Flavor of the Week: Fireside Chatrooms

ROBERT HEINLEIN WAS fond of pointing out that the practical foundations of the sexual revolution were established with the invention of the automobile. Pre-automotive society was filled with obstacles, intentional and otherwise, that prevented young men and women from associating on their own terms; patriarchal laws and conventions as well as chaperones made unsanctioned coupling a difficult and sometimes dangerous enterprise.

A young man with an automobile, then, had a range of advantages over his ancestors in terms of being able to find willing young women, to impress them, to bring them away to some secluded spot. This was not the intended purpose of the automobile, but then every new technology bears eventual secondary consequences that are obscure even to its creators.

By the 1990s, the primary and intended consequence of the automobile—vastly increased mobility—had resulted in another consequence: the widespread proliferation of cities built in such a way that practical transportation was largely dependent on the auto. As a result of this result, untold numbers of children would now be raised under a procedural sort of chaperonage by which parents would control the means of physical interaction and a large portion of the youth would thus be shuttled around from point A to point B day after day. There were some limitations to the limitations, certain destinations could be viably walked to and a child generally had access to a few others nearby, but by and large, technology and convention had succeeded in putting much of a generation in the firm grip of some terrible cabal of hovering mothers, most of whom are, I think, fascists.

As in all ages, though, there existed a conspiracy of the young against the constraints intended for them by their elders. Code words for liquor and marijuana allowed them to collaborate on evening plans even while being shuttled around to each other’s homes by overseers; pornography was distributed through the usual channels; technical specs for the deployment of the gravity bong were transmitted by oral tradition; adult collaborators willing to buy cigarettes for minors were identified and made known to the various cells. But the omnipresent revolt was imperfect in implementation, and thus it was that countless man-hours were wasted in pursuit of the non-existent hallucinogenic effect of banana peels, while knowledge of which sorts of cough syrups would make one trip if consumed in sufficiently disgusting quantities was limited to a proud elite. Perhaps most troubling of all to the various steering committees, though, was the question of sex, and how to make it occur more often.

And then there was the Internet. This brought an immediate and decisive end to the problem of pornography, previously so constraining to those with absent fathers. The futurists among us saw far greater potential, though, and set to work devising new ways in which to advance our collective aspirations. By accessing these technological records, we were able to verify that the banana peel rumor was disinformation and that you couldn’t really get high from plucking leaves from the pot plants that someone’s mom’s boyfriend had grown in the backyard, and then eating those leaves in a peanut butter sandwich. We even discovered that Marilyn Manson was not really Paul from The Wonder Years. A hypothesis to the effect that one could annoy people more efficiently by way of an Internet forum post than a prank call was given weight through controlled experiment and submitted to asshole cousins for peer review. Meanwhile, I myself struggled with the problem of how to go about touching breasts.

At 13, I was uniquely situated to investigate the possibility of using the Internet for such purposes; having been raised by a single mother and a series of female cats, I was already an accomplished investigator into the feminine psyche. Additionally, I had established a theorem linking alcoholism in friends’ moms to the probability of finding interesting things in their dresser drawers. Surely, I was ready to harness the Internet in order to rationalize the means of reproduction.

At this time—1995 or so—there existed local BBS systems to which one could connect simply by knowing the phone number. One of these catered to a wealthy district of my city where Internet use had proliferated quickly, and it was here that

I was to make contact with the girl who would become my co-conspirator in this matter. Early in our communication, Tracy informed me that I could touch her breasts if I wanted to. I conveyed in turn that this would be to my satisfaction and that I would also entertain other proposals of a similar nature. Over the next months, I was able to graduate to second base, to third and finally to dry humping.

Meanwhile, I provided regular lectures to my colleagues on the nature of my discoveries. It was noted that the medium of online communication bypasses shyness, while also facilitating quick and efficient location of those cooperative sorts of girls which are all too rare in many of our nation’s classrooms. I evangelized quite firmly on behalf of this new technology, and soon some of my associates had located their own e-girlfriends, established sexual negotiations and ensured in advance that having one’s parents drive one to go meet a girl at a movie theater to see The Mask or some such stupid fucking thing would be worth leaving home for.

The Internet and its multitude of secondary social effects have taken a great deal of flack from certain quarters. Some of this criticism is warranted, but much of it is based in a misguided mentality that would prefer to deny the individual the choice to choose one’s own destiny as best one can. In the realm of romance, the rise of online dating has provided each of us with the opportunity to move beyond the narrow limits of geography, social circles and accidental meetings, and instead to pursue a more systematic search for the mate most attuned to our selves and our desires. The rise of online dating was nothing less than a second sexual revolution that built upon the first, adding the indisputably consequential gain of informed and viable decision-making to victories already won in the arena of social convention. The end result of both was more and better sex; further justification is unnecessary.