The Internet and Sexual and Moral Gray Zones
At the time that I knew Navarre, I suspected he was locally famous -- famous in places he spent time where English is not the first language -- but I never sought to press him for more information. If he had wanted to discuss it with me, he would have.
It was a private relationship. We were on a first name basis. If he was famous to any degree, I was likely a refuge from that, the only person in his life not trying to make drop or social climb.
I just wanted to get to know him and spend time with him and he wanted to get to me and spend time with me and we did that. We both understood that myriad factors made it unlikely we would meet in person.
The world doesn't really have rules worked out for the new social reality created by the existence of the Internet. Under the law, I doubt you could really charge him with infidelity or whatever for talking to a woman online and by phone.
Our current legal and moral framework is a dinosaur rooted in assumptions that you can only have an intimate relationship in person and that hasn't been true for some time. A large part of our expectations concerning fidelity are rooted in money, disease and pregnancy.
If you only know someone online or by phone, disease and pregnancy are not a risk. Money can be involved but doesn't have to be. You can largely keep money out of the equation if you know someone online in a way that is unlikely with a relationship in person.
In person, you will typically eat together and pursue other activities, like going to the theater. If it's an illicit affair, someone is likely paying for hotels.
I intentionally largely kept money out of the equation with Navarre and Tom. I did so consciously and intentionally because I am aware that men are expected to provide for the family and it's a form of betrayal or sabotage to bleed a married man for money as the side dish.
Historically, we tolerated a man having a side dish. We allowed a married man a means to get his emotional needs met and we don't anymore.
This is actively harmful to society. Men tend to have power and responsibilities and few real friends because of it. Typically, their wife or girlfriend is their only emotional outlet and I believe this fosters some very bad things.
It's also part and parcel of homophobic heteronormative culture. It assumes same sex relationships are platonic and opposite sex relationships are not and this does a lot of bad things, including closing doors career-wise for women.
I have a long history of having platonic friendships with men. I'm also not straight and I've thought a lot about the fact that I could have had a gay affair and had most people see it as a good friendship even while we hung all over each other in public, something I tended to do with all my friends in my teens.
I was asked if I was in a lesbian relationship because I and a friend from a German American family like mine walked around holding hands. Two women holding hands while walking together was extremely normal in my German American sun culture and it wasn't a signal of a sexual relationship. I routinely held hands while shopping with female relatives.
I saw a clip once on TV a long time ago about some business in some Asian country where men could get time alone with a woman in a room with a fence between them which significantly limited their physical interactions. She could dance for him or take her clothes off and to a limited degree make out and it wasn't illegal because it wasn't prostitution because they couldn't actually have intercourse.
Historically, we had traditions like bundling bags and other means to allow courting couples to spend time alone together and have privacy and not have sex. We have in many ways stripped modern peoples of the opportunity to pursue a genuinely intimate relationship socially, emotionally and sexually because we have cut out a lot of historical practices for crossing the gray zone in any relationship to get to the point where we really know and trust each other.
We have been handling the impact of tech ham handedly at best and frequently making it all downside and no upside. A teen girl can decide to send a photo to a boy as a safer way of getting closer to him than in person and be charged with creating and promoting child pornography.
We are currently wrestling with questions that can be personal catastrophes due to the existence of personal tech, such as teens sexting each other and sending each other sexy photos and being charged with promoting child pornography or crap like that. If the phones and apps did not exist, they would probably be showing each other their bits in person instead and (in many cases) this would be perfectly legal. Get a phone involved, suddenly one or both of them can potentially go to jail.
There is a substantial emotional component to sexual relationships and we are getting in the direction of removing healthy human emotional connection and it's causing a lot of problems.
Porn can be "addictive" because there is a significant emotional component to human sexuality and porn mostly gets a rise out of people by being shocking, which is why so much porn apparently revolves around social taboos (interracial, group scenes, barely legal in terms of age, etc). But the more you watch it, the more inured you become, so you need to move on to even more shocking things to get the same effect.I think people suggest relationships as a solution because emotional intimacy can get that same strong emotional response without needing to keep upping the ante in an unhealthy way.
We are, unfortunately, using tech to more extremely objectify and disempower women without recognizing that it also robs me of their humanity.
...globally, it is so common for women to be treated in a demeaning manner that many women view porn per se as demeaning to women. I do not. But I do think a great deal of porn is done in a fashion which is demeaning.
Most porn so strongly caters to male fantasy that some women turn to gay (male on male) porn and yaoi (a form of male on male gay erotic writing) to meet some of their needs. Porn intended for women is a budding industry. It has to be written and filmed differently. I have seen an interview with a woman director who talked about some of those differences. Most porn is strongly rooted in objectifying women in a way which denies their humanity -- in other words, denies that they have any needs of their own or are anything other than a vehicle for male satisfaction. It is a pretty demeaning stance.
There have now been several cases across the country where young people who either pose for, snap, or forward provocative or nude photos of other minors are being charged or threatened with felony child pornography.In the case of forwarding provocative or nude photos, I can see situations where that could be done with malicious intent and really harm someone. Depending upon the details of the case, I would be okay with throwing the book at someone for distributing photos that were never intended to be made public and which caused significant harm. I have heard of a case of Internet harassment that led to suicide or murder. So I think potential for real harm should not be laughed off entirely.Nonetheless, most of what I have read about teen sexting cases sounds completely insane.
We are generally trending towards the most hellfire and brimstone interpretations of Internet usage in sexual relationships instead of recognizing that while other harms are a serious risk, use of the Internet substantially changes the equation in ways most courts aren't really taking into consideration.
At one time, I was strongly in the camp of "lead them not into temptation" and felt obligated to leave no openings for male friends to feel warm towards me or be aware of my warm feelings towards them.
I had an affair and I read all the research I could get my hands on and contrary to popular memes, affairs don't destroy relationships. Dying relationships foster affairs.
Some people were just shocked when I announced my plans to divorce in some online spaces. Other people were not at all shocked and knew it was a longtime coming.
My marital problems were a private matter and I had no obligation to tell everyone I met every hiccup in my private life. It's not uncommon for people to begin looking for emotional support well before they are ready to file papers in court.
Tom was legally separated around five years prior to meeting me, but still living with his wife. Probably mostly because their youngest was three when he learned of his wife's infidelity and told her "My wife has left the island." to mean "We're through and there's no fixing this."
Odds are good a lot of people didn't know they were legally separated. So I changed my stance on giving all men the cold shoulder who seemed to be in a committed relationship. Things aren't always as they seem to the casual observer and what you hear socially may be not entirely accurate because it's a private matter.
Furthermore, the expectation that you can't even talk to a woman if you are a married man fosters abuse of men. It gives them no means to look for the emotional and social support they need.
Women tend to have a lot more friends and a lot more emotional outlets. I've had platonic friendships with men in part because those men needed a friend and emotional support and couldn't really find it among men.
There's a lot of data backing up the idea that if you want an emotionally supportive friendship, you need that person to be a woman. We get tasked from an early age with having social and emotional intelligence, like it or not, to the point where little girls on the autism spectrum are under diagnosed because girls are just expected to learn this stuff, full stop.
Men should be allowed to talk to women as friends, as coworkers, as neighbors and as long as we have this insane standard that if a man and woman talk, it automatically becomes a sexual relationship, that will remain self fulfilling prophecy because men get trained to only share emotionally with women they are sexually intimate with.
Footnote
The above quotes and every link in this piece are writing by me. I was initially Mz on Hacker News and I run multiple blogs.