Sex in the Digital City

Washington Monthly, July, 2000 by Nicholas Thompson

Why it's so alluring on AOL and the Internet--and why it's so addictive

I MET CLAY ABOUT A YEAR AGO IN THE BASEMENT of a smoky club down on 6th St. in New York City's East Village. I had brought a bizarre multi-tonal guitar to play at one of the club's open-microphone sessions. After I finished, Clay asked me if he could borrow the instrument. I said sure, assuming that like everyone else before he'd give up after a few tortured moments trying to navigate around the tiny frets. But his hands moved gracefully and he immediately began to play a gorgeous blues tune on the awkward instrument.

We spent the rest of the night talking and playing music together next to a pile of beer bottles and a pool table. He looked about 21 years old and wore black. He said he had grown up in Canada, someplace near Toronto that I'd never heard of. He had sex with lots of people, men and women. He loved the blues and he didn't want to talk about his life before New York. He was keeping some stuff on the floor of a couple of friends' apartments but many nights he just looked for a sexual partner and stayed with him, her, or them.

I never figured out Clay's whole life story and I never saw him again. But it seemed that he was just following the path of thousands of men and women who have drifted to the big cities to fulfill their dreams and to escape home communities where the woman at the drugstore knows everybody's name. Some become enraptured with the shadows of the city and stay there forever. Others just go for a short trip. Still others do something in between and look back either fondly or regretfully on their "youthful experiment."

Most of us, at one point or another, long to be like Clay. We want to fulfill our primal desires, be anonymous, make up a world and a history if we have to, and wander in the bright lights and the musty corners. But of course we generally don't. The bus trip's too long; we've got a real life to live; other desires and goals are more important.

Now, however, it's easy to be like Clay. Lots of people are making up their own worlds, having sex with dozens of people a day, shifting their identities every half an hour. How? By going online. Men and women who would never have made it to New York with Clay have found their own cities on the Internet and they're replacing their real worlds, and the authentic, complex relationships that organized their lives, with the Internet. And many are discovering that they just don't want to leave these digital cities or, more dangerously, that they can't.

You've got Tail!

Sex on the Net goes far beyond the pornographic images that blanket the Web. Porn has been around for millennia and the Internet has merely increased its scope and availability. The real change brought by the Net is the innovation in sexual conversation between real people typing at different machines; this is the most potent side of the new sexual revolution, created by the crossing of our animal drives with one of the most powerful communication technologies ever invented. This interaction is at the core of what is becoming known among a growing circle of psychologists as the crack cocaine of sex addiction, and it's the foundation of the new bustling city that the Internet has brought into our homes.

If you've never been to this city or if you've never even been on the Internet, America Online makes it simple for you. They've created a system that is almost effortless to load and easy to use. According to spokeswoman Tricia Primrose, the system was set up in part to "appeal to people who remember manual typewriters." All you've got to do is press "enter" on your keyboard, listen for your modem, and look for the innocuous image of waving people labeled "Chat" that appears on your screen. Click twice and you'll be transported into the sweltering labyrinth of chat rooms on which AOL has built much of its business. As millions and millions of people have figured out, if you want erotic excitement, anonymity, and a fantasy life, this is much easier than taking a Greyhound to New York.

The public chat groups on AOL are divided into categories -- some created by AOL's staff and some by AOL's members. They range from general meeting places to discussions about rock stars to rooms for crossdressers. But in almost all of them, users mainly flirt or talk about sex. The chat rooms aren't much more than a sprawling singles bar with sections for every sexual fetish known to humanity--and, it often seems, a few others that must have just been dreamed up.

Researching this article, I put in dozens of room hours, saving conversations to my hard drive. On five separate evenings, I logged chat rooms for the entire night and found that at least two-thirds of the chat is flirtatious or sex-related. Here's a random selection, culled from the bottom of the first page of my printed transcript of five groups selected randomly in the "Town Square," "Arts and Entertainment," and "Romance" sections. "Ever been with a guy my age?" "I'm about to bang on my dick," "I'd just like Britney sitting on my face" [from the Britney Spears fan club chat room], "Babe, lets go chat personally," and "Any ladies with self pics want to trade? I also have a videophone." In the rooms created by members, "Dominatrix 4 sub m" for example, things get even more interesting. There are also rooms that fill up nightly like "xprexteexnxgixrls" in which every visitor is entered onto lists where members privately swap pictures of naked pre-teenage girls.