The Walrus � o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 � Ten Years
Society
Hot Wired
Gay men are on the vanguard of the digital sexual revolution,
and the rest of us are not far behind. Are we satisfied yet?
by Michael Harris
Illustrations by Jillian Tamaki
y friend Dan often spends his evenings searching for sex through
the screen on his phone. Like many gay guys I know, he is un­
encumbered by debilitating prudery or a boyfriend (I suffer from
both conditions myself ). He is charming and handsome enough to
procure a little action in the real world if he wanted to — but Dan, like plenty
of others, is permanently logged on to one online tool or another ­designed
to help him get laid.
Gay men have always looked for sex through a filter. In the past, our ­hunting
grounds were almost exclusively limited to designated bars, bathhouses, and
empty parks. Today that collection of filters includes our laptops and phones.
Neighbourhood pubs and dance clubs are steadily being replaced by c­ hattering
arenas in the cloud.
A little while ago, Dan was talking with a guy on a website called ­Manhunt
whom he had known (through his online avatar, at least) for two years. ­Driven
to action at last, Dan asked him out for dinner. “Sorry,” came the reply, “­only
interested in hookups.” Fair enough, thought Dan, and he moved along. A few
weeks later, though, he noticed that the fellow had changed his profile so it
now read, “Looking for a long-term relationship.” Dan rallied and asked him
out again. This time, the man said he was only interested in getting together if
Dan could provide an additional player for what’s known as a “tag team” event.
M
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The Walrus � o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 � Ten Years
Michael Harris � H o t W i r e d
Looking for sex online is hardly a fringe activity. On a single Sunday last fall,
Grindr users sent 37,435,829 messages of love, lust, and denial.
For many of us, the days begin and end with a consoling look at a phone or a
­laptop. We are on constant alert for c­ onnection — and sexual connection is prime.
Dan related this to me while frowning
i­ nto a cup of Earl Grey. He might have
encountered such erotic flippancy in any
number of off-line venues, but as we export more of our sex lives online it seems
there has been a correspondent crowding
of casual sexual availability (and sexual rejection, too). Since websites like Dudesnude and Manhunt picked up steam in
the early 2000s, men like Dan have been
able to order in their sex (or be ordered in
themselves) as easily as a pizza. We are
permanently ready.
For a dramatic illustration of our future
sex lives, look no further than the smart
phone application Grindr, launched in
2009. The app alerts men to the proximity (and sexual inclinations) of other men,
not while they’re in a seedy bar, but while
they’re walking their Rottweiler, or chatting
with their mom at a nice café. It is convenience itself: a person’s phone is constantly
­replenished with a dozen miniature photos
of smiling faces (or other body parts), and
a fellow can click and chat with other guys,
note that they’re only 100 metres away,
and then arrange what was once called
“a discreet encounter.” This is hardly a
fringe activity: more than four million
men have the app on their phones, and
it’s now used in nearly 200 countries. On
a single Sunday in the fall of 2012, for example, users sent 37,435,829 messages of
love, lust, and denial.
Taken together, these websites and apps
have made a permanent bathhouse of our
surroundings. Sexual frames of mind once
relegated to special environments are no
longer thus bound, and so the bathhouse
brain, primed for immediate satisfaction,
becomes our everyday brain. If I’m sitting
in a sun-dappled park reading Jane ­Austen
and suddenly take up the idea that I would
like some action right now, it’s only my
own starched manners that will stop me.
The Internet’s ability to accelerate sexual pursuit, to bypass traditional courting,
has plunged us i­ nto what some consider a
bacchanalian frenzy. Certainly, gay men
are a good group to point at if one is in a
moral panic: a recent study in Vancouver
found that 90.2 percent of gay guys aged
thirty and over have looked for hookups
online. One friend of mine, Ty, often manages his sex life from his iPad, his laptop,
and his iPhone, all at once. “I’ll change
my profile and my attitude and my image,
based on the logic of the particular website or app,” he explained to me. “It definitely has created a kind of obsession. Not
so much with the guy I’m going to meet,
but with the sensation of being desired.”
Ty, being Japanese, has a­ lso encountered
racism online (the words “No Asians” are
blazoned across some Grindr profiles). “It
often feels exclusionary and injuring,” he
told me. “But it’s something I cannot not
want to use if I want to fuck.”
Gay male culture has evolved to be well
suited to this new reality. Guys even a few
years younger than me (I’m thirty-three)
don’t grasp that there was a time, a very
recent time, when homosexual lust was
pathologized and criminalized; long b
­ efore
computer codes, gay men used codes of
dress and speech to identify one another.
Unless queer people allowed themselves
to be absorbed by straight culture, they
could realize no concrete gains in their
­relationships — there was no chance to pass
on wealth or raise a child — so sex existed
only for itself, and against an antagonistic
world. Then, in the ’80s, via the trauma of
AIDS, the invisible gay male became fully
visible. Our emergence i­ nto society was
accomplished by a disease that immediately shuttered what it revealed.
92
All of that has changed, and continues to
change, but those themes of isolation and
obscured connections, and not just male
horniness, may explain why we are now
the vanguard of the sexual-­technological
­revolution. We know so well the transit
­between an anonymous search and the
final meeting of strange yet familiar bodies. To us, this is not so uncanny.
That said, we’re only the first wave.
Straight people are quickly remodelling
their sex lives, too. Along with selling used
sofas and renting apartments, ­Craigslist,
the massive global classified website,
has lively sections devoted to the proffering of sexual trysts. Neatly divided by
orientation, the site’s casual encounters
pages overflow with gentlemen declaring themselves “fit, hung, ready to please,”
and ladies demurring, “Please have good
­hygiene.” Meanwhile, Chatroulette links
random strangers from Beijing to Bogotá
via webcam feeds — which inevitably led
to the ubiquitous roulette flashers, men
who masturbate before the camera in the
hopes of titillating/appalling female viewers. An RJMetrics report stated that one in
eight users on Chatroulette is broadcasting ­R‑rated content.
These forums may be tawdry and voyeuristic, but even innocuous connections
made on Facebook often belie a sexual
pursuit (its progenitor, Facemash, was a
game in which Harvard students rated
their classmates’ attractiveness). E
­ xplicitly
or otherwise, mainstream technologies
are now integral to the game. Teenagers
send homemade porn to one another via
their phones, while apps like S
­ napchat
­encourage risqué photo sharing, b
­ ecause
they promise to automatically delete
­images — although, naturally, this turned
out to be untrue. Even the most public of
broadcast technologies, Twitter, can produce a sex scandal when a figure such as
­former US representative Anthony W
­ einer
­decides to send explicit photos of himself
to f­ ollowers of interest.
This is not a question of simply transferring off-line behaviour — meeting via newspaper classifieds, for instance, or picking
up a stranger in a bar — onto the Internet.
Yes, we’ve turned every new broadcast
technology ­into a beacon for the lonely
(the first printed personals were created a
mere fifty years after the invention of the
modern newspaper), but no, the Internet is
not just an extension of what came before.
Surveys conducted in 1980, and again in
1992, demonstrated that less than 1 ­percent
of the US population was then meeting
through newspaper ads. Today one in five
relationships begin online. ­According to a
2010 BBC World Service report spanning
nineteen countries, nearly a third of us
now consider the Internet a decent place
to find a mate.
For many, the days begin and end with
a consoling look at a phone or a laptop.
We are on constant alert for connection — and sexual connection is prime. Our
technologies offer something irresistible:
a shortcut between desire and consummation. They grant us twenty-four-hour
access to an alternately frustrating and exhilarating pool of sexual potential, and a
far larger scope of search. Online connections are, in sum, fast food and ­essential
nourishment in one. But amid this smorgasbord of sexual broadcasting, emboldened as we are by the possibility of getting
what we want whenever we want it, I wonder whether all of these tech-­derived sexual gains eclipse the notion that something
essential has been taken away.
n 1965, Lewis Altfest, an accountant, and his computer whiz buddy,
Robert Ross, created Project TACT
(Technical Automated Compatibility Testing), a commercial dating service that, like
the descendants it would spawn, relied
on the inputting of personal information.
­Customers would pay $5 and fill out a questionnaire, which was then run through an
IBM 1400 Series computer equipped with
an algorithm that enabled Altfest and Ross
to find matches for lonely hearts.
They were keenly aware that computeraided dating could be seen as both nerdy
and déclassé, so for months they walked
the streets of New York’s Upper East Side,
scouting for upscale singles. To doormen,
they explained that they were working on a
i
graduate research project; once shown ­into
the lobby, they made their way to the wall
of mailboxes. Whenever one had two different names on it, they assumed the occupants were single and added those names
to their list. “It was a tailored ­approach,”
Altfest told me. “If I do say so myself, it
was very sophisticated.”
Once they knew who was rich and single, they declared their TACT program an
“East Side experiment,” something that
­only residents of the right neighbourhood
could join. “We restricted it to the poshest area in the city, and sent personalized
­invitations to all the single people there.
We said, This is an experiment, and you’d
be doing us a favour if you participated.
You obviously don’t need a date. You’re
simply helping us out.” The usual return
on a direct mail advertising program like
that is 1 percent; Altfest and Ross got close
to 25 percent.
The race to translate human desire i­ nto
ones and zeros had begun. At the same
time, a group of Harvard kids was pushing Operation Match, which used computers to identify compatible couples from a
bank of college students who had self-­rated
their attractiveness and intelligence and
provided a list of qualities they were seeking in a partner. Every new communication technology — from the printing press
to the telephone — has been harnessed by
the horny people of the world, but those
students with their lists of tech-­sanctified
lovers were experiencing something quite
new. Apparent in the infancy of online
­dating were the first intimations of a population in love with off-loading romantic
decisions to a yenta algorithm. What a
strong impulse that would turn out to be:
the ­desire to have one’s desires directed.
Emerging as it did during the s­ exual
revolution of the ’60s, TACT played off
fresh, even courageous social mores.
­Dating, courtship, and sex were all becoming more liberally defined at the precise
moment when computers were broadening
options for interpersonal connection. By
the early ’90s, AOL introduced chat rooms
where users could cyber-flirt; soon after,
sites like Match.com created m
­ athematical
93
formulas to pair singles up. The romantic revolution would deliver us from the
­silencing odds of our old social circles ­into
a highly managed crowd of potentials.
The advent of GPS-enabled phones has
made it possible to take the search outside and ­into real time. To get a picture of
the burgeoning marketplace for online
hookups, I sat down to lunch with Morris
­Chapdelaine, a sexy, muscled, fast-talking
man, about as far from tech nerd as one can
get. He is the executive editor of a new app
for gay men called GuySpy, which, from its
headquarters in White Salmon, Washington, welcomed its millionth user this June.
GuySpy, like Grindr, allows men to find
each other using GPS, but it fashions itself
as a social network, too, complete with
news stories, blogs, and a community of
users. It ­also pushes established privacy
boundaries by accessing mapping systems
and pinpointing the exact street corner
where your soon-to-be lover is loitering.
Midway through our meal, Chapdelaine
had his phone out and was flipping through
nearby men. “He’s cute . . . He’s cute . . . ”
The point is unbridled freedom and
access, commensurate with the expanding freedoms and access enjoyed by gay
men in general. “Gay bars today,” said
­Chapdelaine, “they aren’t even trying.
They just paint it black, offer some bad
drinks. And you know what? They’re over.
Guys want to go to the nice bars, the nice
restaurants. You want to be able to hang
The Walrus � o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 � Ten Years
Michael Harris � H o t W i r e d
Mobile sex apps are more than erotic fast food. Their use is revolutionary,
a way for sexual minorities to stake out territory previously denied to them.
Women tire of monogamous relationships more quickly than men do.
By this reckoning, they are great candidates for casual online hookups.
Their use could be a revolutionary act, a
way for sexual minorities to stake out territory previously denied to them.
Why stop there? Apps could inject this
revolutionary attitude toward sex — overt,
open, casual — beyond gay culture and ­into
the mainstream. The question is, can the
bathhouse brain work for straight people
(and lesbians)? Would this approach to sex
even be tenable? According to Chapdelaine,
it is inevitable; he argues that his app is the
future, like it or not: “Ten years from now,
this is going to be an integral part of everyone’s life, gay or straight.”
h is b r i n gs u s to the heterosexual hitch: the female question.
Do women want this revolution? In
2011, American neuroscientists Ogi Ogas
and Sai Gaddam published their analysis of
the online behaviour of more than 100 million men and women around the world (eat
your heart out, Alfred Kinsey). Ogas says
that, indeed, women’s preferences are why
heterosexual sex culture is so different
from gay men’s. “Quite frankly,” he told
me, “an app like Grindr shows us what all
men would do if women weren’t involved.”
His position seems to be confirmed by examples of Grindr-esque ­efforts where men
are not involved at all: Qrushr Girls, a lesbian variation of the app launched in 2010,
attracted a mere 50,000 users in three
months, then failed.
This runs counter to the anecdotes I hear
from my frankly game lesbian friends. Over
lunches and dual-mommy baby showers,
I’ve been told how they are just as libidinally manic as any man, but it would be a disservice to pretend that women across the
sexual spectrum don’t deal with a far more
fraught experience of casual sex. For starters, there is the long-standing censure of
female sexuality. Then there are the more
concrete dangers of picking up a guy from
the bar or the Internet, the ambient threat
of rape and other forms of violence. There
are STDs (women are more likely to be infected with HIV by men than vice versa)
and unwanted pregnancies. Not until the
’60s, when the birth control pill was introduced and then later when abortion was
t
out anywhere with your straight friends.
This app lets them do that.”
He’s on to something: I spoke ­recently
with Terry Trussler at Vancouver’s
­C ommunity-Based Research Centre,
whose latest study compiled surveys
from 8,600 gay men. He found that nearly
three-quarters of young men are dissatisfied with designated gay spaces, preferring
to roam outside village ghettos. Thirty-six
percent of those under thirty used their
cellphones to find casual sex (compared
with 18 percent of older men). According
to Trussler’s report, “Internet and smart
phones, not bars and cafés, have become
the main means of connection between
men under thirty.”
Traditionally, when gay men left their
ghettos, they were effectively neutered.
You couldn’t know who was gay at a mainstream venue, so sexual advances became
problematic at best, and a physical risk at
worst. Today when gay men go out i­­ nto the
larger world, argues Chapdelaine, technologies like GuySpy point out the queer
potential of any space. In other words,
you can make a four-person gay bar out
of a forty-person restaurant, but only, of
course, if everyone is using the same technology. By this logic, mobile sex apps could
be something more than erotic fast food.
94
decriminalized, could most women maintain control of their own reproduction, and
thus manage a casual sex life of any sort.
Besides these barriers, reports of the
nonexistence of the female sex drive do
appear to be exaggerated. In his muchgabbed-about new book, What Do Women
Want?, Daniel Bergner outlines the emerging scientific truth that women, far from
being the prudes that a male-­dominated
academy has imagined, are just as inclined
to promiscuity as men are. Indeed, it appears that the old story about women being uninterested in sex is more related
to the fact that they tire of monogamous
relationships more quickly than men do.
Women, by this reckoning, are actually
great candidates for apps like Grindr and
GuySpy. It may be societal pressures and
safety threats alone, rather than an innate
frigidity, that keeps women from hooking up online.
Whatever engineered them, the blockades between women and casual sex
encounters have thus far kept online
technologies from becoming ubiquitous
for straights. Attempts to create hookup
apps for heterosexuals are almost platonic by comparison. One, called Blendr (yes,
produced by the folk behind Grindr), is
making a go, with more than 182 million
­members, except that it seems ashamed of
its intentions. It bills itself as “a great place
to meet fun new people,” which would be
a great tag for a location-based social app
for kindergartners, but less so for consenting adults in search of a quickie.
On Grindr, a photo of a man’s naked
torso is accompanied by blunt descriptions of his weight, preferred sexual position, and HIV status. When I scour the
Blendr site, though, I learn that “Brittany”
likes Hugo Boss and the movie Titanic ; and
“Anna” wants to go rollerblading with a guy
who is older than twenty-five. The most
sultry posting I can find is from “Preal”
(a snowboarding fan), who “wants to cuddle with a girl, 25–30.” So much for Blendr’s
casual sex life.
Perhaps future generations of heteros
will be more sexually adventurous. At least
there seems to be a growing comfort with
announcing sexual desire. One study of
nearly a thousand Texan high school students found that more than a quarter had
used their phones to send someone a naked
photo of themselves; that rose to nearly
50 percent when the question was posed
to those eighteen and older. (On Grindr,
too, the digital natives form the largest
­user group, and are most comfortable with
enabling the app’s geo-location software.)
But that’s not the whole picture.
Reading media reports of grade eight
children sending each other naked selfies leads to the gut feeling that digital life
must be an invitation to a hyper-­sexualized
reality. However, gossipy accounts of adolescent sex lives do not necessarily translate to what is actually going on. Statistics
Canada conducted a N
­ ational Population
Health Survey in 1996–97, immediately
before the Internet’s proliferation, and
followed with similar surveys in 2003 and
2005, after teenagers had gained ­access
to complex online worlds. A comparison shows that post-Internet teens were
having less physical sex than their pre-­
Internet peers: the number of adolescents who reported having intercourse
dropped from 47 percent to 43. A more
recent ­StatsCan study found that ­between
2003 and 2­ 009–10, there was a negligible
change in the number of sexually active
young people. The only significant development is that those who are having
sex are now more likely to use condoms,
and the average age when we lose our virginity (seventeen) has remained about
the same for twenty years. The next generation, then, may be producing more
sexual signals without actually having
more sex.
It remains to be seen whether straight
people will catch up to gay culture. For
now, the gap remains wide. The majority of
gay male personals on Craigslist are hookup ads, which is only true of this demographic. Still, a small portion of straight
people have had their taste of the new
zeitgeist. I chose a typical day (Tuesday,
Novem­ber 20, 2012) and a typical American city (Louisville, Kentucky, population 1.2 ­million) to check out heterosexual
posts on C
­ raigslist’s casual encounters
pages. Eighteen were from women, and
230 were from men, meaning almost thirteen times as many men were looking for
casual sex. While both men and women
used graphic language in their ads, about
one-quarter of the men attached pictures
of their genitals, while none of the women
­included photos.
Even if the numbers don’t balance out
yet, it is refreshing that some straight people
can take so enthusiastically to the ­waters
of online hookups. What’s unclear, though,
is whether all of this sexual activity (or
posturing, anyway) is making us happier
and more satisfied. As we fill in the longing that characterizes so much of history’s
erotic art, love songs, and p
­ oetry with the
constant connection of digital technology, what fine yearnings have we made
extinct? Craigslist, sexting, and porn are
superb dismantlers of sexual mystery,
but I don’t know that desire without mystery, without absence, is quite enough
for me.
bsence is difficult, even tor­
tuous, it’s true. The alternative, the
online world we have erected to fill
it, is uniquely adapted to excite our bodies
and minds. This is evident in the physiological responses we have when our electronic devices indicate signs of ­connection.
A
95
When we receive a text message, our heart
rate increases; 83 percent of us, according
to one study, even hold our breath. As Gary
Wilson pointed out in Psychology Today in
2011, the dopamine rush we get from viewing porn online is often greater than that
induced by real sex, or even old-fashioned
magazine porn, ­because all of that clicking and scrolling exploits the searching
and seeking drive that served our huntergatherer ­ancestors. “The Internet makes
possible a never-­ending stream of Tabasco
sauce,” he notes, “in the form of dopamine spikes.”
Beyond these dizzying highs, Paul East­
wick, a psychologist at the University of
Texas, points out a more insidious problem: our own misconceptions. While discussing matchmaking sites, he explained
to me that “the things that appeal to us in
an online profile are not what appeals to
us face to face. We’re very good at finding
profiles that match our idea of what we’re
looking for, but people aren’t terribly good
at knowing what they actually want, so on
average you’re going to be disappointed.”
That disappointment makes sense when
we consider the simplicity of the game:
“You’re making this cool analysis of a person based on how they look and a list of
interests they’ve posted on their profile.
But a picture won’t tell you how it feels
to be with them; and similar interests, it
turns out, aren’t at all a good predictor of
whether a relationship will last.” Furthermore, the very volume of choice is itself a
problem. “Often,” Eastwick told me, “our
ability to stick with a single partner is actually undermined by taking the experience online. You’re presented with all of
these profiles, and the sheer number is
problematic. It keeps you from engaging
and can make it difficult to get to date five.”
Of course, Eastwick is assuming you
want to get to date five. Plenty of us go
online to shed the shackles of traditional
dating and relationship expectations. Consider AshleyMadison.com, which helps its
19 million users arrange extramarital affairs. If the business of online hookups has
a bogeyman, it is Noel Biderman, president
and CEO of Toronto’s Avid Life Media Inc.,
The Walrus � o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 � Ten Years
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The digital world is uniquely adapted to physically excite us. When we receive a
text message, our heart rate increases, and 83 percent of us even hold our breath.
which owns ­A shleyMadison.com and
half a dozen other sites that unabashedly
satisfy the needs of specific populations:
CougarLife.com, for example, helps
young men meet divorcees and single
moms, while EstablishedMen.com helps
“perfect princesses” find older wealthy
guys.
The sites’ traffic charts the ebb and
flow of secret human appetites: Monday mornings are the busiest time at
Ashley­Madison.com, as disappointing
weekends lead to cheating; late Saturday and Sunday nights are busiest for
­CougarLife.com, as drunken older women
(and drunken young bucks) return home,
alone, from the bar; and every dating and
casual sex site sees a major spike the day
after New Year’s, as the world’s population makes a bleary resolution that surely it can do better.
While we spoke, Biderman moved
about his twelfth-floor office at Toronto’s
­RioCan Yonge Eglinton Centre (which has
become a social media hub, housing outlets of Facebook and LinkedIn as well).
He is a charismatic man, smart and guyish. His rationale, surprisingly, matches
the harm reduction argument used to justify safe injection sites: whether you like it
or not, this activity is going to happen, so
we might as well mitigate the risk. “Before
the Internet, most affairs had to be with
someone in your circle, someone at work
or your sister’s husband,” he said. “That’s
way more damaging.”
I asked him where online hookup technology is headed, and he laid out a bold
vision. “We’re going to have to build something that goes beyond self-representation,”
he explained, citing the myriad ways our
subjective hang-ups keep us from accurately representing ourselves. Biderman’s
argument, akin to Eastwick’s, is that we
don’t know, or won’t admit, what we really
want. Instead, we should open up access to
the minutiae of our lives (your web search
hist­ory, that video you emailed your dad,
the music you listen to) so helpful algorithms can do their job properly.
“If we can use science to make our relationships more successful, then that’s a
positive,” he told me. “We need to get over
this idea that infringing on privacy is such
a problem. Does it matter if a computer knows what you watch on television?”
Here is Simone de Beauvoir on chivalric love: “The knight departing for new
adventures offends his lady, yet she has
­nothing but contempt for him if he remains
at her feet. This is the torture of the impossible love.” Tomorrow’s lovers will have a
hard time understanding that. All of their
knights will sit, forever, at their feet.
Gay or straight, in our sex lives we
feel most intensely the distance between
­online abstractions and our lived reality.
The crowded, sense-depriving focus of an
online encounter is the absolute o
­ pposite
of the spare, sense-gorged experience of
cruising the sidewalk at dusk, or chatting up a stranger in a club. And isn’t it
often a person’s weird, unaccountable
qualities (like their Woody W
­ oodpecker
laugh) that charms us, drawing us to those
who might not even be our type? Will
­future ­generations — mired in ever-more-­
complex ­variants of perma-­readiness — find
it difficult to experience these u
­ nexpected
­attractions for themselves?
We might grumble to our grand­children
don’t care who knows that I’ve about the days when people picked up
seen all of Modern Family twice, but lovers from sparsely populated bars with
I do care very much whether my the same antiquarian fustiness a fifteenthlove life is crowd sourced. Yet how could century scribe must have felt when Gutenit not be, the more I become enveloped berg’s printing press spewed forth those
by online processes? If all of us do end up millions of bound volumes. There is a
browsing for sexual partners the same way sad, rare quality to this nostalgia: we will
we hunt for a decent sushi joint, though, ­only lament what was lost for this tiny
will our true sexual potential have been re- ­moment in time. None of us ever asks for
vealed by the magic wand of Grindr and our ­deprivation back.
the rest? Or will it have been masked by
the static of the medium itself? Will the
t w o u ld b e disingenuous to
omnipresence of choice, in other words,
omit my own sexual career from all
block us from the absences that so often
of this. My experiences are timid,
fuel our desires?
but, like 55 million others, I broke down
What we lack, now, is lack. The Greek one lonely evening and created a profile
word “eros” denotes want, lack, and “de- on the dating site Plenty of Fish. The ­spotty
sire for they who are absent.” Perhaps ­results bottomed out with an ornery gradusome innate quality of our search for ate student whose photos were the most
sex and intimacy demands the separa- generous thing about him.
tions that precede our meetings. I’m not
After I had bought us a couple coffees,
arguing for abstinence here, nor even for we started walking the seawall bordering
monogamy, but it seems clear that our Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and he grew
online technologies are pushing us to- ­increasingly irate at the confusion of bodies
ward a state of constant access, and that around us. A child in its mother’s arms let
is not necessarily the only ingredient in out a holler of joy when a flock of birds flew
erotic desire.
by, and my companion pulled a sour face.
i
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Without the invention of writing,
communications would not exist
in the many forms it does today.
Among the earliest evidence of
writing are stone inscriptions
such as this, dedicated to the
goddess Nimintaba at the
temple at Ur, 2094–2047 BCE.
TEXT
MESSAGE?
i
96
PRESENTED BY
EXHIBIT PATRON
MOHAMMAD AL ZAIBAK AND FAMILY
COMMUNITY PARTNER
EXHIBIT PATRON
YOUNG PATRONS CIRCLE
Canadian Arab Institute
PROMOTIONAL PARTNER
MEDIA PARTNERS
The ROM is an agency of the
Government of Ontario.
GOVERNMENT PARTNER
EXHIBITION PARTNER
Mesopotamia is presented by the British Museum in collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum. Supported
by the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Travelling Exhibitions Indemnification Program /
Avec l’appui du ministère du Patrimoine canadien par le biais du Programme d’indemnisation pour les expositions
itinérantes au Canada. Foundation tablet, Steatite, Ur, 2094-2047 BCE, © The Trustees of the British Museum.