Thursday, January 4, 2007

And I’m Looking Forward to Getting to Know You, Now That We’ve Fucked


filed under: Dating 2.0, Love & Other Glitches by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

danah boyd (and wow, am I a pervert for getting off on her finding such good sex stories?) sifted this Salon piece on gay vs. straight dating from 2001 to the top of her del.icio.us links, and so this must bear repeating in some now-ish way:

See, a straight woman says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t have sex with you until I get to know you.”

A gay man says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t get to know you until I have sex with you.”

There’s a (and god, I wish there were a less pretentious word for this) frisson to near-anonymous sex, where each party is moving in on their target with a totally shameless motivation — fueled by desire, one hopes, and not just too much fancy booze. Mutual projection is a fine intoxicant here, imagining one another as one’s own utter fantasy lover but with just enough differentiation from the jack-off material as to be a real being. Nobody knows who anybody is yet with a drink in hand and in the low light of a bar or restaurant or at a club or a show, and so this sort of sexual collision in public is a ripe moment for total self re-invention. Why hate on it? Why not work it?

Is this where the so-called straight girls (and their homo-kin, that the writer bemoans, the queers who are over-ritualizing dating, in his opinion) trip up in this mix? Are they hunting some more “authentic” self as they audition future partners pre-bedtime, or are they maybe just holding out for a nice dinner first?

Or is it that knowing based purely on sex is seen as somehow one-dimensional? As if the “you” that someone picks up on to take home is any less real than the “you” that you are all the time? As if the “you” you are on a more formal date is the whole you, right, and not just a blip of you?

The question then is, if you want to, how do you begin to give someone the story of you in sex? Over a meal, or bent over the bed? Through a photograph, a text message, or with your own mouth, and if so, then where is your mouth? Maybe with a chart or graph of previous partners? With glorious annotations on each one? How do you fill in the flourishes of want that can only be captured limply in a sexual history? And do you need to tell a personal or sexual history only with words? Could the truth of sex best be found and told in sex?

I suppose I’m a gay man, in this particular equation. So what are you?

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Nerd Love, Overheard


filed under: Dating 2.0 by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Nerd Love, Overhead

At the pretty-much-over “polytechno” night (no, that doesn’t mean it’s all slutty Marin types) at 111 Minna (you may have been here partying in the name of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, perhaps with slutty SF types)…

Her: I’m always happy to fuck around with PHP.
Him: Maybe afterwards we can fuck around with your ass.

See also, as I was attempting to get a photo from a friend’s phone to the browser on this desperately fucked to drunk grape iMac, which involved digging way, way back into old email accounts, dead del.icio.us tags, and finding some app someone wrote about once (what else), a similarly drunken dude pulls up to tell me…

You have too many tags.

and:

You could be Steve Jobs’ daughter.

(This post, with love, goes out to Lux Nightmare, the original alt.porn superstar made good. Who blogs you, baby.)

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Tagging Redux: Find Sex Nerds Near You


filed under: Dating 2.0 by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

consumating badge

As an experiment, and not because they are kicking me a dime or anything (really), I’ve put a widget over on the right sidebar for Consumating. The widget displays only those folks who are tagged “sexnerd,” so either tag yourself or your crush and see who else is messing around with tagging for purely scientific reasons, yes.

Update: Speaking of sex nerds, warming-you-all-by-the-fire year-end congrats to the friends-of-Sexerati who made violet blue’s 2006 top ten sexiest geeks list from one of 2005’s outgoing top ten (that’s me). To Audacia, who makes me so grateful for such dear comrades in arms, to Casey & Rudy for taking us to the far ends of the video podcast universe (and being the sweetest vlogstars, ever), and to Mike, who holds the roof over the head of ‘The Future of Sex’ with blip.tv (and doesn’t even blush when strap-on’s come up in his direction), I’m so grateful for meeting you all this year, and job fucking well done!

Monday, December 18, 2006

“Transparency is for politicians, not for lovers.”


filed under: Dating 2.0, Love & Other Glitches by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Susie Bright interviews sex & relationships psychologist (no, don’t run screaming) Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, and it’s too good not to quote them both excessively…

Esther argues that erotic passion— to a certain but critical degree— is built upon distance and ambiguity. In her view, transparency is for politicians, not for lovers.

“It’s often assumed,” Esther writes, “that intimacy and trust must exist before sex can be enjoyed, but for many women and men, intimacy— more precisely, the familiarity inherent in intimacy— actually sabotages sexual desire. When the loved one becomes a source of security and stability, he/she can become desexualized.

“The dilemma is that erotic passion can leave many people feeling vulnerable and less secure. In this sense there is no ’safe sex.’ Maybe the real paradox is that this fundamental insecurity is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire. As Stephen Mitchell, a New York psychoanalyst, used to say, ‘It is not that romance fades over time. It becomes riskier.’”

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