Before AIDS, when I was living in NYC, we thought very little about protection. Our concern was mostly to prevent pregnancy, but if the woman was on the pill, everything was copacetic. We knew about STDs, of course, but we trusted our group of friends to be clean. Every once in a while, we’d hear that so-and-so had crabs, but that seemed to be the worst of it. Herpes was also a concern.
I think we approached sex with a kind of naivite that no longer exists. For us, porn was not easily accessible. You had to go to a dank, smelly place in a really bad part of town. It wasn’t worth it.
So we learned about sex on the job, so to speak. It was all experimental. We might have heard about various possible activities in Playboy or Hustler, but we didn’t know exactly how to go about doing it.
Sado-masochism and other games were hardly publicized in the heterosexual world. Since I had a lot of gay friends, I had heard some very lurid stories about what went on in the Mine Shaft, or the baths.
Then came AIDS. All the profligate activity stopped. We hunkered down, monogomized, and wondered what was going to happen. I went off the grad school out in the sticks, and had no sexual activity outside of my girlfriend.
People learned to cope, and use protection, and be safe, and the rate of AIDS transmission was cut dramatically, especially in some at-risk populations. Later on, they found drugs that could dramatically extend your life. AIDS was no longer an instant death sentence.
I had a friend who worked as an AIDS buddy. GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis) organized volunteers to help people with AIDS through their last days. They’d bring food, provide company (a lot of these men were ostracized by their families), and make sure the people with AIDS got to their medical appointments. They were there when the folks died. I don’t know how my friend did it, but he was a buddy to several folks—I don’t know how many, before he quit.
Then, in the mid-90s, the Internet bloomed on the scene. Suddenly, all this information was available at our fingertips. Information in all kinds of media; not just print. Photos, videos and music were easily accessible. That facilitated the first money-making business on the net: porn.
In the early days, there was all this porn that was freely traded on newsgroups. A lot of it was encrypted into several parts, to keep the size of the files manageable for dial-up access, and you had to decode it and put it together in order to see the picture. This was, for me, the first time I saw hard core pictures of sexual activity.
When videos came along, we could watch all these beautiful people doing everything we had only imagined before. It was like the perfect manual for sex.
The young folks now have grown up in this environment. They’ve had detailed knowledge of, and seen everything there is to see from age…. what” Eleven? Thirteen? Even younger?
Once one of my assistants, this was maybe three or four years ago, and she was 26 years old, was talking to me about her love life. She loved to do this (and that may have been the start of my career as a relationships advisor—though she never took any of it) and would tell all kinds of detailed tales. In part, she was messing with me, but that’s another story.
She told me that her younger boyfriends had these very weird ideas about sex. They thought that pounding away like a jackrabbit was the way to do it. They thought that women loved it when they pulled out at the end, and spurted all over their faces. They knew nothing about foreplay.
In short, they thought real-life sex was like they saw in porn. And it was all (and here, I’m interpreting it, as I see it) mechanical and clinical. Like a gymnast doing a set of tricks to be judged. These days, I get the feeling that a lot of sex among young people, especially recreational sex, and even more especially, “hooking up,” is almost a competition in which they are all scoring each other as to skill and technique and range of abilities. It’s just about fun, but the emotional side of it is complex.
Sometimes, they say, there is no emotion. It’s just fucking. Wild animal fucking. Sometimes they like the person they’re fucking, and then there are problems, because they don’t know if the other person likes them. The rules are confusing. When are we “friends with benefits;” when are we dating; when are we in a relationship that is exclusive? No one knows, because the sex comes first, and the relationship might or might not follow.
When I was engaging in a lot of sex, back in the late seventies and early eighties, it was with people I knew fairly well. Some of it was kind of recreational; we knew it wasn’t about a relationship, but we still really liked each other; maybe even loved each other in a kind of non-possessive way.
We had no easy access to porn. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were inventing it as we went along. Twosomes, threesomes, orgies, who knew how to make these things happen? But they did.
I think that our approach to sex, back then, was very innocent and naive. We didn’t know what we were getting into. In contrast, today, everyone knows exactly what they are getting into. They’ve seen it all multiple times before they ever try it. Porn desensitizes them to the place of sex. It’s more a sport than a relationship activity. They know exactly what they are doing.
To me, this seems rather technical. Technically proficient, yet, like most young people in the arts, the feeling isn’t there yet. They know how to do things that feel good, but they don’t know how to feel good about the relationship, or even how to use sex as a vehicle to express feelings.
I’m sure it isn’t always as I’ve portrayed it here. I don’t know even how accurate this portrayal is, on average. Maybe I’ve exagerated a bit to make a point. But, naive vs technical competence? I think I prefer the exploratory approach. I like to do things for myself, instead of letting other people tell me how to do it. I make mistakes, yes, but I also have a chance to invent something new. These days? I don’t know. It seems like everything’s been done already, even before the first time you get naked with someone.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
