FREE THOUGHTS

OPINIONS WE
COULDN'T KEEP
TO OURSELVES




Reach Out -
Reach Out and Fuck Someone

It all started with the new year - 1994, the Brave New '90s - a new paradigm headed by a slow parade of men (and outdated ideals) from my past, this electronic symbiotic cybersexual '90s kinda reality-subtitled "How Did I Get Here, Where Am I Going and What The Hell's Gonna Happen Next?"

Made all the more surreal because of abruptly shifting parallel universes that keep merging into one another without warning, I feel the need to change my ways. I will create a Brave New Me capable of surviving life in the 21st Century: a distanced, apathetic, cool and dispassionate approach to interpersonal relationships and to life itself.
Don't want to get too close; don't want to feel too deeply. Rejection, misunderstanding, loving more than the other, too much faith in the word of a man whose dick does all the talking. Men return from my littered sexual past, returning to haunt me, taunt me, talk me into letting them jerk off onto my tits and then they leave, mysteriously and quietly as they came, incapable of handling the intensity of feeling left behind.
Placing importance on technology over human contact is dehumanizing us. It's happening now. The pang of conscience I used to feel when confronted with the sight of people sleeping in the park grows fainter by the day. Pretty soon we'll disdain human interaction as blase, passe: been there, seen it, done it. Illustrating this frightening trend is a recent front-page Seattle Times article about the Internet: three students, standing less than a foot away from each other, staring at the computer - not interacting with one another, not talking to one another, not acknowledging the others' existence, attention focused solely on the "wave of the future."
Welcome to my '90s, my Brave New Whorled. Not long ago, having dinner with a friend in at Thai place on The Ave (our first mistake), this obnoxious fag-straining vainly to say anything worthy of eavesdropping-told a pathetic, racist, misogynistic "joke": "Why do Mexican women wear long skirts? To hide the No-Pest Strip."
I tried to blow it off. Really, I did. But my food kept sticking to the big lump in my throat and I knew I couldn't walk out until he heard from me. I told him that what he said really pissed me off. I reminded him that it's the '90s and, as such, I expect to be able to eat a meal in public without having to listen to that kinda shit; and I would appreciate it if, in the future, he could just keep it to himself. How would he have liked it if I had been at my table telling fag jokes? From the look on his face, I could tell he was shocked that I had the audacity to approach him, human to pissed-off human.
So it's the '90s and information superhighways full of coupe de villes carry people toward cyberrelationships between person and technology, virtual reality, hypersex, "auto" [technological] eroticism, cybersex, phone sex, NetSex, electronic voyeurism; all a creation of relationships based on technology, not humanity. So how's a human supposed to behave? Adapt, is one way. OK, let's adapt.
I have phone sex now because trying to wade through hundreds, literally hundreds of men who answered my personal ad, looking for three that I can spend more than a couple of months with is wearing me down. Not to mention going on date after pointless date and finding nothing in common and less gained for the amount of effort expended.
Sometimes when I answer the phone now it's this man-this man I talk dirty to. He tells me what he'd do to me if he were there and we get off together. He sounds like the kinda guy I'd like to spend time with: funny, intelligent, mindful of my needs as well as his own. We have nice, clean, safe, perfectly serviceable phone sex. Reach out. Reach out and touch someone. Oh, oh God I'm gonna come; this is a recording.
Little emotional connection, no risk, but also no folding of arms around another, no smell of sweat and sperm and slip of kiss. Somehow, though, it's oddly fulfilling. This way, I don't get hurt. This way, I'm not judged and found wanting. This way, I can be anybody I want to be, a new creature created from the rubble of failed relationships.
Meeting people, spending time with them, talking and listening, doesn't seem to be working. So I'll turn to the safe, impersonal, surrealistically unreal Internet. Touching keyboard buttons like I'd touch a lover, stroking the words out. Sitting in the dark, alone, just me and my 'puter. Making love to a tone on the phone (is it live or is it Memorex); fucking and sucking the future.
It's the '90s; come here often? With a flick of the switch, the computer screen with a map of the world lights up: my lover's face. Fingers on the keyboard, teasing errogenous zones ABCDE ... type type type type type. Pounding with insistent rhythm, my playfield, my bed, my 'puter screen, flickers like a bedside candle. Is your hard drive ready for me, my lover? My groin is goin' online. Groan. Ooh, honey, yeah, interface me.

-Andrea Helm is a Seattle writer who really, really needs a good vibrator.

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Contents on this page were published in the April/May, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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