welcome to the first part of a series focusing on gender relations in america, entitled gettin’ it on in the aughts. i’ve broken it down into five easy sections for your reading pleasure:

1. technology 
2. trust
3. the sexes
4. the sex
5. love love love

i’m just proud of myself that i’ve thought this far ahead. and while i’ve had no formal training in cultural anthropology, i consider myself expert enough to speak on it simply because i’m human.

and horny as hell.

part 1:

 i have a pretty rich fantasy life. my mind is the fertile playground for numerous scenarios; 20’s jazz singer mixed up with a dashing but dangerous mobster or lady in waiting secretly lusting for the lord of the manor; civil war widow being tempted by the hired help or wild scottish warrior-maid hot for the hunky clan leader; i’ve had countless assignations courtesy of my very own cranium.

i suppose my childhood is to thank for this. middle of iowa, poor mormon family, fourth kid out of five, shy, sensitive, not many friends, intelligent, precocious, artistic and naïve, what else did i have to do but bury my head in a book, wash a canvas with color and make up worlds entirely different to my own?

i also grew up in a blessed time: the 70’s. schoolhouse rocks! was teaching us about adjectives and the constitution, the apple IIe boasted solitaire and 2-d miniature golf on green screens, eight-tracks were ultra-cool and cordless phones seemed like something from a sci-fi movie.

now let’s look at the aughts: blackberries, ipods, pagers, e-mail, laptops, cell phones, fax machines, tomb raider, fear factor, big brother, the internet superhighway and 5,000 channels of pay-per-view.

we now have countless ways to communicate, to bring the world to us. best friend teaching english in brazil?  no worries. instant message. having a party and want to keep track of it all?  e-vite ‘em. feel the need to share your left-leaning, slightly silly and often asinine thoughts with the world?  upload to your blog.

hell yeah, technology kicks major ass. i can’t imagine life without washing machines, or microwaves, or elevators. i get to talk to my family as often as i want (which admittedly isn’t that often) even though we’re strung out across the states. i get to listen to awesome playlists on my awesome ipod and watch compelling documentaries (and escapist action flicks) on my primo dvd player.

but we’ve become irrelevant. humans, i mean. it seems like we’re all figments, fragments of digital information hurtling at super speed through wires and cables and fiber optic networks. we exist only as a contact in a cell phone, an e-mail in an address book of global proportions.

no wonder we’ve lost ourselves. we can’t even find each other in the bits and bytes of data that flood around us daily in the ever-deepening whirlpool of this virtual non-reality.

and the biggest casualty in this techno war is courtship. sex. love.

feel the need to talk to someone but too lazy to get off your ass and find some compatible conversation?  chat room. forget the fact that about half of the people out there aren’t who they say they are. we don’t want them; we want the faceless, emotionless idea of them. we have become a society of the anonymous fuck. cyber sex gives us the pseudo-release we crave free of messy commitment. call me crazy, but, i’ve never found the idea of frantically pounding out “oohhhhhhhh ahhhh baby i’m gonna cum i’m cummmmmming” on the keyboard while pleasuring yourself particularly sexy.

it’s all out there. from fucking inanimate objects to snuff films and child pornography, you can find it. embarrassingly, frighteningly easily.

sure, some people turn to techsex because they’re lacking in social graces and it’s difficult for them to meet people. for others, it’s a way to ameliorate past sexual trauma or abiding loneliness. but it’s cyclic. logically, it’s absurd to prescribe isolationism as a cure for isolationism. but logic rarely enters into the world of little heads and big tits.

personally, i find the brain to be the biggest sexual organ of them all. give me a nice juicy cerebral cortex and i’m a happy girl. but that’s become harder to find amid the detritus of digital desire, where gratification is instant and those we couple with go by handles like “hugecock4529.”

not to mention that boob-jobs and penis-enlargement pills engender unrealistic expectations. 98% of the population does not look like porn stars. we have cellulite and hairy backs. we jiggle. we snort when we laugh. with the exception of that 2%, we’re full of fear that we won’t measure up. either in life, or in assuming the position.

humans are funny creatures, complex at best and insoluble at worst. but we are wondrous in our ability to confound, and our breath-catching uniqueness should be celebrated, not mechanized.

when did “pda” change from “public displays of affection” to “personal digital assistants?”

when was the last time you touched someone because you were there and they were there and just that simple fact made you happy?

when do we stop trying to convince ourselves that we’re satisfied when we go through the day without looking anyone in the eyes?

unplug yourself and engage your brain.

stop typing, start exploring, and see what happens. it will be messy, if will be painful, and it will be unexplainable. it will also be unbelievably erotic, down and dirty, and yes, i’m going to say it, spiritual. and it will be human, which is the biggest turn-on of all.

now if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got a date with my vibrator.