These men I
would divide into two groups: the openly slavering, confident about the
righteousness of their lust, and the selfconscious, worried about breaking the taboos
of touching and insulting a woman.”
She finds a much different kind of sexual energy — though one that still makes
her uncomfortable — at orgasmic meditation meetings in San Francisco staffed by
greeters who welcome “newcomers with the confidence and searching eye contact
characteristic of all purveyors of conversion experiences.” Witt has a hard time
leaning into the relentlessly safe space created by the group’s leaders, one that
3/5/2017 The Joy of Mass Intimacy: A Look at ‘Future Sex’ The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/futuresexemilywitt.html 4/4
encourages men and women to be honest in real time about their feelings, sexual or
otherwise. But other women seem liberated by the unusual openness. One, Witt
writes, “cried like someone who has been unhappy for a long time, has unexpectedly
found solace, and now can hardly conceive of the darkness to which she had
previously confined herself.”
There is very little darkness in what is probably Witt’s best chapter, a deep dive
into polyamory in San Francisco. By the time she arrives in the city, she’s a little late
to the party. It is no longer a haven for sexual misfits and exiles. Instead, it’s a
playground for successful, brighteyed young adults who have “grown up observing
foreign wars, economic inequality and ecological catastrophe, crises that they
earnestly discussed on their digital feeds but avoided internalizing as despair.” At
first, Witt isn’t sure what to make of their sexual appetites. “Their sex lives were
impossible to fathom,” she observes, “because they seemed never to have lived in
darkness.”
Witt anchors this chapter inside the relationship of the young polyamorous
newlyweds, who like going to Burning Man with their tribe of relentlessly cool and
openminded friends and who seem to have figured out, through trial and error and
countless difficult conversations, what makes them happy in and out of bed. Witt
can’t help envying their closeknit friendships and sexual frankness and openness.
Witt’s sexual future — as well as the future of free love in America, which Witt
only gives tangential attention to — seems less promising in comparison. “America
had a lot of respect for the future of objects,” Witt writes, “and less interest in the
future of human arrangements.”
Benoit DenizetLewis is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and an
assistant professor at Emerson College.
A version of this review appears in print on October 23, 2016, on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: The Thrill of Mass Intimacy.
QUOTED: "Witt is an unusually immersive journalist, and her account of the shifting fortunes of a three-way relationship is beautifully alert to irony and tenderness. Whatever you might think of polyamory, it’s hard not to admire the sheer labour–the shared Google docs, book groups and endless, wrangling conversations–that sexual liberation entails."
Future Sex by Emily Witt review – is another era of free love over?
Single female, 30, seeks pornography, hook-ups and sex online … a curious participant-observer finds a new age of sexual liberation under threat
Demonstrators in San Francisco protest against a proposed city-wide nudity ban in 2012.
Demonstrators in San Francisco protest against a proposed city-wide nudity ban in 2012. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
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Olivia Laing
Friday 6 January 2017 02.30 EST Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.01 EST
For the last few years, Emily Witt has been dispatching gripping, keenly strange field reports from the frontiers of contemporary desire. A curious, if cautious participant-observer, she has attended orgies, inhaled nitrous oxide with polyamorists and watched college students in the midwest broadcast their fantasies via webcams, painstakingly assembling a luminous, flickering portrait of human (hetero)sexuality in the age of the internet.
Witt’s desire to chart new species of sexual behaviour followed hard on the heels of a breakup, an alarming rupture in what she’d previously conceived to be a natural, seamless progression from monogamous dating to the permanent station of marriage. Abruptly and unhappily single at the age of 30, she was forced to confront the troubling possibility that love is not something you can ordain or engineer; worse, that it might not be attainable at all.
What if the interim behaviours in which she and her peers had been engaging – the hook-ups with friends, the “undating”, the casual, carefully meaningless encounters – were not the aperitif, but the main event? “We were souls,” she says, “flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, awaiting the brass trumpets and wedding bells of the eschaton.” Perhaps the future wasn’t coming; perhaps coming in the present could be its own reward.
There are many reasons why a straight woman approaching middle age might shy from promiscuous sexual experiment, not least the chlamydia clinic in which Witt finds herself after a nocturnal dalliance produces unwanted consequences. The zipless fuck, as Erica Jong dubbed it in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, was made plausible by the invention of the contraceptive pill, yet remains perennially hampered by fears of pregnancy, violence and disease, as well as more subtle cultural inhibitors.
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Witt is beset by a kind of magical thinking that finds an inverse relationship between number of partners and likelihood of finding love, a nagging puritanism that supposes pleasure will be punished, abstinence rewarded. Elizabeth, her polyamorous interlocutor, had to consciously resist the inhibition of knowing her sex life affected the way she was viewed in her professional life. “Monogamy was assimilated into notions of leadership and competence; other sexual choices came with loss of authority,” writes Witt.
Little wonder we’ve become so dependent on computers for organising and enabling our erotic lives, with their promise of anonymity, their marvellous ability to mediate between bodies, displaying, connecting and transmitting at will. The internet is a frictionless utopia for the polymorphously perverse, routing desires of every possible heft and size.
Witt became single in 2011, a few months before she purchased her first smartphone and a year before Tinder was invented. There was no better place that year for assessing how technology was facilitating new models of sexual behaviour than San Francisco, where the healthy, wealthy young employees of Google and Facebook were daily sculpting the future into being. “The city just happened to be a synecdoche,” Witt observes of her temporary home, “where the post-1960s combination of computers and sexual diversity were especially concentrated.”
The problem with internet dating, as she swiftly clocks, is that even the most sophisticated algorithms are hopeless at assessing physical attraction. Women are supposed to be put off by frankly sexual content, preferring instead the “clean well-lighted room” approach purveyed by the marriage markets of Match.com and OKCupid. But what if you decline the moral obligation of love; what if you want something wilder, darker or less inclined to permanence? Among the alternatives that Witt explores is the website Chaturbate, where anyone with access to a computer can play both exhibitionist and voyeur, like the pallid Edith, who strips while reading RD Laing and claims to be “internet sexual”, and wholly celibate in her non-cyber life.
The internet is a friction-less utopia for the polymorphously perverse, routing desires of every possible heft and size
A stronger stomach might be required when Witt attends the filming of an orgy for the BDSM website Public Disgrace, during which a young performer named Penny Pax is stripped and whipped before having rough sex in front of an audience of rowdy extras. Were there any moments of genuine pleasure, an incredulous Witt asks Pax as they huddle in a stairwell. “She looked at me like I was crazy. ‘Yeah. Like the whole thing! The whole thing.’”
There are feminists, from Andrea Dworkin on, who would allege this to be false consciousness, a Stockholm syndrome assimilation of a violently misogynist culture. On the other hand, there are feminists (Annie Sprinkle, say) who would applaud its honest acceptance of sexual diversity, the grand mystery of specific human arousal. “Or”, pleasingly, is Witt’s byword. She perpetually interrogates her received ideas, more interested in auditing than legislating possibilities.
Meanwhile in the Google canteen, a new breed of free love advocates were diligently hashing out the rules of their polyamorous adventures. Witt is an unusually immersive journalist, and her account of the shifting fortunes of a three-way relationship is beautifully alert to irony and tenderness. Whatever you might think of polyamory, it’s hard not to admire the sheer labour – the shared Google docs, book groups and endless, wrangling conversations – that sexual liberation entails.
Erica Jong: 'There are a million ways of making love…'
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This is, of course, free love 2.0. The original free love movement, which reached its zenith in the 1960s, fed by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich, believed that in going beyond religious strictures a new kind of humanity would emerge: more peaceful, healthy and content thanks to their potent orgasms. Perhaps sexual experiment also birthed a new documentary form. The New Journalism, a movement to which Witt owes a significant stylistic debt, emerged at around the same time, energised by and quick to skewer the eccentricities, hypocrisies and bleak fallout of the free love era.
The New Journalists, a loose cohort that included Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Gay Talese, brought the exuberant techniques of the novel to bear on the non-fiction world. Like the affectless Didion in particular, Witt possesses an extraordinary knack for capturing the aesthetics of the moment: “leathery-tan nudists twinkling at passers-by in the Castro, stone fruit season at Bi-Rite. Somewhere down in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs was on his deathbed, the white aura of battery light pulsing ever more faint. San Francisco, 2011: the Summer of Emotional Involvement.”
The problem with the future is that it turns so quickly into the past. It’s beginning to seem as if the sexually liberal era here envisaged as permanently secured might already be under siege; that sex in the Obama era could prove as vulnerable to the rise of the ultra-conservative right as Obamacare. In Britain, certainly, the curious reader will soon no longer be able to summon up the whipping posts of Public Disgrace and its ilk.
The digital economy bill, currently passing through the House of Lords, will ban “non-conventional sexual acts” from the internet, applying the same regulations as are currently applicable to DVDs. Never mind whether they involve mutually consenting adults: fisting, female ejaculation and menstrual blood must be banished, our communal erotic repository censored, just as the old fleshpots of New York’s Soho and Times Square were cleaned up and colonised by well-lit Starbucks cafes.
One lawyer’s crusade to defend extreme pornography
Read more
But it isn’t only governments that threaten the freedom of the imagination, the liberty of the sexual body. “There was no industry of dresses and gift registries for the sexuality that interested me in those years,” Witt writes towards the end of her adventures, “and some part of the reason I wanted to document what free love might look like was to reveal shared experiences of the lives we were living that fell outside a happiness that could be bought or sold.”
Sex, and especially sex that doesn’t take culturally sanctioned forms, is here conceived as a way to escape the consumerist imperatives of late capitalism, to experience a kind of wildness and emotional connection that can’t immediately be repurposed by ads, even if it’s grubby or depressing or actively risky. I know exactly what she means, and I want it, too. Amazing the price you have to pay for free love.
• Olivia Laing’s latest book, The Lonely City, is published by Canongate.
On Emily Witt’s “Future Sex”
By Madeleine Watts
134 0 1
DECEMBER 6, 2016
EARLY IN HER BOOK Future Sex, Emily Witt describes a friend who refers to “a ‘non-ex’ with whom he had carried on a ‘non-relationship’ for a year.” Witt struggles with the same ambiguities as her friend. She has relationships with people that she can define only by what they are not. The problem for Witt — indeed, the problem for many of us in our 20s and 30s — is that the way we have relationships has changed, even though the narrative arc of romance, courtship, marriage, and reproduction has not. “I was a person in the world,” Witt writes, “a person who had sexual relationships that I could not describe in language and that failed my moral ideals.”
Future Sex collects new material alongside a number of essays Witt has previously published in slightly different forms in London Review of Books, Matter, and n+1. These essays have a common interest in contemporary American sexuality, and range in subject matter from polyamory to orgasmic meditation to the corporate bacchanal of Burning Man to extreme porn shoots in the sketchy side streets of San Francisco. That last essay, on the filming of the online female-directed porn series Public Disgrace, where women are bound and punished in front of a room full of strangers, was originally published in 2013 under the title “What Do You Desire?”
The question “What do you desire?” is never directly asked in Future Sex, but it is the animating premise of the book. “What do you desire?” forms both foundational inquiry and narrative momentum. It nags through the book like a koan.
And “What do you desire?” is an important question, because it allows that you might not know.
¤
In the last three years, several books have addressed the conditions that sexually active young women find themselves facing. Memoirs like Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object and Lindy West’s Shrill confront the inescapable sexism that takes a toll on women’s daily lives, whereas Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex and Nancy Jo Sales’s American Girls train reporters’ eyes on the lives of young, mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly upper-middle class women and girls.
While Valenti and West confine their observations to personal experience, accounts like Orenstein’s and Sales’s view the 21st-century culture of sex and relationship as an essentially combative one, for which young women are inadequately armed. In their view, women are held hostage by contemporary “hookup culture,” yet they are blind to the real conditions of their kidnapping. They focus on young women’s reports of rape and harassment and sexual abuse. They argue that women should learn “defensive” skills. They suggest that girls should be protected from their own poor choices. They implicitly make the case for the committed, monogamous relationship as the only safe option and the only valid expression of female sexuality. Such judgments worries young women into a corner. No matter what they say, an older woman is always there to tell them that they do not really mean what they say.
These books contend that the college-age women who film themselves naked, who give a lackluster blow job, or have casual sex with a Tinder match have been produced by a culture of hypersexualization and corporate control. They are therefore more wanton than women of previous generations, but passively so. That the blow jobs were lackluster or the casual sex made them unhappy is presented as proof that there is a problem with the culture, and signifies that it is stacked against their best interests. These books tell stories about willful deception and unhappy promiscuous women, and rarely explore with any degree of seriousness the ways in which young women might locate sexual freedom and autonomy in new technologies and the changing sexual landscape.
Instead of accepting the existing catalog of sexual and romantic models, Future Sex explores the ways in which these paradigms are both essentialist and insufficient. In one such piece, titled “Internet Dating,” Witt traces the different stories told about the popularization of Grindr and the normalization of Tinder. If Grindr was originally described as a way for gay men to find sexual partners, Tinder was marketed to heterosexuals as a safe and mostly polite platform where women would be able to find a romantic partner. “I saw two cultures with distinct stories about the right way to act and to be, with differences in what they were willing to declare about themselves,” writes Witt. “Two sets of symbols and gestures that would end the same way, with two people in a room together and no guidance.”
Our desires are often complicated and mediated, but in Witt’s essays, those of young women are frequently met with the charge of false consciousness. In “Live Webcams,” Witt focuses on women involved in broadcasting themselves on the website Chaturbate. These women have varying accounts of what they enjoy about webcamming. One winsome 19-year-old, otherwise celibate, considers the idea that she might be “internet sexual.” A Southern Baptist redhead explains that before webcamming, she had never experienced control of a sexual encounter. A 44-year-old Iowan woman describes entering a “hermit phase” of her life and discovering “mass intimacy.” In her conversations with these women, Witt suggests that webcamming might function as a space “where women could go to consider their desires, where they could learn what attracted others to them, and discern and name what they found attractive.”
There is no established narrative arc that applies to the stories that these “cam girls” tell about their lives. But the methods Witt suggests — discerning and naming what we find attractive — may be the means by which new narratives might begin to take form.
¤
Future Sex begins in 2012, when Witt moved from New York to San Francisco at the age of 30. “I had not chosen to be single,” Witt begins, “but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated.”
Witt decided to go to San Francisco because it is now, as it was during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the place that most embodies the conviction that the future can be better. The ethos of contemporary San Francisco, seeped in the tech-utopianism of nearby Silicon Valley, is one in which technology has the power to reshape society in ways that better fit our needs. It envisions a future in which our relationships are intentional and desired, not circumscribed by habit.
San Francisco is also frequently associated with the ideal of “free love.” The exiled utopian socialist John Humphrey Noyes coined the term “free love” in the 19th century, and the concept was revived on a mass scale in the 1960s and ’70s. It meant freedom of sexual expression for all people. Free love was palpable in the polyamorous future envisioned by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; it was there in the revolutionary politics of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, who believed that free love would help produce a new politics; and it was present in arguments of prominent feminists who rejected the institution of marriage and heterosexual monogamy, arguing, as Gloria Steinem once famously said, that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
But the utopian future of sexual freedom envisioned in the 1960s did not become our present. The sexual freedom of our parents’ generation was presented to those of us born in the 1980s and ’90s as a failed revolution. We grew up with the lingering funk of their regret, a regret that was exacerbated and rhetorically reinforced by the AIDS epidemic, panic about which pervaded the air of our early childhood.
Our generation is often accused of hanging back in an extended adolescence, but that view implies a level of choice that the structural conditions do not, for most of us, allow. It isn’t that we are delaying adulthood, so much as the milestones of adulthood — housing, marriage, and children — have become increasingly cost-prohibitive, if they haven’t drifted entirely out of reach. Freedom of sexual expression is going to look different for us because of the evolution in economic, environmental, technological, and social conditions, all of which have been changing for over 100 years.
In Future Sex, the suggestion is that freedom of sexual expression cannot be found in the narratives of free love or science-fictional utopias, because they are the stories of a previous generation. We need a new set of narratives we can tell ourselves about the way we live our lives now, and what we’re staring at is a blinking cursor on a blank screen. The story might begin to take shape if we sit back and try to answer the question: What do we desire?
Witt attempts to locate some of these new narratives in the different approaches she finds in San Francisco. She spends time with the group OneTaste, who practice orgasmic meditation, a 15-minute “practice” which involves all the gestures of trying to get a woman off, without orgasm being explicitly the end goal. The people at OneTaste adopt an almost tyrannical insistence on openness, disclosure, and the processing of feelings, and part of that insistence involves language — “penetrate” indicates an emotional breakthrough; being aroused is described as feeling “tumesced”; they use “sex” as a verb. Despite her discomfort, Witt frames the group’s dedication to sexual fulfilment as one worthy of consideration. Theirs is a method that tries to repurpose language to give names to the kinds of sexual expression they’re looking for. “The people at OneTaste were looking for a method to arrive at a more authentic and stable experience of sexual openness,” writes Witt, “one that came from immanent desire instead of an anxiety to please.”
In Witt’s survey of the sexual and romantic landscape of the Bay Area, the relationships of her friends, and her own experiences, she diagnoses a peculiar failure of language. “Many of us longed for an arrangement we could name, as if it offered something better, instead of simply something more familiar.” Many of the people and cultures Witt writes about try to reconsider sexual experience and find a language adequate to describing the way we live, and want to live, our lives. This quest is crystallized in Witt’s examination of a polyamorous couple in San Francisco: “they were seeking to avoid the confusion and euphemism of their generation’s dating scene by talking through their real feelings, naming their actual desires, and having extensive uncomfortable conversations.”
When Witt is at her best, she offers readers her personal experience as a lens to examine what it’s like to be alive and desiring. When the book falters, it is largely due to her focus on the white, heterosexual, upper-middle class social spheres of the Bay Area and New York, a focus that displays a kind of opacity toward the experiences of queer, poor, or minority communities living in places elsewhere. Witt never presents herself as somebody who has all the answers. She is both unsure and searching, and the book’s conclusion is neither proof nor disputation of an original conviction about sex or desire. “I still did not feel as free as I wanted to,” Witt writes in the final pages of the book. “Sometimes I could not cross the barriers that keep people from expressing their desires.”
The culture of the Bay Area Witt depicts in Future Sex is in large part one of “hyperbolic optimism.” As coined by a Google employee Witt profiles, hyperbolic optimists “thought that an action was right if it promoted individual happiness, regardless of its effect on others […] [T]he way they approached sex had roots in a libertarian idea that if the right dynamics were set up every problem would work itself out.” The problem with hyperbolic optimism is that human emotions are brittle and tricky. People still fail and hurt one another, and a good relationship doesn’t cure anybody of unhappiness or carelessness. We all make mistakes.
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Among the conditions of being young are the experience of feeling formless and making mistakes, and these mistakes are those that Sales and Orenstein cite as the symptoms of their concern. But sometimes you do not arrive at adulthood with any clear sense of what you desire. Witt quotes the book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, in which Samuel Delaney describes the bygone porn theaters in Times Square as places where he could explore the nuances of his own desire: “What waits is for enough women to consider such venues as a locus of possible pleasure.” Risks of pregnancy, violence, and disease have tended to keep women from exploring their sexuality. But the discourse of self-preservation and worry taught to us by our mothers and popularized in books like Orenstein’s and Sales’s has encouraged the belief that the danger is best avoided, that safety lies in the stable, committed, and probably monogamous, relationship.
I have personally found that discourse to be a frustrating and inhibiting one. While reading Future Sex, I came upon a poem by Maggie Nelson, included in her collection Something Bright, Then Holes, in which she notes, “I hate the phrase ‘self-preservation’ / I mean, what exactly is one / preserving?” And it is often difficult to know what you’re meant to be preserving when you have not interrogated your own desires and found a language to articulate them, even when such an interrogation may be accompanied by risk and pain.
At a sex party Witt attends in San Francisco, hosted by a group of polyamorous Google employees, a set of rules are posted on the walls. “Enthusiastic consent” is encouraged. Enthusiastic consent should be the goal of all sexual encounters. But you will not respond with “Yes!” to every sexual encounter you ever have. Sometimes you might respond with “Yes … ” or “Okay?” The pursuit of sexual freedom, not to mention gender equality, involves treating young women as autonomous subjects. It involves giving women the liberty to discover what they want to say “Yes!” to on their own terms; and allowing that they will sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes get hurt; and that an unhappy experience is often proof of nothing more than an unhappy experience, not a referendum on the perils of the culture at large.