{"id":14413,"date":"2015-02-03T21:15:22","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/i-am-a-digital-romantic-because-sex-online-is\/"},"modified":"2015-02-03T21:15:22","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T21:15:22","slug":"i-am-a-digital-romantic-because-sex-online-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/i-am-a-digital-romantic-because-sex-online-is\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
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I am a digital romantic. Because sex online is real sex and love online is real love and everything in between is real, too, as real as your hand down your pants, your heart in your mouth. I say this for all of us who\u2019ve ever felt our breath quicken when a particular userpic pops up on screen. For everyone who marvels that you can use a keyboard to construct a perfect rose that will never have the decency to decay. For the kids sexting each other on sticky smartphones while their parents sleep. For the fan fiction writers sending their horny fairy tales out into the dark like perfumed letters. For the student staying up late to hump a camera for her girlfriend in another timezone. For the Craigslist missed connections and the Chatroulette strangers. For the transsexual teenagers whispering lust and learning in chat rooms while small-town bigots drive drunk through their disappearing fiefdoms. For the World of Warcraft lovers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sexuality online is real sexuality, and it\u2019s about far, far more than porn. It\u2019s the children who meet each other on self-harm forums whispering their most painful everyday secrets until the night when one of them posts in crisis and the others call from across the world in voices so familiar they forget they\u2019ve never heard each other speak before. It\u2019s OKCupid and Fetlife. It\u2019s the camgirls and the cryptic personals and the amateur pornographers. It\u2019s passsive-aggressive status updates, untagging and defriending and broken-hearted blogging. It\u2019s the second-dates who tease each other with hyperlinks and the couples who send each other cat-gifs at work. It\u2019s every neck-down naked picture I\u2019ve ever sent to a boy I wanted to screw.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the hours positioning yourself on the sheets for the blink of a camera and touching yourself gently when the laptop shuts. It\u2019s the shy intellectuals spinning out message-board chats into something seductive, it\u2019s all of us who understand that how you fuck can be less important than how you talk about fucking. It\u2019s the lonely bedroom blogger flirting with a spambot. It\u2019s the bots who want to be loved and the lovers who want to be robots. It\u2019s the perverts, the dreamers and the shy, reaching out across the ether and running chilly fingers over each other\u2019s forebrains, and it\u2019s complicated. It\u2019s always complicated. But that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not human.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0from Unspeakable Things<\/i>\u00a0by Laurie Penny (via funny-likeafuneral<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a digital romantic. Because sex online is real sex and love online is real love and everything in between is real, too, as real as your hand down your pants, your heart in your mouth. I say this for all of us who\u2019ve ever felt our breath quicken when a particular userpic pops […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3Kt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}