CHAPTER 12
The Wild Blue Web
It was hard to envision its enormity.
At the Web’s inception, few outside the tech world realized it would be seen as one of the signal events in computer science. Or that it would ignite an information revolution. Or that it would make it possible for an individual or a group or a government to communicate with billions.
Even fewer foresaw that the Web would become the largest wank-off machine in creation. Though there were inklings.
People browsing for sexual content, like those searching for illicit love, guarded their anonymity and frequented hard-to-find addresses, often at night. Like those caught up in affairs, they could become obsessive, protective of their time in the zone. Like those donning drag, they assumed new names and created parallel identities. The tech writer (and self-described nethead) J. C. Herz would make the point in her 1995 book Surfing on the Internet that the wired universe offered “gender options that don’t physically exist. For instance, the LambdaMOO virtual world gives users a choice of male, female, neutral, neither, royal (the royal ‘we’), and the natty, insouciant ‘splat’ (*) option.” Women and men would assume cross identities: a member of one sex, disguised as another, would engage in cybersex with Net partners of either gender, or both, depending on the mood and circumstance. This elasticity unleashed a new freedom to experiment, fantasize, and role-play.
As the digital age bloomed, sexual variety reigned. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, cybersex had a limited connotation: virtual-reality kink. VR sex, theoretically, involved people in proximity or in distant locations donning special suits and/or cybergloves and/or headgear, festooned with wires, and then remotely diddling their partners and sharing a simulated sexual experience, sometimes accompanied by SFX audiovisuals. (CGI—computer-generated imagery—was a huge gaming and cinematic breakthrough in the 1990s.) Cybersex was sim stim. For a time it went by the cringe-worthy name “teledildonics.” And at the time, it was pure hokum. (In 1997, Mike Myers, with a debt to Wilhelm Reich—and to films such as Barbarella, Putney Swope, Sleeper, and Liquid Sky—introduced “fembots” to explore the concept of robo-shagging in his Swinging Sixties spoof Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. But for a species that now got its babies from test tubes, why shouldn’t a geek try to get his ya-yas out by way of Alpha Centauri?)1
Back then, it was called cybersex. Or virtual sex. Or netsex. And much of it, as discussed earlier, was emerging from Usenet and newsgroups. In the fantasy forums called MUDs, it was sometimes called TinySex, as Sherry Turkle would note in her 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, discussing early “computer-mediated screen communications for sexual encounters. An Internet list of ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ describes the latter activity… as people typing messages with erotic content to each other, ‘sometimes with one hand on the keyset, sometimes with two.’”
Along came CD-ROMs and DVDs—interactive discs that could be slipped into a disk drive or game console—which allowed users to issue simple commands and choose various options or outcomes in their sexual entertainment. There were Internet forums where people could post erotic stories (or add to others’ stories)—many of which would evolve into multipart series—that would attract tremendous followings. There were hatchling websites that stole printed porn pictures and posted them as their own; sites that featured virtual strip blackjack; sites where online models popped up in tiny matchbook-size peepholes, responding to keyboard commands (“How about removing those fishnets?”). The Internet began to micropander to every type of sexual connoisseur.
In the larval stages of the Web, as Time’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt would attest, crusaders against cybersmut would infiltrate newsgroups that trafficked in nude photos and type in screeds with subject headings such as YOU WILL ALL BURN IN HELL! And even if websites had entry screens that required users to click on a button to admit they were over eighteen years of age, many minors clicked with abandon. Soon politicians and parents everywhere were talking about ways to filter the content to protect kids, and to punish offending content providers and hosting services.2
As the medium welcomed faster modems and less glitchy video, in marched the credit cards. Electronic payments—at the time a new method of consumer, banking, and business transaction—accelerated access to sexual content. At first, the casual browser had trepidations: Do I really want my credit card information out there? Do I trust potentially shady merchants and faceless content providers?3 Shouldn’t I worry about an entry on my statement with the words: VHS Tape: Bordello of Blood? In fact, consumers late into the 1990s generally preferred shopping via catalog over shopping online. As hard as it is to conceive of today, many people would compare prices on the Web, then drive to the mall to make their purchases. And when it came time to pay for virtual or mail-order transactions, customers, according to the marketing trade publication Brandweek, favored reading their credit card info to telephone salespeople, or sending checks or money orders by mail or express shipping companies.
New e-commerce methods, along with a robust Clinton-era economy, would make the Internet a clearinghouse for products, services, and hard-to-find items (Amazon and eBay launched in 1995, as did Craigslist, which began as a free emailed newsletter. PayPal, the e-commerce service, would premiere in 1998.) By increments, consumers saw fewer and fewer downsides to using their credit cards for Web sales, especially when it came to paying extra for adult material. In time, of course, an ever-greater share of the online porn market became free or shared or user-generated—or all three. According to Forbes, by the end of the ’90s there were half a million sex sites, with one hundred fresh ones popping up each week, many of them very profitable very quickly due to the sales of ads, products, and links to spicier paywall-protected areas. Come 2000, the porn industry’s total yearly take was some $2 billion in Web business alone.
The pioneers of the computer industry were largely a boys’ club, with a few exceptional exceptions.4 Men dominated the institutions that supported the industry. The teams writing code skewed male. (They were later dubbed “brogrammers.”) And while there were significant, accomplished women in tech, up through the ’90s dot-com surge, their numbers were small. (As of this writing, the workforces at the most influential tech giants—companies already under fire for a lack of racial diversity, especially in management—remain about two-thirds male, with men dominating the executive ranks.) As a result, gender bias has been coded into the industry, its culture, and, inevitably, the digital media it produces.5
During the ’80s and ’90s, some serious coin had rushed into the world that built the virtual world. Twenty- and thirty-somethings—mainly of the male persuasion—became flush with preferred stock, drove sleek cars, and lived in sprawling, spartan abodes. (A few tech tykes that decade were worth a billion—with a b—before they turned thirty-five.) Despite the nerd quotient, the computer industry scene on both seaboards attracted those who were not altogether tethered to conventional norms. Their work hours were ungodly. Their attention to physical fitness was dubious. Their affinity for gadgets was even more pronounced than their nontechie peers. But many were bright, intense, and charmed to their bones with the knowledge that they were apostles of a new medium that would drive the culture.
A not insignificant number of these young men soon became chick magnets. They operated under the laws of sexual physics: a body that has been long at rest will sometimes wobble wildly when suddenly set in motion. “Give a guy a few stock options and a DSL line and suddenly his Asperger-y tendencies become adorable,” says Abby Ellin, who in the ’90s covered the dot-com boom (and its subsequent bust) for the New York Times. “It was the ultimate aphrodisiac. Women suddenly realized that their mothers had been right: that AV guy with the giant key ring, that Dungeons & Dragons–playing geek, really did have a lot of potential—and he would reach it soon. The guys, of course, were well aware of (not to mention thrilled with) their newfound desirability. Talk about revenge of the nerds.”
Sian Edwards-Beal, a television and film producer, was drawn to New York City’s so-called Silicon Alley in the late ’90s, working for a time on a pilot for an unrealized TV series, tentatively titled In Bed with Manhattan. She remembers the wilder nights among her friends and colleagues. “The Internet parties were a bunch of geeks who’d never had sex,” she says, remembering scenes in the back rooms at soirees thrown by the folks from places like Nerve, the online portal devoted to sex, culture, and human interaction. “It was the first time math-and-science geeks could get fucked insanely they had so much money. And the Net was all about allowing you to meet up—sometimes sexually. The dot-com parties in SoHo, party after party, had this naughty underground feeling to it and the Internet had this Brave New World sense of vision in the same way that Kerouac did.
“A close friend of mine went to one party,” she recalls, “where people were making out in [pitch] black rooms with cameras [trained on them]. It was voyeuristic. Technology created a new way to see sex—and it was exciting. [I remember being told,] ‘You’ve gotta meet Jack. He’s getting laid more than anybody in Manhattan.’” Geeks became, if not sexy, then at least worth the effort—for the mental stimulation… and for a glimpse of the aerie where the future was hatching.
Some guys in tech, of course, exhibited little interest in making sexual connection. These were the e-monks. Many were driven by a nobler hunger than the erotic, one that seemed to derive not from flesh but from quicksilver. Their drives appeared to be neither hormonal nor harmonic but the product of a self-imposed exile from the rhythms of the natural world. They were, essentially, moonchildren. “The engineers at the height of the Web explosion in the 1990s,” according to the New York Times’s Mark Leibovich, who then covered Silicon Valley, “often worked through several nights straight and never seemed to notice or to mind. They were mostly male and single. The real prodigies appeared to achieve total synergy with the machines.”
The earliest adopters of the Net life were guys who set Guy Rules. Games were prized and winners rewarded. Passwords were protected, protocols created, gauntlets laid down. Speed was deified. Piracy was romanticized. The real renegades among them were called hacks and hackers, phreaks and phreakers, black hats and gray hats.
As the online world grew, its discourse evolved (and in many ways devolved). Pranks, quick wit, and rough language were encouraged. Ego was inflated in value; so too was the brute, market-force wisdom of the mob. The Net’s waters became a snark-pool, more gaseous than viscous. And nothing in this evanescent medium was worth saying if not said snidely—or chauvinistically.
In this virtual world, actual women were sometimes considered not just a distraction to the business at hand but a class of trespasser, not infrequently belittled or ridiculed. What’s more, the cloak of anonymity—and the belief that women who engaged in Web discussion groups or forums were mere online “presences” and not people—gave license to misogyny, which metastasized as the Web grew. By the end of the ’90s, even though the gender balance on the Internet was almost equal, incidents of verbal abuse and physical threat against women became so pernicious, dangerous, and epidemic that over time an environment would set in, one that fostered what journalist Amanda Hess would call “the banality of Internet harassment… [in which] the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women.”
Initially, the World Wide Web held vast promise. “The ways by which ordinary men can be of use,” James Agee had written, “are tragically limited, even in a democracy.” But in one stroke the Web gave solace and meaning to those hoping to be or to feel “of use.” The Web was a global stage and the browsing masses newly players. Indeed, those who went online became known as “users,” a term emphasizing their utilitarian function (as well as the Internet’s). With time, they became “unique visitors” or “uniques,” underscoring their specialness, in spite of their anonymity. They “shared” (and sometimes overshared) information with “followers,” a word that can have religious connotations. Through email “addresses,” they had a destination, a virtual place to go or to be. By building websites they could set up their own “home” page. In joining social networks, they could create new personas and start afresh.
My friend David Kirkpatrick, tech writer and entrepreneur who authored The Facebook Effect, is unreservedly sunny on this score, cautioning against those who argue that deep and vital personal connection is being degraded or trivialized in the age of digital interaction and social media. “When billions of people choose to do things in a certain way,” he explains, “they are making a grand statement about what they think it means to be human in this era. And they cannot really be wrong. If all those people are choosing to spend their focus and their time in virtual interaction, there must be something genuinely gratifying and useful in it for them, even if sociologists and sexologists et al. may not have fully discerned what it is.”
The Web’s connective tissue from the get-go was its web of generous users. “Who would have guessed (at least at first),” writes Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality and a digital-era seer, “that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.”
Lanier, however, understood that the Web’s recesses, despite this early volunteer spirit, had their own dark fissures. “The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse,” he has observed in his bestselling manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. “The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone’s-windows of the 1990s.” In Lanier’s view, a “culture of sadism online” has sprung up and, by degree, “has gone mainstream” as individuals have used the medium to take out their aggressions, to demean and humiliate, to flame and defame. “We evolved to be both loners and pack members,” he says of this emerging clan-think. “We are optimized not so much to be one or the other, but to be able to switch between them.” (It was not surprising that two of the Internet’s popular peepholes early on were sites that were created in large part to expose. The Drudge Report, which started as an email blast in the mid-’90s, would often post incendiary stories that the mainstream media resisted, ignored, or had not yet fully vetted. The Smoking Gun—a WikiLeaks predecessor, founded in 1997—made it its mandate to unearth and publish “material obtained from government and law enforcement sources, via Freedom of Information requests, and from court files nationwide.”)
The Web, by definition, offered virtual sex. Much of it was literally autoerotic. The solitary online sexual encounter, for many men and women, came to be regarded as noncommittal, less emotionally taxing, and less trouble. Why deal with the challenges or rewards of another’s needs, when one could satisfy one’s own—and so efficiently? For many online users, the synthetic actually replaced the actual: online sex became not an expression of mutual connection but of selfish release. But this was only half the picture.
For millions of others, the earliest forms of cybersex brought the promise of genuine engagement, not alienation. Strangers typing words to one another—digitally stimulating a partner by writing on a keyboard—could experience real-time interaction on an entirely new plane. Online sex brought Insta-Grat. It boosted the ego. It offered a number and variety of potential partners that were theoretically limitless. It allowed for a semisanctioned embrace of new taboos, which was arousing in and of itself. Its virtual nature made “online cheating” arguably more acceptable to one’s real-life partner or one’s conscience. Its attendant anonymity could be exhilarating and often emancipating. Its seamless utility (from the comfort of one’s home) was liberating. Its relative safety, to many users, beat its real-world equivalent hands down, because electronic transmission came with zero risk of STDs.
Lisa Palac, a leader in the so-called sex-positive movement, has written at length about digital Eros in its old covered-wagon days. In the ’80s, Palac had gained notoriety as an editor at On Our Backs (the seminal journal of feminist lesbian erotica), and she would be celebrated as “the queen of high-tech porn,” partly for her stint editing Future Sex magazine in the early ’90s. But in 1993, she was a neophyte when, one night, she found herself in her first chat room. In her memoir On the Edge of the Bed, she recalls adopting the handle Lisapal (turn-ons: “sushi and red lipstick”), then entering the “Jacuzzi” area of an adults-only online bulletin-board system called Odyssey. She was “overwhelmed,” she writes, not so much by the steamy chat that zapped around her but by the number of direct requests from male members to “go private”—to slip away from the others and sex-chat tête-à-tête. The next evening she returned. But she remembers being weirded out when she typed a few rather filthy remarks to a guy named GI Joe and he had the gall to log off, presumably intimidated.
Palac, frustrated but aroused, decided to go to another forum. She tried ECHO, a hip virtual community that was run, salon-style, out of a Greenwich Village apartment. Sitting in San Francisco, she typed in “Lisa Palac.” And within minutes, a man who recognized her byline—a doctor who actually knew some people she knew—got into a bit of online repartee about spanking, S&M, and “erotic humiliation.” Palac typed, “Maybe you should give me your phone number,” thinking it made more sense for her to initiate the follow-up, as she puts it, “in case he’s a psychopath masquerading as a normal person.”
Palac’s description continues:
At 11:30 P.M. West Coast time, I was lying naked on my bed, phone locked against my left shoulder, right hand poised. “How about a story?” I suggested.… His voice was low and sexy and oh man, that British accent. He told me something that went like this:
“You’re on a lonely road, somewhere in the Southwest, in the desert. You’re hitchhiking and a green Citroen pulls up in a cloud of dust. Inside are two Mexican soap opera stars, a man and a woman. They pick you up, offer you some tequila and orange juice.… Suddenly the car stops. There’s a large boulder in the middle of the road.… From behind the boulder steps a gorgeous outlaw cowgirl and soon it’s evident that you’re all being held up at gunpoint.
“The outlaw handcuffs [all three of you… and] thinks about robbing you all, but realizes there isn’t anything to take. So she decides she wants something else.…”
I can’t remember exactly how the story ended because I was coming so hard.
Palac was hooked. They continued their communication, largely through email, sometimes exchanging three dozen messages a day. “I shouldn’t have had cybersex on the first date,” she would admit. She was soon “logging on to ECHO every twenty minutes, breathlessly anticipating our next communication. Telnet, log-in ID, password—come on, you stupid slow thing.… How could I be in so deep so fast, without any physical contact?” Palac’s reasoning: in reality, the physical cues spur erotic chemistry; online, however, “this process works in reverse: If our sexual interests match up, then we ask to see the body.… Disembodiment, ironically, leads to an immediately greater sense of intimacy… conveyed only with the alphabet.… This is completely unparalleled in the human saga of love.”6
Not all such encounters were sweetness and light. One of the earliest Net-sex horror stories involved an online skeeve who turned out to be a con artist. Susie Bright remembers it vividly. One of the West Coast leaders of sex-positive feminism, Bright in the early 1990s had left her job editing On Our Backs, where she had helped mentor Palac. Bright recalls that she had first gone online because she’d heard that on a computer bulletin board called The WELL7 a community of people was engaged in a discussion thread labeled “Why I Love Susie Bright.”
Bright now says, in a series of interviews and emails, “The WELL was like the shiny new toy that everyone in the media was fascinated with. Soon, of course, came the con man. The first time there was a sex hoax on the Internet—at least that I am aware of—it happened at The WELL. There was a private women’s conference that only [female] members could be part of. There were quite a lot of women on The WELL—for an Internet group, it was a shocking number. That was part of what made The WELL so cool. It didn’t even occur to me that computers were supposed to be a guy-only space. [As part of] this private women’s conference—it was more gossipy and talking about our private lives and things you didn’t necessarily want everyone else to see in public—someone started a topic called ‘That Son-of-a-Bitch.’” She laughs. “Sounds promising, right?
“This woman told a story about how she’d met this wonderful man on The WELL and it just all seemed so incredibly touching and poignant and like a match made in heaven. It’s hard to capture how innocent we all were. So we were ‘listening’ to her describe how sexy it was. By the end of the story, as you can imagine, he turned out to be a con artist. He [had seemed] really, sincerely interested in her—‘We’re going to have dates and so on’—and then he had these emergencies where she had to send him money. That was when the worm turned. But by then she was so in love with him, so infatuated with their virtual affair: they’d had phone sex; they’d done so much [online]. So when he started extorting money from her, she didn’t even see it [coming].”
Bright remembers that one of the other WELL participants chimed in. “The woman stopped her and said, ‘This same thing is happening to me and I haven’t told anyone because I’m so embarrassed and ashamed and I’m starting to feel like a chump. And here we are, we’re both these ultra-smarty-pants, computer-genius women—how can this be happening to us?’ They compared notes—and it was the same man.” When they floated his name to the wider community of The WELL, Bright recalls, “there was complete pandemonium. They outed him. And he had been doing this with so many other chicks, it was just [crazy].”
Bright recalls her reaction: “I’m sitting there at my keyboard and I just dropped my cup of coffee, because I had just fucked this guy in New York City a couple of weeks earlier. In real life. And I felt really embarrassed because, unlike the others, I had not given him money. I had merely had sex with him. I wasn’t that attracted to him. I was on a book tour. It was proximity. Yes, he had been a big fanboy and told me how much he just loved-loved-loved the idea of seeing me and he would do anything for me when I came to New York. Then I said, ‘Well, we can meet.’ He was based in New Jersey. This guy has all these super-brainy women dangling on a string. [He] was, as far as I knew, the first Internet cad.”
There were downsides, there were upsides. My friend Stephen Mayes, a respected photo editor and champion of photojournalists, insists that the Web had a largely salutary effect on the sex lives and love lives of many gay men. “I had had an incredible disability in the gay world of never having picked up a man in a bar,” Mayes confides over drinks at a speakeasy in Manhattan’s East Village. “What the Internet did was give me a new awareness of myself. Previously, the gay bar scene revolved around a body fascism: a prescriptive sense of muscles, tight abs, shoulders that you had to have. And I am less of a physical specimen in that way. So in a bar, my eyes had always been filled with fear—the fear of rejection. Along comes the Web, and I dropped into this world in which I believed my body would be accepted. The Internet released me from all that fear. It suddenly gave me a freedom to meet with men in a way that I’d never experienced before.”
Mayes believes that when it came to the stereotypical sexual aesthetic of the gay man, the digital realm had much to recommend it. “The gay world seems to lend itself to this idea of sharing stuff,” he insists. “It’s open-source, like the Web. It has that reputation: open relationships, sharing partners, etcetera. It has, historically, a sense of being furtive—pushed into the underground for centuries—but once outside social constraints, it was a lot freer within a private, underground context.” In many ways, these were also the hallmarks of the early digital space: a private, members-only society with its own language and codes and libertine ethos that existed under the radar.
At the same time, Mayes recalls, the digital photography revolution of the 1990s served to enhance the sex lives of those who were drawn to the visual, to exchanging private pictures, and to creating homespun erotica that might invite and satisfy the fellow male gaze. In previous decades, many gay men, he says, had relied on Polaroids (which required no processing) since they were concerned about bringing their undeveloped film to the corner drugstore or one-hour photo shop. “There was a social stigma,” says Mayes, “and, more importantly, legal issues in taking your film to the lab. Sodomy was illegal in places like Texas until the 2000s.8 So the digital camera freed up people.” And those intimate digital photos could be easily traded electronically. In the early days of the Web, Mayes notes, “the digital sexual image is very private—you take it, put it up on your computer, share it just with the people you want to see it. No lab technician! In the late ’90s this changed. If you wanted to, you could place an explicit photo online to attract partners, and you felt it was private. You had to register under a screen name. You were addressing members like yourself. But it was a misguided belief that you were addressing a private club. In fact, anyone could register and, more than that, you could download the image—and suddenly your own photo [would be] feral, animal, developing a life of its own. For all the benefits that these websites brought us—gay and straight and otherwise—little did we know the extent to which our personal images would become public commodities that had the potential to spin out of control.”
The ’90s coincided with great shifts in the nature of American romance (remember romance?), long-term relationships of all kinds (including civil unions and marriage itself), and sexually charged socializing (as the practice of “hooking up” became common on college campuses). Accompanying these course corrections, there arose a new phenomenon: online dating. Among the first successful mate-finding sites were Match.com (1995), JDate (1997)—a digital matchmaking service for Jewish singles—and eHarmony.com (2000), a site started by a Pepperdine psychologist active in Christian divinity circles, some of whose books were published by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. eHarmony.com served as a traditional-values counterweight to the Web’s more freewheeling alternatives, and the site used a proprietary “Compatibility Matching System” to target those set on more committed relationships. That same year, Salon and Nerve.com (billed as the Web’s home for “literate smut”) would join forces to launch Salon/Nerve Personals (touted as “the definitive space for online flirting”). Meanwhile, the fledgling Craigslist would roll out “Casual Encounters,” which the New York Times would refer to as “the erotic underbelly of society, where courtship gives way to expediency.” Craigslist would eventually become a staging area for escorts, hookers, and those offering other “erotic services,” until state and federal law enforcement agencies moved in.
The Internet, for many, was a virtual singles bar. On the largest dating sites, chemistry (both sexual and interpersonal) would be replaced by algebra. Algorithms that had been designed to sift through a voluminous database of attributes listed in members’ profiles would sort and rank potential partners’ likelihood of attraction and relationship longevity. Individual subscribers would then be presented with a slate of possible dates who, in time, might be possible mates.
Matchmaking services, of course, had been around for decades. But the Web brought a new level of respectability to such artificially induced interaction. Little by little, the fix-up began to lose its total-loser stigma. In the digital age, the unattached, no matter what age, came to see e-dating as socially acceptable, safe, and efficient. In fact, the algorithms and the screening process conferred a certain authority. (At the time, Michael Wolff would describe online dating as a new and rather vanilla way of mating: “a perfectly decent, unremarkable, squaresville thing to do.”) By comparison, the singles scene, the bar scene began to be regarded as crass.
Dating sites took off. And this ’90s phenomenon so revolutionized the way urbanites coupled up and settled down that today, according to the New Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten, “fee-based dating Web sites” take in more than a billion dollars annually and have become “the third most common way for people to meet. (The most common are ‘through work/school’ and ‘through friends/family.’)”9 As the dating dot-coms grew, so did a new set of online meeting places that turned one’s wider net of contacts into their own raison d’être. These were the start-up social networks. And in terms of the wider culture they would become far more influential than the dating sites. Social media would not only help define one’s persona and sexual expressiveness (shaping one’s real-world reputation and online demeanor in the eyes of potential suitors, friends, strangers, and even potential employers), but would also have long-term effects on social interaction, free speech, and political change. Services like TheGlobe.com and SixDegrees.com (well before Friendster or LinkedIn, before MySpace or Facebook) were the online hubs where communities of users gathered to converse and exchange information about shared interests, pastimes, or backgrounds.
Sex, of course, was central to the origin story of social media. “We often forget that social networking, early on, was really all about sexual stereotyping,” says my friend Rachel Winter, the film producer. “Facebook was founded as a way of rating women’s looks. From that nucleus—devised by male students at Harvard—came everything that followed, including the trolling and shaming. At this stage I would say: let’s all take a breather and ban social media for five years. We’d all be better off.”
Much of the Web to this day remains powered by social connection, by sex, and, yes, by porn—a subject that demands a deeper ’90s dive.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It’s time to toggle back to Washington and reenter the political force field.