The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Americans Relinquish Sex for the Net

Writer Audacia Ray recently linked to a Reuters article on a study that purports to prove that Americans, increasingly, are forgoing sex for the Internet.

Hey, can you blame them? How often does sex involve hedgehogs, UFOs and Britney Spears? (Don’t answer that.)

What’s most interesting to me about the study is not what it finds but that it was treated as news. This study was conducted by advertising giant J. Walter Thompson, a company with over 8,500 employees and more than 300 officces in 87 countries. J. Walter Thompson serves 1,200 clients, including Pfizer, Shell, Nestle, Kellogg (Hi there, Johnny Boy!), and the United States Marine Corps. More to the point, apparently tired of that stodgy “J. Walter Thompson” name that was kicking around since 1877, they’ve mothballed their venerable moniker and reinvented themselves as the enormously hip “JWT,” flaunting what they got in a web site that’s a screaming nightmare of browser-crashing self-indulgence. Clearly, this is a company with its finger squarely on the pulse of technology (guess which finger?).

The Reuters article quoted JWT’s Ann Mack, whose title, “Director of Trend Spotting,” should ensure that you believe absolutely anything she says.

“The internet is taking away from offline activities such as sex, socialising face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines,” said [Mack]. “I don’t suppose their partners are too pleased about it.”

As Dacia points out, the URL of the Yahoo repost of the Reuters story ends with /technology_addiction1_dc, which is helpful of Yahoo, for those of us too dense to clue in to the article’s agenda right off the bat. All this enlightenment is, quite helpfully, illustrated with a picture of a guy typing. The caption? “A man uses a keyboard in an undated file photo.” And here I thought it was a picture of a Peruvian tap dancer.

Regardless of whether Ann Mack or the ghost of J. Walter Thompson has any qualifications to tell me whether my partner likes or doesn’t like me on the internet, the study, like most news stories about sex on the net, assume that meaningful sexual interactions don’t take place online. News stories like this discount the profound power of the net to bring provide new sexual experiences.

In her comments, Mack assumes respondents are partnered, and are staying up late to email, blog, or download music rather than going to bed and fucking their partners. She, and anyone who reports this garbage as news, puts forth the belief that there’s some profoundly important interaction that takes place in bed but never takes place anywhere else. They assume that fucking is categorically different than emailing, chatting or blogging, when in reality, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

Even assuming the study is accurate — and I’m doing that only for the sake of argument — who’s to say it matters? As far as I’m concerned, all the sexual variations one can sample online are worth a little sacrifice. But I’m not convinced there’s really any sacrifice involved. “Sex” and “the internet” are not binary choices — but what if they were? People choosing the internet “over” real-time, in-person sex could be doing so for one of a million reasons. Maybe the kind of sex they want is physically impossible, or inappropriate with their real-life partner. Maybe they don’t have a real-life partner; maybe they don’t even want one. Maybe they get more satisfaction from reading Wikipedia articles about African history, or watching videos of puppies, or playing online games more satisfying than having sex.

What troubles me most about this study, and the wider newswriting trend it engenders, is that it does what physicians, psychologists, politicians, and sexual partners have been doing forever: pathologizing new behaviors because they are different. Studies like this reported as “news” represent the worst kind of technophobia and, less obviously, a rampant terror of sexual variation. People are going online “instead” of having sex, we’re told, and “I don’t suppose their partners are too pleased about it.”

I don’t suppose Ann Mack has the faintest idea what my partner is or isn’t pleased about, so I wish JWT would go back to hawking corn flakes.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.