Wednesday, March 21, 2007
JET SEX (COUNTERPOINT): WHAT KIND OF DISTANCE, REALLY?
filed under: Jet Sex by Melissa Gira
NYC-based artist and writer Irene Kaoru joined Lux and I over this past weekend in New York, storming fancy hotel suites with her camera and offering wine to lubricate our conversations on awkward sex. She offers this contribution based on our bathtub chats (forthcoming, in video form), as a counterpoint to my ceaseless futurism. Read, weep, and learn:
No human beings grow apart with the painful speed and grace of lovers. Of all types of people and relations, lovers grow apart the best. Friendship and family beget their own sorts of slippery channels and idle acquaintance is itself an isolating protective moat, but these are nothing compared to the treacherous trenches dug by lovers for one another. Feeling oneself distant, apart, from a lover is one of the more acutely unpleasant emotional experiences one can know. So what if we strip away the romanticism of painful distance and look at it, in true Sexerati style, as something positive, exciting–not a bug but a feature? This is just what I’ve been pondering after an interesting chat with editrix Melissa about the nature of jet sex and its possibilities.
The ideal of jet sex can in a way be distilled to convenience–the convenience and novelty of building a network of lovers/partners/flings in far-flung locales through the natural course of our (urban elite) globe-trotting lifestyle. Assuming (and it’s a large, hopeful assumption) that all parties involved are forthright and respectful, this Utopian community idea could potentially make of this world a garden of destigmatized business-trip/pleasure-trip sex, further blurring the already-dissolving lines between work and play. If as Melissa declared recently, jet sex is “[l]oosed from marriage, loosed from relationships” then does jet sex actually diminish the painful feelings of distance and loss inherent in many sexual encounters, even while it encourages physical distance between partners–and partners-for-one-night-only? Perhaps, the jet sex ethos seems to imply, we should simply accept that lovers grow apart, whether or not they want to, whether or not there is physical distance involved, and we should just embrace this fact and use technology to make optimal use of the time we have together to have all the sex we went–miles apart be damned.
All of this sounds ideal until we add the sticky complication of love. Is there room for love in the jet sex playground? Or is jetting from one city, one lover, to the next simply a way to stave off the (perhaps inevitable) feelings of attachment and vulnerability that come whether we like it or not when we share our bodies with others? The sweet and debilitating pain of emotional distance from a fading long-term love is something that requires that old paradigm of two-by-two, of commitment and often of self-denial in the form of monogamy. While I believe love may only possible in the absence of the self-centered pure-pleasure-seeking that jet sex entails, that love is something which requires the wait and build-up of occasional self-denial in order to keep its spark, my jury’s still out on whether love and marriage can keep up with the competing, tantalizingly schedulable nature of jet sex or whether jet sex will simply be another blind alley on the road to sensual and emotional fulfillment.
If we simply don’t have time, or won’t make the time, to build a relationship with only one person, is jet sex a “next best”? I’d give that one an emphatic “no”–it’s a different beast entirely. Jet sex is–must be, in order to be successful and fulfilling–an expression of a radical reordering of priorities…and the first thing you can guess about a jet sex-er is that she (or he) puts their pleasure and their work first.
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sex is only one the infintite possibilities of the expression of love, i would find it to be a waste of time to travel for the sole purpose satisfying that urge….on the otther hand,the idea of it is exciting, if i needed a break or a getaway to have someone somewhere who was there for me like that….but to secure that, it seems like it would be a lot of work, getting to know someone for the sole purpose of being a fuck buddy, as cool as that sounds it seems like i would have to devote more time than i have…..but to have a place to stay in another city with a loving person sounds like a great time and to have a loving person come stay for a few days here and there, but to meet and ’secure’ all these loving people, it seems like it would be hard, maybe its a skill that can be developed, i’d like to talk to someone who’s actually doing it, an intersting idea…not really my style……….