Future Sex

It's strange how the cultural moment say, eight years ago can feel so much more outmoded than two decades back. It's the narcissism of small differences, maybe, that made me recoil in irritation from this book. It's a micro-memoir, it's a piece of gonzo reporting about love and sex in a particular corner of the modern age: Silicon Valley in the years of optimism.

The author is a Googler living in the Bay Area. She finds herself at sea with the evolving landscape of relationships and dating. She asks good questions about where the free love moment has actually landed us. Do we have new, better models to follow in our love lives? Or are we just fucking it up in novel ways?

She goes some way in looking for answers. She looks at dating apps, the production of professional porn, chat girls, something called orgasmic meditation, sex parties, polyamory. She does in-person gonzo reporting. She reflects through the lens of her own relationships. All the while, there's a feeling building in me (no, not that kind), and it culminates in the Burning Man section.

God I hate these people. Yes, self-awareness pours off the page, about being a rich tech worker ruining San Francisco, ditto ruining Burning Man. It failed to inoculate me from the feeling that whatever the answers are to the cultural questions of the moment, I wish this distorted region of the West Coast wasn't treated like the laboratory of society. It's an idea generally in decline, and this book only makes me glad to see the back of the cultural era.