People are funny like that.....: Unzip American Sexuality and What Do You Find? Tech

Sex Drive Commentary by Regina Lynn Culture : Lifestyle

Unzip American Sexuality and What Do You Find? Tech

By Regina Lynn 03.14.08 | 7:50 PM

Brian Alexander investigates how Americans have sex in his new book, America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction.

When journalist Brian Alexander set out to investigate how Americans have sex, he didn't expect to be studying it through the lens of technology.

"I knew I was going to find that digital culture has changed the way people get sexually involved, but I surprised even myself at how true it really is," he says.

Alexander's new book, America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction found that you can't write about contemporary sexuality without bumping into technology.

Virtual worlds, chat rooms, social networking and Catholics using birth control -- sex is infused with tech at every turn.

Alexander is the Sexploration columnist at MSNBC.com and a contributing editor at Glamour magazine, and it sounds like his inbox looks a lot like mine. Like me, he noticed a shift in what readers were asking in the past year or so. More sophisticated queries ("Where can I learn more about safe ways to use electricity during sex?") were replacing questions about the basics ("If my husband wants me to put my finger in his ass, is he gay?").

Unlike me, he pitched a multimedia investigative series to find out why. The result is America Unzipped, which includes articles, online videos and discussion forums in addition to the book.

Alexander traveled all around the United States, delving into smaller communities and conservative regions as well as sexually progressive cities like Seattle and San Francisco, to uncover what we're really doing under the covers.

It turns out that Americans are not nearly as Puritanical, frightened, angry or perturbed as the religious groups and politicians waging the war on sex would have you believe.

We’re not even terribly bothered by the notion that technology has become an integral aspect of sexuality. In fact, "love and let love" is a much more widely held philosophy here than is generally assumed.

In the South, Alexander found that faith and sexual freedom can blossom side by side; plenty of Southern Baptists and Catholics see no conflict between their relationships with God and their choices to use birth control, sex toys, pornography or to have sex outside of marriage.

He tried his hand as a sex educator/retail clerk at an adult store in Tempe, Arizona for a week. ("The longer I worked there, the more I realized it's a very middle-class bourgeois thing to do, going to an adult store.") And as a Passion Parties assistant in the Midwest, he learned that mothers, daughters and sisters can sit comfortably around the living room to shop for arousal-enhancing gels and vibrating cock rings.

In Maryland, he spent time with a couple that uses Craigslist to find other people for group sex. "In five minutes she opened the laptop on the kitchen table, found responses to ads they'd placed, and decided who to meet up with," he says. "While it's not news that people can do that, to see people do it so easy and so quickly was almost startling to me."

Over and over again, Alexander's subjects told him that the internet had opened their eyes, dispelled their fears, given them new avenues for pleasure, and provided support as they figured out what they really wanted from sex.

(In the book, he confesses to reaching a point where he simply refuses to allow one more person to gush about the internet. "Isn't it possible," he muses, "that we're just bored?")

After touring the Adam & Eve toy factory in North Carolina, attending a fetish conference in Florida, watching a hardcore BDSM porn shoot in San Francisco, and taking in an all-kinks-welcome sex party in Seattle, Alexander concludes that while this explosion of sexual exploration is not hurting American culture, the culture that enables it may actually be hurting sex.

"I think we are living in ever more disconnected times without great senses of community, family, belonging," he says. "People go looking. Some turn to fundamentalist religious views. Some turn to phony tribalism -- I mean, really, white boys with Maori tribal tattoos? Come on.

"Turning to sex is at least as rational a response as religion. Maybe more so, because at least it is a connection with another human being. Sex is believable in a world which offers us very little to believe in anymore.

"But sex gets hurt when this response leads to a loss of subtlety, of romance and sex as an art form, a dance, a work of imagination."

And yet, by definition, we lock the investigator out of those subtle, romantic, imaginative spaces. The dance he speaks of may be too subtle for an observer to notice (especially amidst the sensory overload of a fetish ball or the extremely cerebral work of sex in virtual worlds). If you haven't experienced the subtleties, the art, the works of imagination that are particular to sex tech, can you learn to see them in others?

Alexander is skeptical about critics who suggest personal experience may be necessary to present a truly balanced chronicle of contemporary sexuality.