Let’s get it on
Emily Witt knows how to do research. Attending a live porn shoot at a bar near San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, she interviews director and dominatrix Princess Donna of Kink.com as well as tiny blond starlet Penny Pax. Then she fixes her keen reporter’s eye on the male lead, Spanish performer Ramon Nomar, who’s just finished shooting his climactic scene:
“With the room’s attention focused on Penny he yanked off his sweaty T-shirt, flung it into a corner, and wandered off into a dark part of the bar, naked but for his combat boots. Like a long-distance runner who has just crossed the finish line, he walked it off, moving his arms in circles, wiping the sweat from his face with his arm, and taking deep breaths.”
In this moment, and in many others in her genre-bending first book, “Future Sex,” Witt captures lonely, tender truths about human sexuality. Seeking the future of sex in our culture, she shrewdly examines the past, weaving a brief history of pornography into her present-day experience, touching on the antiporn feminist movement, the movie “Deep Throat” and pioneering performer/director Annie Sprinkle. And that’s just one chapter. Witt also explores Internet dating, the practice of orgasmic meditation, live webcams, polyamory and the hedonistic Burning Man festival, where she concludes her journey in the orgy dome. The result is a riveting chronicle of 21st century sexuality, told by a smart and talented writer.
Witt’s story begins in Brooklyn, where she finds herself unhappily single at age 30, nursing a heartbreak that bores her and a persistent worry about the future. Uncoupled and straight, she’s stuck in sexual adventure mode — sleeping with some of her friends, who in turn sleep with other friends — not by choice, like the polyamorous young Google employees she later profiles, but “by accident.” An Ivy League scholar and cultural critic who’s written for the New Yorker and the New York Times, Witt questions the whole industry of coupling: weddings, gift registries and baby-making, the universal approval that comes with having a family. And when the “monogamous destiny” she’s planned for doesn’t arrive, she embarks on a quest both intellectual and personal: to “explore the possibilities of free love” and try to understand her generation’s sexual mores. The project takes her to San Francisco, because “in those years, San Francisco was where the future was going to be figured out, or at least it was the city America had designated for people who still believed in free love.”
A word of caution: if you’re looking for a juicy, confessional memoir, find another book. Witt is a journalist and keeps an observer’s distance from her subject, even while trying out an “anonymous online sexual encounter” via private webcam. She stays guarded about the details of her erotic life, reluctant to depict true arousal or desire. Her tone can be cold, as if she’s going through the motions of sexual experimentation, more social scientist than memoirist. After attending a hip sex party in a rented loft south of Market Street, Witt remains coolly intellectual: “I was still thinking of myself as just a visitor … someone undertaking an abstract inquiry but not yet with true intention.” But her courage is indisputable, and her crisp narration, wry humor and critical insights make for a compelling read.
Witt documents the sexual subcultures she encounters, examining how technology has opened up new possibilities of ingenuity and self-expression. “Future Sex” delves into the world of live webcams, particularly the website Chaturbate, which one Swedish performer calls an “introvert’s paradise” that allows women to remain in complete control of each encounter. Witt interviews an enigmatic 19-year-old college student named Edith — a virgin who reads Walt Whitman aloud to her thousands of followers and describes herself as “Internet sexual.” The definition of sex as something essentially private and “sacred” breaks down as people experience economic and sexual autonomy through their devices.
“Future Sex” traces the origin of the word “polyamory,” following a trio of high-tech Millennials through their open relationships. Witt investigates the free love legacy of the 1960s and gives us an insider’s view of the new sexual freedom, a demographic that is young, urban, well-educated and welloff. The polyamorists we meet are earnest and self-confident, sharing “a genuine commitment to the idea that all things [are] possible.” Their world is alluring but exclusive, and the New Yorker’s view of Northern California is not always generous. Living in San Francisco is “like visiting a planet made of pastel marzipan,” Witt says, her tone verging on snarky when describing the beautiful people on Valencia Street.
Instead, the “primal carnival” of Burning Man is the book’s high point. Witt is at her best when immersed in a scene, writing fast-paced novelistic prose that draws us into the moment. After so much abstract inquiry, she opens up, lets go and becomes playful in the desert, eating caramel-corn marijuana with a guy named Lunar Fox. “Future Sex” transports us into this anticorporate bacchanal, so it’s a letdown to end on a decidedly sterile scene: a lunch of quinoa and green juice on the Facebook campus. “You got to get it while you can,” sang Janis Joplin in the Summer of Love, and maybe the lesson is to savor all the getting and the giving, no matter what the future will bring.