Well, here’s one for the misanthropy file: Chaturbate is an online service in which anyone of legal age can watch other people masturbate, or turn the camera on themselves and self-pleasure for the anonymous masses. Emily Witt writes about it for Medium (don’t worry, there are no strongly NSFW photos, though given the material, you probably don’t want to read this at work). Excerpts:

Chaturbate is a live webcam site that launched in 2011. It distinguishes itself from the many other live webcam sites by its democratic approach. It is free to watch — really free, as in no logging in or setting up passwords — and open to everyone of legal age. Its tabs offer “Females,” “Males,” “Couples,” “Groups,” and “Transsexuals.” To start broadcasting, a person has only to register a name and beam herself to the world, eating Chipotle. Total sexual anarchy is forestalled by a zealous volunteer police force of users, who operate along the lines of Wikipedia moderators, reporting and shutting down any performers who look suspiciously underage or who break one of Chaturbate’s few rules — the usual bans on violence, animals, and excrement.

Oh good, so there are some standards. Witt says she started looking into the site after an editor assigned her to do a piece on what people do in conditions like we have now, in which they have an abundance of sexual freedom. From an interview with one of the regulars on the network:

She called Chaturbate an “introvert’s paradise.” I asked her how it was that broadcasting her image to thousands of people over the internet could appeal to an introvert.

“I have complete control over the situation,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about it escalating physically. I can turn it off whenever I want. I can turn these words on the screen off whenever I want. I can kick people out. I make my own rules, nobody’s telling me what to do. Not that I’m necessarily a control freak but I’d never had that sexually. I’d never been in control of a sexual encounter until this, and I think it was something that I definitely needed.”

A Chaturbate woman named Wendy teaches Witt about the joys of “mass intimacy”:

“There’s this freedom, in that you don’t actually have to meet any of these people and they don’t actually know you,” Wendy explained. “You can be whoever you want to be. You can show them any part of yourself that you want. You can be totally open and bare and share everything without having to worry about people rejecting you or you can totally make up a new self and be someone different.”

I’d recently read an essay called “Times Square Red” by the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. Delany, a gay African-American man, had in the 1970s and 1980s frequented the porno movie theaters in Times Square, where he had hundreds of casual and anonymous sexual encounters with other men. He wrote that it was a shame that women suffered risks in the pursuit of similar experiences, but that also “What waits is for enough women to consider such venues as a locus of possible pleasure.”

He went on to describe the benefits of his vast experience in casual sex. The movie theaters had served as laboratories in which he had learned to discern the nuances and spectrums of his sexual desire, where sexual experimentation happened entirely outside of narratives of love or emotional entanglement. His observations about sexual attraction consistently disproved conventional notions of beauty and ugliness. (He discovered, among other proclivities, that he had a thing for burly Irish-American men, including two who had harelips.) Describing the importance of the anonymous sexual encounter, he wrote:

We do a little better when we sexualize our own manner of having sex — learn to find our own way of having sex sexy. Call it a healthy narcissism, if you like. This alone allows us to relax with our own sexuality. Paradoxically, this also allows us to vary it and accommodate it, as far as we wish, to other people. I don’t see how this can be accomplished without a statistically significant variety of partners and a fair amount of communication with them, at that, about what their sexual reactions to us are. (However supportive, the response of a single partner just cannot do that. This is a quintessentially social process, involving a social response.)

For women, the pursuit of wide-ranging sexual experience has always come with disproportionate risks and stigma. But online, in the context of what Wendy called “mass intimacy,” some of the women I spoke with were undertaking Delany’s endeavor with the risk of pregnancy, violence, and sexually transmitted infection minimized through the medium of encounter. Chaturbate and its ilk — everything from My Free Cams to the “Gone Wild” amateur porn thread on Reddit — could be the equivalent of the darkened porno theater of the 21st century, but places more welcoming to women, where women could go to consider their desires, where they could learn what attracted others to them and to discern and name what they found attractive.

So the Internet, plus the abundance of sexual freedom, is teaching everyone to live by the values of perverts who used to go to X-rated movie theaters to have anonymous sex. Wendy tells Emily Witt that to do it right, she needs to “objectify” the people on the other end of the electronic connection. One more clip:

Some people might look at Max and Harper, or anybody on Chaturbate, and disagree. They might think of clean sheets, a well-made bed, a clearly defined “partner,” and a closed door and think that they know exactly what sex is — loving, maybe; monogamous, probably; dignified by its secrecy; more authentic for not being shared; sacred because it’s not mediated through a cell phone. Spend enough time on Chaturbate and such a view starts to feel both rarified and unambitious.

Some people limit their internet sexuality to the private sphere of sexting or video chats with long-distance lovers. Others choose to meet their virtual partners in a semi-anonymous public forum. When mediated bodies can inhabit the same temporal dimension, the distinct purposes of porn, sex work, casual sex, internet dating, and social networking start to blur. Right now I see being sexual on the internet as a bold and risky form of performance. I anticipate that in the future it will just be thought of as sex.

I hope you will read the whole thing, though — trigger warning, for those who need them — the discussion, though anthropological, is fairly seamy at times. Why is it important to read? Because this loveless dystopia, this pornographic pseudo-world, is increasingly the world we live in, and in which our children are being raised. I think Witt is probably right: in the future, this will just be thought of as sex (though Witt doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with that).

Ordinary sexual love between partners as “rarefied and unambitious.” Philip Larkin got there first, with the bleak sarcasm of his poem High Windows, the opening of which I’ve redacted for use on this blog:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s f—ing her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly.

Our civilization is producing dead souls incapable of erotic love, only despairing hydraulics. This is what it most wrong with Chaturbate and the culture that created and sustains it. It’s not what it does to the body; it’s what it does to the soul, to the imagination, because of what it does to the body. From the opening chapter of Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, a novel about the total atomization of humanity in contemporary life:

The expressway back into Paris was deserted, and Djerzinski felt like a character in a science fiction film he’d seen at the university: the last man on earth after every other living thing had been wiped out. Something in the air evoked a dry apocalypse.

A dry apocalypse. Yes. That’s what we are living through. When I talk about the Benedict Option, I largely mean creating a stronghold of hope and love where the old virtues of civilization are lived and taught, and refugees from the dry apocalypse can take shelter from the chaos, and learn how to be human again.