In a classic case of bad timing, I got turned onto lit theory after graduation, whereupon I ditched most of the frivolous fiction I was reading and started to wrestle texts of all sorts. It's been a battle, to say the least. After each issue of the zine, I have to keeping dumbing down the "to read" pile; so by now I've gone from poststructuralist feminist theory to Ethel Merman biographies to the internet.
Dumb is right, sort of. The amount of time spent on the net weeding through stuff, scrolling, and waiting, is grossly disproportionate to any actual information I get out of it. Still - and I got to hand it to all the critics who've pressed the point - there's a lot to learn from the net that has very little to do with either the "facts" we pull off it or the specific technologies themselves.
Yeah, so I'm not ready to discuss identity politics or information theory or postmodern whatever, but diddling around, one thing has become obvious to me: the net's a easy way to develop a crush.
Like everything else rooted in the high school experience, crushing is something we're supposed to outgrow. Of course, some of us never did; we only got better at it. A textbook video-star worshipper, I always hated dating. Only peer pressure convinced me to spend my senior year "going out" with class president Mike. He was so much like the hero of cheese teen movies (beautiful, popular) and I so much the unlikely object of his affection (geeky, unpopular), I couldn't find a good reason not to like him. For me, dating has always been like bad comedy. By dictating the context for a relationship (you are here to make me laugh, you are here to romantically interest me), it limits the boundaries. Rather than deal with expectations, it's tempting to just pull romantic sparks out of nowhere, whether that be from someone on the street, a voice on the radio, a video star, whatever; to find an object and read into it what I want.
For a long time, this was a process I conducted unconsciously; perhaps in part because self-contained romances are derided as crushes and my flights of fantasy seemed to have very little to do with unrequited anything. But the advent of email made everything obvious. Once authors became texts, so did objects-of-affection. The writing on the screen made clear what had long been the case: that crushing boils down to creative reading. Whether the cues are written words, voices or haircuts, the process is basically the same. By eliminating the uncontrollable variable (ie the other person), romance is a cinch. That Aerosmith video - the one with Virtual Reality Teen Boy playing out romantic fantasies on his machine - is a real hoot; not because the charade smacks of cornball, faux- cybervision (after all, it's only MTV), but because Boy's game is a game within a game. When it's over, he's merely the object of Dream Girl playing VR herself. Her romance is not with Boy, but Boy's romance, a romance she created.
Of course, you don't need virtual reality to be fucked in the head. I should know. Having spent 25 years married to an active imagination, I've made crushing into a sort of art. Like playing music or painting or whatever, it's an end in itself; a safety net against something more "serious." Dreaming about being with Sweetie is not the same as being with Sweetie, so there's only so far things can go before the person in mind no longer matches his fleshy likeness. By this time, I've projected so much of myself onto my object that it's difficult to determine who's who. It's like meeting some celebrity and figuring out she's not the person you had imagined. Once you do, you move on.
Occasionally, though, I'll find myself on the other end of the shaft - when someone has the nerve to think he's queer for me based on something as insignificant as what I write or how I sound on the radio. Again, it's a fine line separating who's who; so when I withdraw in horror it's largely from my own reflection. The difference between us is that he acts on his projections. I play it safe. That way they don't figure out I'm not who they think.
As subjects, we don't make good objects. We're not what you might call open texts, so mediating between reader and writer is, as it is in lit crit, somewhat of an ordeal. The way to avoid conflict, then, is to press even further out toward the abstract, to eliminate that other body and be at one with a real open text. For me, that has always been music. No boundaries, no image, no apprehension. Whenever the mood strikes I can come home and have safe sex with Royal Trux or Merle Haggard or Ruth Brown. And if it ever gets boring, I change the album.
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