Sex-ting
noun
/seks-sting/
: the sending of sexually explicit photos, images, text messages, or e-mails by using a cell phone or other mobile device
Did anyone else see it? SBS 2 I think. It was about sexting. It was about people who were having intimate sexual relationships with people they had never met using only their smart-phones. It was about people who live in a virtual reality. The Internet has made pornography better but has robbed humanity of its inhibition. They showed sexting addicts with their half-naked selfies. The Internet has made the world smaller but people have become more isolated. People are too scared to reveal their naked selves in reality so they capture their image for the world to see. I remember when you would ask a person to take a photo of you. People now use photography not as an art but as a means to strut. The show was about half-naked people sitting by themselves waiting for their phone to beep. I’m old fashioned. I don’t have a smart phone so I wonder why people can’t look in the mirror and see what they look like bowing down to their electronic God. Someone was telling me the other day that they do all of their electronic banking in the palm of their hand. I like to see my money.
The documentary showed where wireless technology is taking the world. They showed a phone with three sensor pads that hook into the jack that you can attach to your genitals that another person can stimulate through a series of three circles. The three circles are for both nipples and one for the genitals. I watched with my jaw on my chest. I watched but couldn’t believe that people could think that electric was better. I sat wondering why people couldn’t understand that human touch is better? A woman was trialing the new technology. She was sitting and seemed to be enjoying an orgasm from the sensors attached to her body. She sat moaning and shaking with her eyes closed. Maybe it’s different for a woman, no what am I saying, it’ definitely different for a woman. A lot of women own a vibrator. Not many men own a blow-up sex doll. I was sitting in my wheelchair watching the documentary when a woman caught my eye walking past my apartment. She was walking quickly with her head bowed and both hands on her smart-phone. It looked like she was texting. Maybe she was sexting?
Orwell would have never seen this. He would have never imagined people having sexual intercourse through wireless communication devices. I bet Orwell preferred a good root over seeing somebody and not being able to touch them. Who knows where this will take us. In the not so distant future the English language will be dead. People will only communicate in abbreviated English on their smart phones. The ceremonies of courtship will be made redundant and will be replaced by the sperm and ovum of strangers standing in a line. People will be waiting for a chance at the simplistic beauty of 00110011. All you will see will be the bowed heads of people queuing up to exchange their fluids at a sperm and egg bank. Their heads will be bowed, connected, linked, and online so that they cannot see the person standing in front of them but can see their virtual other half on the other side of the net.
Louie Armstrong said that they would learn much more than he’d ever know. He was right and he was wrong. I know a female in her early twenties. I was telling her that I had asked a woman out the other day. She asked me how I knew her? I told her I didn’t know her. I told her that I wanted to know her. That was why I asked her out. Wow, she said. She told me she had never been asked out cold before. I had to ask her what she meant? She told me she had never had a stranger ask her out. I told her I felt sorry for her. She asked why? I told her I felt sorry for her that she had not felt that electricity before. In the world I know you can tell about a person by how they carry themselves. Nobody is carried online. Online they float. Everybody floats online in a world of make believe. Online you will see the best photo while the worst photo sits in the Trash. They know much more than we’ll ever know.
Andrew Stuart Buchanan