THIS is the story a friend told me: One night at a gathering at an apartment in New York City, a woman blithely announced, “I would pay someone to have sex with my husband.” There were snorts and yips of laughter. I believe one woman even clapped. “What did they mean?” I asked my friend. “ ‘Here’s to no sex with our husbands ever again?’ ‘Here’s to the end of sex?’ ”
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I began to imagine that a kind of sex-themed Andromeda Strain had fallen upon the post-30s female population of Earth, causing them to turn away from men. But no, said another friend; sexual disengagement was an equal-opportunity employer when it came to gender, not to mention age. She pointed me to a recent article in The New York Observer that featured young hipsters who leave parties at dawn uncoupled but sated; and another one in New York magazine about guys who’ve been gorging on Internet pornography suddenly finding that they no longer have much appetite for the nonvirtual. After all that passive watching, a real breast rising up in the dim light of a bedroom might seem as cold and surreal as a moonscape. A male friend told me he thought he understood why pornography could be preferable to some people; watching pornography, he said, is like going to a Wikipedia page. You search for a specific thing, a specific feeling, a specific result, and that’s exactly what you find.