Future Sex
Emily Witt
[Farrar, Straus, and Giroux]
Though Future Sex would appear to be about sex, it’s more of a commentary on its apparatus; on the lengths we go to in order to distract ourselves from a lack of sex itself. Welcome to the techno-utopian Pleasuredome: the land of the “Manhunt” app and “Bong Water Butt Babes”, of acid trips and orgy tents. Technology draws bodies together, but for all the hook-up apps and teledildonics, the virtual grasps at the body in vain.
Witt moves between investigation and dispassionate personal commentary. There are condensed histories of websites (Match.com began as “Electronic Classifieds”, while Manhunt began as a phoneline) along with excursions to Facebook HQ, Burning Man and a Kink.com video shoot. In a sense this is all yet another tale of the decline of San Francisco, of the rise of the $15 locally-sourced “heirloom coffee” and of a bizarre brand of anarcho-puritanism which allows for anonymous sex and acid trips, but which forbids alcohol and gluten. The essays repeatedly sidestep both descriptions of actual sex and any mention of love. On the latter, drugs replicate it, festivals briefly conjure it, but ultimately “relationships” become a canvas for self-obsession.
With every chapter we notice this estrangement, a retreat into the self and the laptop screen, and Future Sex is marked by a sense of irreparable spiritual exhaustion. Witt’s great achievement is to lull the reader into this same comfortable nihilism. The message in Future Sex is that there might be no future at all.
Words – Roisin Kiberd
