Sex Geekdom Homecoming 5/10- I Hope They All Get Carpal Tunnel
Welcome to my Sex Geekdom Homecoming, 10 days, 10 articles and we’re half way home. I’m lucky in a way, I get to return to a place I love, but i’d be lying if I said I hadn’t grown to love Honiara. I’ve had a blast. One thing I’m excited about though is regular internet and dating apps, cause here in Honiara at $95 AUS for 1GB that is simply more than I’m willing to pay for unsolicited dick pics.
Confession time, I’m an idiot and I was totally unprepared for Honiara. I emailed my bestie before I arrived with questions about olympic size swimming pools, book cafes and street addresses. She had this to say “No, newb, no.”
Faced with limited and always patchy internet I was excited about getting into a life defined primarily by face-to-face interactions. That lasted about three months. Since then I’ve been mainlining data like it’s going out of style. Mainly just to keep in contact with friends and family back home. But in a week I’ll be back with fast internet and I’m gonna hit it.
The last thing I want to do is turn this into a piece about dating apps; what’s in what’s out, what we should and shouldn’t do. Let your online freak flag fly, brothers and sisters. Cause after all who am I to judge? Like taking pictures with tigers? Like cropping out exs? Like having long winded lists of attributes and refuse to engage unless they tick all your boxes? Be my guest.
There is someone out there for everybody, even the headless torsos.
I used to be a total naysayer- I didn’t think online worked for me – sexual attraction for me is about conversation and I can’t do that in a club and unless they’re some amazing wordsmith I wasn’t really going to get involved online. Call me crazy, but I didn’t really think I’d be interested in just seeing disembodied genitals.
A lot has changed and dating apps have hit the mainstream in both gay and straight communities. While I still don’t think there is enough diversity, the dating app world is highly specialised and if you’re the kind of person who is attracted to someone because they’re funny or because they’ve got something special going on, not just their gender, presence or lack of body hair- it can be harder to negotiate. That said, I’m still waiting for the app designed for old school butches and the men who love them (Pssssst Lea DeLaria, call me)
Still, I’ve very much come full circle and enjoy the ability to connect with people around me, aided by technology. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday. She met her partner online (before it was cool) and almost lamented the new found popularity of dating apps, saying “i miss the days of online hook ups when it was all truck drivers posing as 20 year olds and shut-ins.”
Online literacy is important, what you are willing to show, to put out there on the interwebs is up to you. Reading between the lines and miscommunications are common and there is always a gap between expectations and reality, as my RuPaul loving friend says “sometimes people who are funny as hell in chat just have zero real-time charisma, uniqueness nerve and talent.”
But that is the name of the game. Excited about the many possibilities I turned to a Tinder loving friend of mine to get the skinny and similar to my initial questions about Honiara I was way off.
“Yeah I’ve had a few Tinder adventures and people are certainly more open about using it. But there seems to be a trend of couples downloading the app just for fun, I’m open to open relationships but this is people in monogamous relationships with no interest in me outside entertainment. I’m like hell no, I’m against couples even downloading the app (yep I’m that bitch) You get to be in a relationship – you don’t get to make fun of me, torture me or even fantasise about me.”
Granted I’ve been out of the loop for a while but I didn’t expect that. In my sex positive, bubble of sex geekdom I’d just assumed we’ve gotten over that, if we can meet people online, admit it and perhaps even celebrate it- why the hate?
While I’m proud to call myself a convert and excited to see what’s out there after a long hiatus, new apps, new people, new slang. I’m also keen to hear from other Sex Geeks about they negotioate the world of dating apps. Does douchery, affect your online mojo? Is it hard to stay sex positive and non-judgemental in the face of body negativity and snap judgements?
How do Sex Geeks do online dating? Not how do we, as Sex Geeks, date each other (we’ve been through this before, that’s not what we’re about). I’m talking about how do we remain true to our Sex Geek values in that online space.
Maybe it really is high time for a Sex Geekdom App, a place to take a break from hook-ups, a safe place full of puns, platonic coffee dates and unicorns. Cause if all I’m walking into are bored couples and an online version of a burn book, well, I hope they all get carpal tunnel.
