Anyone who hasn’t read Big Ed’s post, “On hunger for connection and the ‘outing’ of Alexa” should go and read it, because it’s a very honest piece on the desire for connection and why, in virtual spaces, we are so often disappointed.
In his post, he says:
“men (or at least many men) crave authentic voracious feminine sexual energy in their lives. Skim any Penthouse Letters book or free stories site aimed at men and you’ll see that most of the women in them are high libido, highly sexual women with low inhibitions. That’s what enough male readers want to be able to sustain those publications and sites.“
What makes personas like Alexa so attractive is exactly what he has described: the male yearning for an uncomplicated, sexually insatiable, completely uninhibited woman. She presented herself that way. Many men wanted to fuck her and a not inconsiderable number of women wanted to be her (so many men would want to fuck them). The problem was, she was an illusion.
In the 48 years I’ve been alive, I can count the number of women I have met cast in that mold on a single hand and still have a couple of fingers left over. In fact, I’d venture to guess that, for the most part, they don’t exist.
It’s not that some women aren’t sometimes sexually insatiable or that we don’t go through uncomplicated phases in our lives. And some of us (not me, I can assure you) have learned to chuck all our inhibitions aside. But not all of that, and not at one time.
Real women can’t possibly compete with myths like Alexa. And real men can’t find them in the real world, because they mostly don’t exist.
Similarly, women are forever tantalized by the strong, silent and unbearably buff Mister Right, who sensitive when it matters, with an IQ off the scale, masterful in bed and fiscally responsible to boot. Tender in all the right moments and utterly lacking in any baggage that might get in the way of them fully committing to a lifetime of blissful domesticity – or even a couple of months of it. Romance featuring just this sort of mythological creature still outsells every other form of genre fiction. And, in the 48 years I’ve been on this planet, I can’t honestly say I ever met a single one of those.
It’s not that most men don’t exhibit some of those qualities at some time. But rarely all of them all at once.
And men simply can’t compete with that image of Mister Right. Real women can’t find them in the real world, because they don’t exist, either.
Nonetheless, countless industries make untold amounts of money urging us on in our fantasies and perpetuating those mythical personas, because we’re such suckers for them.
And when someone with a reasonable understanding of human psychology comes along and exploits our desire for these unattainable, unreal models of desire, they find it pretty easy to manipulate us, because we’re just so damn ripe for it.
There is an art to building mirrors to our fantasies. It’s clever and takes a good deal of human insight. And, very often, a considerable amount of self-examination, because we all know what WE want. Now, if we just turn that round and pretend to be it for someone else… we’re in like flint. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to know the person who created Alexa was a male.
Here comes the touchy bit: authorial intent. Is it cruel or unfair or fraudulent to dangle the image of what someone wants so badly in front of them and then burst their bubble? Is it emotional fraud, malicious manipulation?
I’m going to leave that for someone else to answer.
The point I want to make is, we need to take some responsibility for ourselves. As my mother (and many mothers, I’m sure) said: if it’s too good to be true, it’s not true. If it’s too cheap, there’s something wrong with it. If it’s too sweet, it’s going to make your thighs fat, and it the virtual personality your pining after is utterly the man or woman of your dreams, then buyer beware.
We need to take some responsibility for wanting what doesn’t exist, and for rejecting the complications of the real. Real women don’t dream of sucking your cock for an hour – their jaws start to hurt. Real men won’t keep contradicting you when you’ve told them, for the 50th time, that you are worried your ass looks fat in those jeans.
I know I’m doing a little stereotyping. But we all do, and nowhere moreso than in our fantasies. So, when those fantasy bubbles are burst and the person you fell for online turns out to be a man, or a 75 year old granny, or married with 5 kids, you have to take some responsibility for the fact that you wanted something that doesn’t exist.
Even though I write fiction, I try my best not to write those kind of mythological characters in my erotica because, in my own small way, I think that perpetuating a desire for the utterly unreal is wrong. You can have some of the things you want, some of the time, but not everything at once, and it comes at a price.