Future Sex (24 page)

I knew what he meant. I had never had a day like this in my life. I had never become so close to someone so quickly. We visited a geodesic dome. We went to a chapel containing an organ that Lunar Fox
wanted to play before it was set on fire that night. Inside, more people were getting married. He picked out “Here Comes the Bride” on the organ and we cheered the happy couple. Then we biked back to Desperado. We shared his dinner, a grilled cheese sandwich with some tomato soup. He said to stop by later, that maybe he would have some mushrooms. I stopped by later. He was wearing leather shorts,
no shirt, and an aviator cap. He had no spare mushrooms. “The girl I made out with last night was just here,” he said. I was confused … hadn’t he said…? It did not matter. I had my own complications. We made plans to meet at noon the next day. I didn’t keep the rendezvous.

Instead I went back to my RV, where it turned out there had been drugs all the time. We put half a hit of a synthetic psychedelic
under our lips and proceeded out into the night, the chemicals leaching from the paper as
Mir
was set on fire, the wedding chapel set on fire, the Facebook “like” set on fire. We wandered through the LED-infused landscape, its color palette that of the movie
Tron
, a vision of the future that had now become the future, a future filled with electronic dance music.

The drug hit us when we were playing
beneath an art installation of rushing purple lights. We ran and danced in the lights, laughing and gasping. We boarded mutant vehicles, one shaped like a giant terrapin, one a postapocalyptic pirate ship called the
Thunder Gumbo
. We danced atop the vehicles. Beneath us the Burners on bicycles orbited like phosphorescent deep sea crustaceans. The memory of my day kept coming back to me. I kept
thinking I was seeing people having sex, then realized I had just seen a pileup bike crash. I kept thinking I had met the people around me before. We put more paper under our lips.

We encountered a phone booth from which we could call God. I picked up the phone and spoke to God.

“Good morning,” said God.

“Is it morning?” I asked.

“It’s morning where you are,” said God.

“Where are you?” I
asked.

“I’m everywhere,” said God.

“This is why people don’t like you anymore!” I wailed, and hung up the phone.

I pictured God as an aged Burner somewhere near Palo Alto, who could not make it to Burning Man this year, who had instead rigged this magical telephone. I pictured volunteers like him across the country, awaiting phone calls so that they could play God and have contact with the
magic of the playa. I considered that in fact probably the phone was rigged to someone in a tent nearby.

I began to see conspiracy. A mutant vehicle pulled up alongside us. On top I could see several older people, in their fifties and sixties. I saw them as aristocrats. They seemed to be wearing Aztec mohawks and Louis XVI–style powdered wigs. They were Brahmin priests observing us from on high,
a whollyness of all elites in history. Their vehicle, shaped like a rainbow-colored anglerfish, was called the
Disco Fish
, and it was self-piloted by programmable GPS. Its scales were the primary colors of the Google logo. I saw the
Disco Fish
as a secret plot by Google to defy Burning Man’s anticorporate ethos with its self-driven cars, the project overseen by the executives on the second tier.
My suspicions seemed confirmed when one of their number began discussing a show at the Guggenheim with one of my friends.

Still, we rode on the
Disco Fish
. We danced. We stayed up until the sun rose. We slowly made our way back to the RV, where we stayed and talked. Each of us had experienced a unity. One of our number had just left the company he had founded, fully vested. He no longer had to
work, ever. He told us about all the things he had thought about this year, when a job that once seemed magical was transformed into a grind, with an office, with rules, where he realized he no longer belonged and was no longer wanted until, the day before he left for Burning Man, he was paid to leave. He wore a hat that said “Junior Airline Pilot.” While we sat there, outside the RV, Adam returned.
He wore blue leggings and a white fur vest. Someone had painted his face. He was exuberant. He had biked to the edge of the playa and watched the sun rise. I hugged him. I was so happy to see him. Another person had gone to a sunrise party on the outer playa called Robot Heart, where Shervin Pishevar, the venture capitalist who had once shaved the logo of the startup Uber on the side of his head,
was dancing on top of the sound system. The corporate lawyer arrived, wearing Superman boxers and a bikini.

No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone else would suffer for if they didn’t obey. The hypocrisy of the “creative autonomous zone” weighed on me. Many of these people would go back to their lives
and back to work on the great farces of our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalization of the drugs they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time in the orgy dome. That they had cheered at the funeral pyre of a Facebook “like” wouldn’t play well on Tuesday in the cafeteria at Facebook. The people who accumulated the surplus value of the world’s photographs, “life events,”
and ex-boyfriend obsessions were now celebrating their freedom from the web they’d entangled all of us in, the freedom to exist without the Internet. Plus all this crap—the polyester fur leg warmers and plastic water bottles and disposable batteries—this garbage made from harvested hydrocarbons that will never disappear.

To protest these things in everyday life bore a huge social cost—one that
only people like Lunar Fox were willing to grimly undertake—and maybe that’s what the old Burners disliked about the new ones: the new ones upheld the idea of autonomous zones. The $400 ticket price was as much about the right to leave what happened at Burning Man behind as it was to enter in the first place.

Still, this place felt right. I had been able to do things here that I had wanted to
do for a long time, that I never could have done at home. And if this place felt right, if it had expanded so much over the years because to so many people it felt like “home,” it had something to do with the inadequacy of the old social structures that still governed our lives in our real homes, where we felt lonely, isolated, and unable to form the connections we wanted.

If I had to predict
a future, it would be that Burning Man would last only as long as we did, the last generation that lived some part of life without the Internet, who were trying to adjust our reality to our technology. Younger people, I hoped, would not need autonomous zones. Their lives would be free of timidity. They would do their new drugs and have their new sex. They wouldn’t think of themselves as women or
men. They would meld their bodies seamlessly with their machines, without our embarrassment, without our notions of authenticity.

I had been awake for more than twenty-four hours. I would not be able to sleep for many hours more. I was ready for the feelings to stop now, but they just kept going.

BIRTH CONTROL AND REPRODUCTION

The inadequacy of birth control technology does not need to be explained. Women’s lives are linked to pills and devices that cause weight gain, spontaneous bleeding, lowering of sexual desire, bad skin, blood clots, varicose veins, and depression. A woman might invest in an expensive or invasive technology, only to discover that it does not serve her and must
be removed for something else. We use birth control because it can prevent pregnancy, endometriosis, ovarian cancer, acne. Still, one goes to the doctor to learn about one’s “options” with a sense of dismal resignation to their various imperfections. Almost half of American women will have an unintended pregnancy before the age of forty-five; three in ten will have an abortion.

I went on the
pill at eighteen, when I first started having sex. For the next ten years I cycled through pills and more pills. Some made my skin bad. Some made me gain weight. Some were covered by health insurance and then suddenly not. Some diminished my interest in sex entirely. I suspected they exacerbated the depression I experienced in my twenties, which I treated instead with other kinds of pills. At the
age of twenty-eight, after a decade on the pill, a doctor informed me that I should not have been taking pills with estrogen at all, since I occasionally have migraines with aura, which puts me at increased risk for a stroke in the event of a blood clot. I went off the pills and did not get my period again for six months.

When I next had a boyfriend and got tired of condoms, I installed a hormone-free
copper intrauterine device, which eventually made my periods last twice as long. A doctor suggested menopausal hormones to deal with the bleeding and that did nothing. I took a progesterone mini-pill that made me bleed for two months straight, a relatively common side effect of the mini-pill that made sex embarrassing and clearly repelled my partners. It seemed impossible that in this era
of advanced technology I was still reliant on the whims of a contraption that was literally elementary, a copper device that had been invented forty years ago.

When I went to have the IUD removed things got worse. The nylon filaments by which an IUD is pulled out had been cut too short; there was no sign of the thing. First I paid for a sonogram to see if it was still in my uterus (it was), then
I visited a series of doctors who fretted unhelpfully or contemplated surgery until finally one successfully managed to remove it. All the birth control options left to me had potential for side effects and cost upward of $500. While most devices were covered under the regulations of the Affordable Care Act, the testing to make sure I did not have an infection before the IUD was inserted was not.
There were always condoms. “And how realistic is it that you will consistently use condoms?” asked one doctor. I had a boyfriend by then, so for a while relied on his self-control, but I really did not want to have a baby. I got a plastic IUD with hormones in it, a technology that had been invented in the 1970s. For six months, I bled off and on until suddenly, miraculously, my body settled into
something approaching stability.

*   *   *

We tend to think of technology as something that we invent and direct to our own ends, and machines as prosthetics that we deploy, but sometimes we conform our expectations to the technology that we inherit. This is especially true of contraception, which has seen almost no paradigm-changing innovation in the past forty years. We take as a given the
limitation that the condom is the only contraceptive that protects against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection. We take as a given that the best ways to prevent a pregnancy are the worst ways to prevent infections. We accept the lack of options for women who cannot take hormones. We treat as exceptional the risks for people who want to get pregnant but whose partners have chronic viruses.
The last advancement in contraceptive technology for men came after the invention of latex in 1920.

In 1995, the Institute of Medicine issued a report calling for “a second contraceptive revolution.” It cited the above shortcomings, and public health issues such as the high rate of unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States and around the world, rapid population growth, and the
difficulties poorer and medically underserved communities have in accessing satisfactory contraception. The twenty years since then have been punctuated by breakthroughs in everything from computing to theoretical physics to decoding the human genome. None of the above problems have been solved.

Private-sector investment into birth control has dramatically fallen from its peak in the 1970s. The
biggest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have largely abandoned research in the field. It is not in a pharmaceutical company’s best interest to innovate away from a profitable and widely used once-a-day pill and toward a long-acting, cheaper alternative. Because contraceptives are taken by wide populations of healthy people, the barriers for testing and regulatory approval are high. What
innovation there has been in recent decades has largely come from the government, or from philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation.

Changes in sexual behavior—more partners on average, longer periods of sexual activity outside of marriage—coincided with the decrease in funding for research into contraception. The technologies we use today were invented for a different era of sexual
morals. I rarely considered, when undergoing another lecture by a physician about “risky” sexual behavior (namely sex without a condom), that I was experiencing the consequences of a research paradigm rooted in the expectations of half a century ago. For decades, prevention of sexually transmitted infections was considered an endeavor separate from that of pregnancy prevention, the assumption
being that infections were not a concern for the “normative majority”—the committed couples concerned with moderating fertility but at lower risk for STIs. In reading old research papers about contraception, emphasis is consistently placed on modifying behavior to conform to the limitations of the technology, rather than modifying technology in consideration of a wider range of sexual behavior.

Fighting for the right to merely get birth control had taken so much energy we had apparently forgotten to make any other demands. We had set our sights very low, especially considering that contraception was one of those advancements of civilization, like literacy or dental hygiene, that would not be taken back. Birth control is the original fusion between the human body and our technology, the
initiation of a symbiosis that will only accelerate in the future. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, population control is the default setting, the one that we will maintain for most of our adult lives, diverting from it only for an average of 1.7 pregnancies in the United States. And yet it’s the brief windows when women pursue the maximum fertility of their bodies that are often treated
as their “natural” state. Perhaps what hinders our thinking on the subject the most is this commitment to an obsolete idea of biological destiny, initiated with the false menstrual periods of the early birth control pill, enshrined forever in 28-day plastic packages that force women to return to the pharmacy according to the waxing and waning of the lunar month. And, despite advances toward mandated
coverage, this universal question remains a disproportionate financial burden, considered a personal cost borne by one half of the population rather than the other. Framing birth control as a choice, and not as a human right, had caused us to settle not only for mediocre technology and poor availability, but it had encouraged us to think of our childless lives as an arrested state.