A woman wearing a panda head was live-streaming sex acts. ‘Have you read Andrea Dworkin?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied
I was single, straight and female. When I turned 30, I imagined my sex life ending in a terminus of monogamy. Then I split up with someone I had been in love with for two years and – after sleeping with a couple of men and ending up in a clap clinic being tested for chlamydia – I decided that, based entirely on my own experience, the whole way we approach relationships had undergone a seismic shift in the past five years. In need of even greater solipsism, I moved to San Francisco to write a book about it.
On reaching the west coast, I signed up for the internet-dating site OkCupid. After a couple of dates, however, I began to feel an underlying malaise. While the internet offered countless opportunities to meet people, it was no guide to their suitability. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her 1949 classic The Second Sex: “I live in fear that someone will invent the internet, as it’s hard enough trying to stop Jean-Paul shagging women as it is.” So it was that I stopped going on OkCupid: the men I met bore little or no relation to their picture or descriptions.
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