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Friday, April 20, 2007

The Chasing Amy Effect

filed under: Love & Other Glitches by Lux Nightmare | 13 Comments

I was fourteen the first time I saw Chasing Amy.

Fourteen, a sophomore in high school, living in Buffalo.

I don’t think I fully appreciated the movie at the time. I liked it, sure, but a whole lot of it went over my head. A lot of it didn’t really resonate: couldn’t really resonate, because I didn’t have any experiences to compare the movie to. It was a fantasy, a (sad) love story, a movie.

It’s been almost ten years since I saw Chasing Amy. Not surprisingly, a great deal has changed about my life in those ten years: at twenty-four, I’m an accomplished sex educator and former altporn star with more than a few sexual experiences under my belt. And every time I launch myself into the world of dating, every time I meet someone I really like, I find my thoughts turning back to the tale of Chasing Amy.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the plot line is relatively simple: straight boy meets lesbian. Straight boy falls for lesbian. After some drama and negotiation, straight boy dates lesbian… and eventually learns that, in spite of her lesbian identity, she’s got an extensive history of heterosexual sex, including some group sex experience. Straight boy freaks out, relationship goes down the tubes. The end.

Years ago, at a family function, I found myself chatting up my cousin’s cousin. We’d bonded as teenagers, and I felt as though I had some kind of connection with him: this may have been why I told him that I was in an open relationship.

I immediately regretted revealing that piece of information. His face changed, and I could tell he was reevaluating his opinion of me. “You know,” he said, “Guys don’t like girls who are too experienced.”

So I’ve been told.

I’m of two minds about discussing my sexual history with potential partners. On the one hand, I believe in honesty: and the idealistic part of me wants to say that anyone who would judge me based on my past is not worth dating. The idealistic part of me wants to say that “the one” will be able to accept me, regardless of what I’ve done, regardless of the places I’ve been.

On the other hand: I’m terrified that I’ll meet “the one”… and “the one” won’t be able to handle the number of notches on my bedpost, “the one” will think I’ve taken it one kink too far, “the one” will be all sorts of hung up on things I did when I was eighteen and self-destructive, things I haven’t even thought about in years.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Introducing the Bubble Hotties: Boys & Girls Hot Beyond Their Means

filed under: Love & Other Glitches, Web Sex Index, Bubble Hotties by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

The bubble — (blogging about) it’s so hot right now.

We don’t judge if you haven’t been paying attention to the bubble, but you’ve been reaping its benefits. It’s okay, users. No, I’m sorry, content makers. We’ll still respect you even if the thing ends up bursting its unseemly tech juices in the morning. We’ll even bring you a warm towel with which to wipe up and hand you our Blackberry across the pillow so you can see if your stock is still worth a damn.

But we’re not bitter.

As the bubble (or, hopefully, not-a-bubble) grows, so too, does the collective hotness of the web and its makers. As we chart it, hotness is well and truly booming now, but for a few dips that correspond, as one might assume, to related market forces:

Yes, numbers not even Dave Winer would argue with. (This sort of crack research is, of course, why you’re here, and not reading TechCrunch, either, though you could more likely get away with invoicing those hours than the time you spend at Sexerati. So let’s change that with some punditry.)

If one is judging the health of the web by the health of Google stock, what does that mean for the growth of hotness? As our inner entrepreneurs are stroked by the media, and cash comes rushing in to support our newly developed dream-apps, are we also taking care to develop broad-based internal systems to support this sudden surge in all areas of our newfound popularity?

We might make fancy money now, and act and eat and dress to match, but can we fuck, love, and relate at the same speed?

Not likely. Not immediately.

For hotness, and one’s ability to work it to make the most of it, must be cultivated, like any other form of weatlh, if it’s going to stay with us in the long-term.

Read more

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?

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.’”