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Thursday, March 15, 2007

Jet Sex: Romance, Precarity, and the ‘Global Nomad’

filed under: Jet Sex by Melissa Gira

Once upon a time, we just read wack essays on the convergence of global cultures. We filed away this idea that someday, we’d all be living some rock-star mashed up lifestyle, somewhere between the jet age and information age.

We woke up, and the future was finally sharing our pillow.

Jet sex occupies a liminal space, thrives there. Conference sex may have been the inspiration for jet sex — or maybe it was affair-sex, or even commercial sex: that is, sex that truly flourishes as it is tightly contained in time and space. As our lives expand to include more global travel, less location-based employment, and a more densely networked social and professional sphere, jet sex may be the defining sex of the 21st century. Loosed from marriage, loosed from relationships, even: jet sex is the province of the individual, colliding with other individuals, in momentary collaboration.

However, as the economic conditions that make jet sex possible are anything if not precarious, jet sex itself contains that precarity. Sex becomes not something that we fall into, soft onto the bed and fade to black. Jet sex may seem less ’spontaneous,’ but reveals how sex operates when everyone’s cards have to be on the table. The greatest motivator — getting laid — ‘forces’ us to be more forthright. In other words, if we’re going to fuck at all, we need to actively make a plan, make time, and then, if the stars are aligned and the server didn’t crash and everyone’s flight gets in as scheduled, make love.

This isn’t a new problem, of course. But as in all sex futurism, where others see a bug, we see a feature. Jet sex might be the place we end up when each of us has the potential to be our own global microbrand, all narcissists hunting pleasure where we can squeeze it in — or, it might just how we’re going to do it in the future to come.

Consider the following perhaps fabricated pamphlet circulated in what may be a fictional document on “ubiquitous precarity,” or, the condition of the information age worker — temporary, part-time, always-on, and mobile as sin:

GeoTAZ!
A Network of Oases for Global Nomads!
An Alternative Off-the-Grid Infrastructure for Activists and Others!
A Fun Use for all your Location Aware Wireless Mobile Devices!
A Weekend Hobby for Web Warriors and Code Jockeys!
A Job Finder for Knowledge Workers and Tiger Teams!

Membership in GeoTAZ includes access to:
The Oases: mobile, hidden quarters and supplies for living, working, resting and refueling in cities and parks throughout the Northeast.

The Secret Missions: weekend adventures for fun and profit. Hunt for caches, track and transport items across the country, around the world, or in your neighborhood. Discover a hidden city overlaid on the one you thought you knew, or get out of your well-worn groove and do some guided exploring. Attend a political rally, a house party, or a business meeting, and meet other like minded individuals.

Though it may be all fantasy, within this desire for a revamped workaday world, where work itself is more like play and we find new spaces in which to play/work together, I can see an opening for a reorganized sex culture, as well. Whether it’s the advent of co-working, open source, barcamps and unconferences (which, psst, the queers and feminists and radicals have been at for years, just with less wifi), it’s clear that finding a way to support an independent, mobile, jet set lifestyle with community-driven periods of reconnection is an emerging need. In this context, jet sex is bucking up against ‘the old sex,’ of two-by-two, until death do us part.

We’ll endeavor to document this new sex culture here, lest jet sex be all ideal and no action.

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