Well, I've jumped on the bandwagon, albeit a bit cautiously, and joined up with Twitter, so if you're interested and would like to find out what I think or am thinking, hop on the bandwagon with me. I'm still not sure how it will be working without a net -- a cell phone for the rest of the world -- since I do not have and have no intentions of getting one. After all, I work at home and don't travel all that much, so why add another expense I'll have to lose the rest of my weekends working to support? I'll stay out of that particular end of the tech pool, at least for now.
One quite divine femme wrote about how easy it is to misunderstand a simple flirtation online and turn it into a budding romance -- or first step on the stalker trail. It's something I have lots of first-hand experience in.
My profiles are pretty businesslike, fact-based information with a bit of word play that have been misconstrued as flirtations and come-ons. They have garnered me quite a few propositions and numerous proposals of marriage. I could say I don't get it, but I do because I used to be the voice on the line that spun fantasies and helped men find the orgasm within. That's writer code for phone sex operator. It was many years ago, but a sexy voice, a creative and imaginative mind, coupled with a way with words and it's a recipe for instant romance. Funny isn't it that I really don't care much for hard core romance?
I shouldn't say I don't care for romance because I love romantic gestures and romantic men. I even appreciate romantic women; I'm one after all, bearskin rug in front of a fireplace in a snowed-in cabin is the essence of romance when you add a glass of wine or champagne, fresh strawberries or a decadent cheesecake to share with the
Dracula by Bram Stoker was definitely romantic, but it wasn't the blatant in-your-face romance and sex that hits the top of the Romantic Times Best Sellers list over and over. There's nothing more thrilling, or frankly more sexual and erotic, than being bitten on the neck. Think about it in more anatomic terms. In the 19th century, writing about sex was confined to a very profitable and lively niche called pornography, and 19th century pornography is every bit as racy and provocative as anything written today, even more so, if you want my opinion. Yes, I have read it. Everyone should. Pornography has been around since men first learned that charcoal would make marks on cave walls. Emperor Tiberius was a great connoisseur and consumer of pornography and locked himself away in his villa and gorged himself into a Dorian Gray picture stupor until he died. Dracula isn't pornographic, but it is erotic.
The act of a vampire sinking his teeth into a woman's vulnerable and unprotected neck to drink her blood is very erotic, but you knew that. It is in a way a substitute for sex. The act of intercourse requires the man to sink a part of his anatomy into a woman's most intimate essence, the deep, warm recesses of her femaleness.
Dracula, unlike his more virile and sexually potent modern offspring, wasn't capable of a phallic erection, but his fangs were erect and hard and probed deeply, over and over, and his victim, preferably a virgin, was penetrated, defiled and aroused to orgasm. When Dracula attacked men, his assault was vicious and homicidal. Although he ultimately killed his female victims, he was gentle, taking them into his arms, romancing them into baring their vulnerable necks and embracing him passionately. It was a surrender that eventually led to death, but sex in the 19th century often led to death in one form or another (childbirth, syphilis, rape, Jack the Ripper, etc.). It was beauty and the beast with a new twist; the beast wasn't changed into a handsome prince by Beauty's tears or her kiss. Dracula remained a beast while beauty died. Is it any wonder the book still sells and directors and actors still clamor to bring him to the screen?
What does that have to do with people falling in love with faces and words online? Romance.
It is so easy to fall in love over the phone or online because you get the essence of the person without all the baggage, and because romance is sadly lacking in the world. There are so many demands and claims on attention that an escape, any escape, is necessary to keep people from running wild in the streets raping and pillaging along the way.
The vikings probably wouldn't have been so vicious and blood-thirsty if the Internet existed then. Vikings weren't after romance, not in the general sense, but they were after something to spice up their lives, usually booty, wine, riches and women. There were seldom enough women to go around, not with women dying in childbirth, of syphilis, rape and Jack the Ripper. Even though it seems to us in our modern cyber-connected world to be vicious and antisocial, it was still at the heart about finding a woman to clean the house, bear the children, do the laundry, cook and be vulnerable to their less blood thirsty pursuits.
As a society, people are so locked into work, chores, family and money that they crave something more human, more intimate. The net provides that, and not just in the blatant sex ads and porn sites, or even in personals and dating connections, but in seeing someone through their words that stirs something inside. In the end, we all want the same things, to be seen, heard and touched. We want a connection that has nothing to do with plugs and liquid crystal displays. There are people on the other side of the cyber-chasm and they're looking, too. The farther we move away from each other physically into the world of computers, cell phones and television, the closer we yearn to be physically connected.
Sex and love are born in the brain, but it's the body that is starved for a simple human touch. The human touch is necessary to life and we forget that until words on a computer screen touch something deep inside and make us reach out to make the fantasy into real romance, to touch the flesh behind the words, to feel the heart beating in time with ours, to sink into those deep recesses impaled when we are at our most vulnerable.
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