"The gay stuff doesn't exist."

An acquaintance of mine commented over the media, while wringing its collective hands over Zootopia and the furry community:

One interesting thing I also noticed when media does decide to talk about furry porn: the gay stuff doesn't exist.

I had a very similar reaction to an (otherwise pretty good) Marie Claire article about porn, Porn is today's Sex-Ed, in which the author wrote, "Porn sanitizes sex. Nobody has hair. You never see lube, even though they go through gallons on set."

I wondered what porn she was talking about. Almost all of the porn I watch has gallons of lube in every scene. Most of the people have hair. And then I realized: I don't watch mainstream heterosexual porn. I watch kink porn. I watch amateur porn. I watch gay porn. In all of that porn, lube is critical. Sports bottles loaded with j-Lube; paper picnic bowls of Crisco. Even the much-vaunted for-lesbians, by-lesbians Crashpad series has megafrackloads of lube.

But for most people, the gay stuff doesn't exist. The amateur stuff doesn't exist. The most "realistic" porn, in the sense that ordinary people do their (extra-)ordinary kinky things, and don't edit out the details, on camera, is basically the porn that has no marketing budget.

I think that's sad for the obvious reason that, unlike other kinds of movies, we do have sex, and when we watch porn it's often for the kind of sex we want to have but, for some reason or other, we just aren't. And I don't think we want lube-free, laughter-free, sanitized sex.

I could be wrong. The coming twin forces of Presence and Sexbots will probably prove me wrong. I think I'll stick to people.

The disassociation of the animal and the human

• The evolved relationship human beings had with exchange ended with the first city-states.
• The evolved relationship human beings had with knowledge ended with literacy.
• The evolved relationship human beings had with politics ended with the printing press.
• The evolved relationship human beings had with food ended with the railroad.
• The evolved relationship human being had with God ended with the automobile.

Some of these are somewhat (may I say, sometimes very) controversial, but take them in order: when human beings started creating cities, they came together and created a system of exchange that was facilitated not by interpersonal trust, but by uniformly pushing that trust onto a third party, the king. Everything we'd been doing for 50,000 years stopped being meaningful; most of our transactions were abstracted outward from one person to another. Then came literacy, in which the words of the dead could continue to teach long after the original thinkers were gone, and not just because a fluke led to someone memorizing a particular song or poem. Politics was interpersonal, even in Rome, and throughout the Medieval time until the printing press; at which point, it became possible to flood the mental space between people. Food was local and weather-dependent; then came the railroads and interstate distribution, warehousing, and market pressures for preservation and industrial agriculture.

And then, God was something with whom you interacted with your neighbors and often had to reconcile with them; then came the automobile and the ability to leave your neighborhood, pick your church, the church of your bent, the church of your own ideology, and soon your need to be reconciled to your neighbors, to honor the Sermon on the Mount (or its equivalent in other faiths, and all faiths have a teaching about reconciling with one's neighbors), became less important than other, often less conciliatory, issues.

All of these issues have become more, not less, disassociated from our animal understanding of them as information has become more and more widespread, books and printing and radio and television and now the Internet provided more and more people with more knowledge (not all of it "factual," of course). The pressure is on.

So here we are, at the stage where it's becoming obvious that the evolved relationship human beings have with sex is finally, utterly coming to an end. It started, naturally, with the invention of reliable birth control where women had the say in its use. But just as the tasteless tomatoes of the grocery store have replaced the vine-ripe readiness of our gardens, artificial substitutes for partners have started to satisfice enough to make people sit up and notice. Even as we become so blase about discussing sex in public, there's a retreat that will only grow as virtual reality and robotics start to delay our sexual debuts, cripple our sexual vocabulary, and shorten our sexual impatience.

I mean, why go through all the trouble of dating, negotiating, and risking disappointment when you could always go home to your model 2021 Rebel Girl Mark IV, especially since you paid for the VR upgrade? With the contact lenses in, she can have any of a thousand starlets' faces; when you leave the office, your phone will notify her to activate. By the time you've pounded down a Soylent and your Tesla has pulled into the driveway, she'll be warm enough to convince you that you don't need anyone else.

"How to be a Stepford Wife with ADHD."

The only book at the local library for adults with ADHD was entitled The Queen of Distraction, a book entirely for and about women with ADHD. I picked it up anyway. Good list-making tips are good no matter what your gender.

But the section on romance really (and I mean really) bugged me. Because the author wa, y'know, cool and all with the idea that hyperactives might not want to settle down, but instead spend a lifetime of moving from relationship to relationship as boredom settled in, but inattentives might well want a "real" relationship. You know, one that lasted.

She really does a fantastic job of capturing the anxiety of ADHD/I on a date. I can't stop looking at that flickering TV in the bar. He probably think I'm an idiot because I can't keep up in conversation or find the right words. Do I look okay? Am I talking enough? Too much? But the thing is, nowhere in this long (and duplicated) tale of "getting serious" is polyamory ever really discussed. I mean, seriously, if you're the sort who wants both a stable relationship and lots of lovers, have both goddamit. Just do it with everyone's consent and compassion.

There's an entire goddamn chapter on clothes and laundry. Part of it's excellent: the anxiety of buying and wearing clothes for someone with ADHD is well-written, but the whole laundry thing is so detailed it's closer to an autism spectrum disorder how-to than anything.

It's such a mix. It's like, there's ADHD, and if you want to live the most boring, middle-class, white-bread life ever, this is how you look like you're doing it while managing your spinning brain.