Every woman Anais Nin, every man a Henry
Cybersex: online sex-oriented conversations. First known use 1991
— Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Subj: Heard you were great. Date: 97–06–27 22:25:11 EDT
From: Abby66 To: Virtualish
Someone said you were the best online for cyber!! If that’s true, my curiosity is way up, I usually don’t go in for that, but I like to experience everything in life once. E-mail me sometime if you’d be agreeable to chatting sometime.
— :) Abby
When I was accepted for the Seattle writing seminar I thought I could finish my new novel there. My daughter said renting a cabin in the San Juan Islands to write made more sense. My life certainly would have been different if I had. But I lugged my clunky, slow personal computer to campus among writers with sleek expensive laptops.
Each writer had a room normally occupied by two college students. Each room had direct internet hookup, no long-distance charges. When I wasn’t in class, I was online. The first day, I “met” a sex-obsessed North Carolina wife who cruised Cyberia for serial virtual lovers under different screen names. She told me how to silence modem squawk to avoid marital monitoring — she didn’t intend to let me vanish once home. The number of lonely horny women online was surreal. A seminar classmate, a young newsman, described “doing two at once” in adjacent windows. “Sort of a virtual menage a trois.”
Everybody was doin’ it, doin’ it, like the old Irving Berlin song. I stayed in my room in preference to parties thrown for students, or left early. There were writer groupies at those parties, too. But everybody was so young — or if my age, so successful — I was self-conscious. Instant gratification online trumped mating rituals over drinks. I doubted a seminar staffer who said a svelte young lovely from one party wanted to see me again, and gave me her phone number. Didn’t follow up.
The internet already was awash with commentary on the phenomenon of cybersex. Most of it was tight-sphinctered and self-righteous. It reminded me of pre-computer pundits who saw the end of civilization in the sexual revolution fueled by the Pill, Roe v. Wade, and the happy carnality of flower-child Boomers.
Cybersex then still was largely confined to words on a computer screen. Purported experts on ethics and moralists of every stripe were united about erotic keyboarding:“ain’t it awful?” Language echoed moralistic pre-sixties attitudes that denied the reading public the literary romps of Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and any other novelist the bluenoses could ban. I was interested enough to do a little research.
Historically, a long battle to keep sexy writing away from the public culminated in a 1868 British court ruling, Regina v. Hicklin, banning all printed work that would “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Meaning anyone who could read. The U.S. Congress in 1873 adopted that view, and banned sexy books along with birth-control devices and sex toys. States and cities went further. Comstock Laws and “banned in Boston” joined the lexicon of suppression.
I saw a subliminal consistency between the self-appointed arbiters of morality to sexy literature and modern negative reaction to cybersex chat rooms. The unstated motive was suppression of individual freedom — especially freedom for women, my erstwhile feminist mentor, Ms. XX Pizan, would have asserted. Women must be controlled and cosseted at all cost.
Venusians unleashed are a dangerous breed. Keep them out of saloons, forbid makeup, fulminate over hem length. Make them wear bras, deny the vote, don’t let them drive or have bank accounts. Veil them head to toe, cut off their clits. Blame them for attracting lust. Even murder them for sexual misconduct. Eve’s daughters must be closely ruled or they will cuckold you with the Biblical serpent, and orgasm on forbidden knowledge.
To me, technology was the seductive serpent offering an erotic apple. Gutenberg’s printing press was the devil incarnate. Organized religion railed against technology that put religious texts in lay hands to read unsupervised — which endangered Orthodoxy. Once that battle was lost, Orthodoxy regrouped to ban printed matter exposing readers to unsanctioned ideas. Revolutionary screeds, revisionist religious theory — every unorthodox idea finding its way into books — had a turn being banned, or burned. Almost alone in the world, America’s First Amendment, drafted by revolutionists, protected free discourse, including the printed word. Eventually jurists extended its protections to sexy writing.
Gutenberg’s tech created the phenomenon of the novel, and novelist. From the seventeenth century on, Orthodoxy fiercely resisted these new dangerous outsiders.“The novel,” wrote Robert McCrumb in the UK Guardian, “was profoundly associated with transgression. John Bunyan wrote in prison. Daniel Defoe was put in the stocks. Writers of all sorts were seen (and saw themselves) as outsiders, renegades and troublemakers…”
In the long word-war, it appeared more novelists were drawn into the mainstream by market forces — the desire for popular acceptance — than were coerced by authority. But word of their new respectability failed to penetrate the Deep South, where my great-grandmother forbade her teen-aged seventh daughter to publish her first — only — novel when she got a contract offer. Novelists, the old woman fumed, were no better than actors, who were barely better than whores. The girl who became my matriarch angrily burned her own manuscript and became a bootlegger’s gun moll, then a fireman’s wife.
McCrumb said it took Henry Miller to reclaim outlier status for the novel,“disrupting the still waters of convention with shock and outrage…Miller, the down-and-out literary enragé…and his muse Anaïs Nin…(were) resolute, isolated and stoical in pursuit of their new aesthetic…” Miller’s controversial books were banned for a generation, and smuggled into the U.S. by libertines like my old wire-service mentor, Houser, who preached “Sex is fun!”
Late in the twentieth century, technology spawned a new lascivious serpent. The defense industry’s internet creation was seized by the hoi polloi to author their own steamy fantasies. The new tech made a novelist of every man — every woman — with a modem. Thanks to the new tech, virtual carnality was loose in the world, led by liberated women. Venusians who keyboarded their fantasies to me said the brain is, after all, the largest sex organ.
Pontificating against “modem love” resembled nineteenth century Orthodox cant against novels that “deprave and corrupt.” Psychiatric warnings that echoed theological rants against writing about sex and sinning had as much chance to stem the cybersex tide as the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. (No pun meant.) You didn’t need to look for it. Once online you couldn’t avoid it.
Hard to stay depressed when the modem squawk — they still squawked then — signaled an entire world of beguiling women willing to write their erotic fantasies. I had been hampered early by long-distance charges from my remote home. When the modem squawked it signaled financial drain. More infuriating to my wife than keyboard-flirting with distant females. At least until I incautiously printed the Florida blonde’s anonymous seduction, and she read it.
Sex was in the air that summer. Some of the seminar classmates were sleeping with each other. Others were led to Seattle sex clubs by a young female who already was a published erotic writer. One writer so intrigued a sex-club worker, a hottie if ever I saw one, she became a fixture in his room. He seemed a trifle overwhelmed. Shades of my MP buddy Korsaw and the Queen of Pigalle: sex workers’ hearts are pierced by love’s arrow readily as anyone’s.
I observed those mating rituals remotely, nothing to do with me. But depression lifted online, where I could write sensual dreams for a virtual universe of Venusian writers with peculiarly powerful emotional connections to their “dream-spinner,” Virtualish and his anonymous alter-egos — other screen names.
The Florida blonde disliked my unrestricted internet access. Ran telephone bed checks, magisterial as my wife. Said I was out of control as a college freshman because I went from the matriarch’s control to married control with nothing between but Army discipline. “Get it out of your system,” she said. “Shut the computer off, let all those floozies find somebody else.”
She made me think of Dr. Frankenstein, dismayed by the monster she created with that would-be anonymous cyber-seduction. When she understood I wasn’t going to listen to her, she said I was like an alcoholic on a binge, whose best drink is his next drink. As noted before, she was sharp. In the end, she sadly washed her hands.
