And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: Soylent, Day Four, Five, And Six

So a long-time Internet crush of mine was in Ohio, and I’d agreed to drive down to Columbus to meet with her.
What do you do with a girl in a strange town when you can’t take her out for coffee?
What you come to realize when you’re on Soylent is how omnipresent our food is as a social construct.  Want to see someone?  Go out for coffee.  Have a date?  Take her out to dinner.  Have friends in town who you really love?  Cook a meal for them.
But if I wanted to have a space where Kristen and I could sit down in and chat in relative privacy that didn’t involve food – because God, if you put me near an iced coffee I would drink that fucker quicker than the dog steals your dinner – then I had only one other option.
And it seemed a little, shall we say, aggressive to suggest renting a hotel room on our first date.  Particularly one that charged by the hour.
Yet when you take away the shared comestibles, you come to realize what a restaurant’s true purpose is: it’s a neutral, pleasant place you can pay someone else to allow you to talk in public.  Which is super-useful.  You don’t want to go over to stranger-danger’s houses, or even necessarily have friends over to yours if you’re messy.  Or maybe there’s not enough space.  So you go out to a restaurant, which gives you a low-key and interactive thing to do that doesn’t involve you wandering around looking at stuff.
The “not looking at stuff” is key.  We eventually settled on meeting at the arboretum, which was nice, but not exactly private.  And it was a little awkward, talking about polyamory and the kink scene and oh, did you know she used to be a porn star? in a big echoing room when there are small children playing with the koi at our feet.  We could have found a bench, but then we’d be facing straight outwards, not at each other, and given that we’d been exchanging texts for years and the novelty of this whole experience was the actual presence of her pretty eyes, I kind of wanted to look at her.  And yes, the flowers and the brickwork were nice to look at, but often kind of distracting from actually catching up because we’d be discussing her past history with her ex and we’d round a corner and a parrot was cawing in our faces.
What I needed was a nice place to sit down and have people bring us the entertainment to poke at on our own time, and then pretend they didn’t hear us talking about Queen Victoria’s sex life.  (Because honestly, that’s how I roll: historical kink.)  When I tip you well, Mr. Waiter, that’s my way of saying “Thank you for sufficiently covering your smirk when you overheard us.”
Despite the lack of entries, I didn’t skip the weekend’s Soylent-blogging – I was actually collecting data, trying to see how awkward a rather social weekend would go when we couldn’t have food.
And I am sad to tell you that Gini and I flat-out cheated.
We had a Home Free concert to attend on Friday with two friends, and I suggested meeting up for dinner beforehand.  Gini was horrified.  “We can’t go out for dinner!” she cried.  “We’d just sit there empty-handed like fools!  What would they do?  Would they also eat nothing, in some fucked-up Guantanamo hunger strike solidarity?  Would we look the waiter in the eye and stir goop into our glass and say, ‘Sorry, we’re taking up seat space and stuffing your tip up your ass?’  There is no dinner now!  There is only Zuul!”
Then Gini said, “I don’t talk like that, Ferrett, would you stop exaggerating my words for comedic context?”
Then Gini said, “I totally talk like that all the time, I don’t know why anyone would think that that very nice, handsome, and above-all accurate reporter Ferrett would possibly misconstrue my words.”
But yeah, we punked out on the pre-dinner show, because it would have been totes awkward.  And we’d only been drinking Soylent for four days, and already we felt like a freak show.  Admittedly, we set out to be a freak show, and this whole “Let’s drink Soylent” was pure performance art, but we weren’t quite ready to go all Andy Kaufman and start entangling others in this whacky process.
And what we realized was that if we decided to do this full-time, we would have an incredibly awkward time trying to keep up a social life.  On average, we go out with friends three, maybe four nights a week.  Of those, about two to three involve eating as part of the catching up, whether that’s dinner at the Meyers or coffee with Karla or hey, new restaurant, who can we take there?  And the remaining night is usually a movie, and the best part of the movie is going out for a drink afterwards and dissecting why the hell Christopher Nolan thinks that turning the music volume up to 11 is an EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE.
And going out without goop is, well, kinda dangerous.  As noted, Soylent digests at a very consistent rate – if I drink a glass, I’m good for about three hours before I start to feel hungry again.  If we go out for a long evening and don’t bring our goop, then according to the rules to as to how we are doing this right now, we cannot buy a cruller or a bagel or a candy bar or a piece of fruit or Jesus think of all the snacks you can just casually buy and then imagine them not being there when you want them.
Being on the all-Soylent diet is basically like being on the Oregon Trail.  You have to pack your goop and stuff it into the back of your wagon, because once you hit those hills there’s no place to buy anything.  And if the concert runs long or you get stuck in traffic or you decide to go out afterwards, you will feel the dwindling nutrients in your stomach slowly shrink.  And if you get really hungry, then sorry, YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY.
Basically, the all-Soylent diet gives you a nice sharp preview of what it’s like to have massive food allergies.  And unless you’ve had those, you don’t realize how truly fucked up it is to have to carry your own food around with you, constantly monitoring your caloric input, inventorying what you have and making sure you can make it to the next day.
So we didn’t even bring goop to the concert.  We just chugged a lot of it, enough to hopefully get us through, and then left right away to go home and chug more goop.
Saturday, we skipped dinner at the Meyers, but when we walked in, we found that winter had arrived.  And Kat has an allergic reaction to snow: whenever there’s ice on the ground, she bakes.  Obsessively.  So when we walked in there were racks of cookies, three loaves of bread, the house filled with the delicious yeasty scent of a new loaf in the oven.
Strangely, the presence of the food didn’t bother me all that much.  At this point in the Soylent diet, I still crave food – anything buttery will knock me on my ass – but the scent is almost enough of an experience to get me through the withdrawal.  It’s a mild hunger, like you might crave gum once in a while.
And yet I found myself wanting to be social.  Everyone there was cutting up pieces of cheese, snacking on apples, noshing on this fresh hot bread – and my hands kept reaching out to take the bread, as though eating with them would somehow let me be a part of them.
Gini and I did not bring goop.  Because we could probably chug enough in advance to not be hungry.  And because mixing up a batch and bringing it would be awkward.  But at least for me, I felt like enough of a freak show being on this week-long experiment, with everyone asking “So how’s it going?” – and actually chugging the goop in public would have marked me as the alien I was.
I would not be sharing the warmth of this meal.  I would be drinking something else, something they found disgusting and freakish, and actually putting that into my mouth in front of them would have just emphasized my otherness.  And I wonder if that’s how it is for native Chinese when they come here and people mock their disgusting food, or any other immigrant.  Did they once have this social pressure of “Eeeyew, you really eat that?” – a subtle pressure that kept them pent with their own kind, where they could have a nice yummy haggis at home and not have anyone force them to justify this?
I thought Soylent would teach me about food.  What it’s teaching me about is how we react to food.
And what I’m learning is that food is so integrated with friendship that it gets really, really awkward to separate the two.
TOMORROW: So Where Do We Go From Here?

And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: Soylent, Day Three

I’d like to talk to you about my anus.
…well, no, actually I wouldn’t, but that act puts me in a very small crowd. Because I really fucking hate fart jokes.
Because everybody farts.
Imagine a world where everyone around you burst into belly-clutching spasms of hi-lar-ity every time you sneezed.  Each sneeze would be met with, at best, someone smirking like you’d done something truly shameful but maybe just a little bit enjoyable, and at worst a sneeze would lead to a so-called “epic” story about that time – hee hee! – you remember that Aunt Sady?  Had a cold?  And she went to church?  And right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon, she – oh, yeah, she did – she let out a big wet sneeze right in the middle of the homily?
Then everyone around you would laugh for like ten, fifteen minutes while you sat there feeling vaguely embarrassed for everyone.
But no.  They loved sneezes so much they made fake sneezing noises and then giggled like this was the height of comedic technology.  Every comedy trailer featured, prominently, a scene where some dignified mayoral-type got sneezed on, spewing gallons of fake snot all over his monocle.   Down at the warehouse, it was considered the super-funniest of pranks to sneeze on the back of someone’s beck.  People would go out of their way to snort black pepper at declasse parties, because the biggest sneezes were naughty, but by God you secretly had to admire the loudness of Jackie-boy’s sneezes, amiright?
There you’d be, trapped in a world full of sneezeophiles, feeling like people were basically idiots for taking a vaguely unpleasant act and ritualizing it into the funniest of funnies.  Sneezes would be so hallowed, in fact, that if you said “Really, I think a little less of people who get off on sneeze humor” that you would be automatically seen as the sort of tight-nosed prude who deserved a good head-cold.
Then you hear about this new diet you can go on!  And it turns out that one of the side effects is rampant sneezing.  So you figure, “Okay, well, I don’t find sneezing funny, but at least writing about this diet will allow me to make a bunch of cheap nose jokes.  It’ll amuse somebody.”
But alas, though I’m supposed to have turned into a human whoopie cushion at this point, I am not a fart machine.
Gini claims to be windier, but frankly I haven’t noticed.  We were promised huge toxic clouds, and I anticipated being basically a gas giant at this point, surrounded by a ball of toxic miasma, perhaps even having acquired Saturn-like rings – but nothin’.  I mean, I do fart, but no more so than in the course of a normal day – which is totally hysterical, right?  Ferrett farts!  Oh my God, clutch your purses to your chests.
But what is happening is that Gini is starting to freak out.  Last night, she clutched my chest and said, “This stuff tastes like baby food.  My poop smells like baby food.  I smell like baby food.  I don’t know if I can do this.”  She wailed when characters ate food on The Big Bang Theory, pounding her armrest and demanding that someone give her nutrition with actual texture and taste.
I told her to hang on, but at this point my only hope of her making it to Day Seven is everyone on social media shaming her into not giving it up.  So I hope I can rally enough troops to provide psychological pressure on my wife.  Remember, she is a bad person if she cannot do this and then no one will ever love her again if she cannot drink silty artificial goop for seven straight days.
What is happening, however, is that my body is readjusting, much like Matthew Murdock after getting a canister of radioactive waste straight to the face.  My sense of smell has never been particularly keen, but yesterday I was in the basement writing…
(SIDE NOTE: What I am writing currently is the first draft of a novel which can best be described as “The Velvet Tango Room in space.”  It begins with a starving character turning up at a space station and being invited to dine at the finest cuisine in all the known worlds.  Much of what I am writing now is an uneducated boy learning how to eat well, in a different prose style than I’m used to – and if “authorial experience” colors a chapter, these early bits are going to be some of the strongest writing in my entire life.)
…yesterday I was in the basement writing, and the entire room was suffused with the buttery taste of popcorn and salt.  Like, so vivid I wondered whether a ghostly Orville Redenbacher was sitting next to me.  I actually put down the keyboard and walked upstairs to investigate, only to discover that my daughter had microwaved herself some popcorn and both Gini and I were circling around her, noses uplifted, as if we could live on scent alone.
Which I, personally, kinda could.  It was disappointing to follow that up with another glass of sludge – and that petri dish of crawling growth at the back of my throat gets worse with each glass – but the smell was almost like eating popcorn, at this point.  It was nebulous, but there was a weird ascetic satisfaction in going, “I can live on this odor” and then drinking my muck.  The same thing happened later when she heated up some Greek food – a burst of sensation in the nose, but my stomach was full.  What I craved was taste, but so much of taste was in the nose that I could alllllmost get there.
But not quite.
Because goddamn, writing this right now?  I want some fucking popcorn.
TOMORROW: Social Engagements and Soylent
 
 

And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: Soylent, Day Two

So I text a lot over the course of a day.  And in light of attending the Geeky Kink Event last weekend, I had lots of new people I was chatting with.
And about two hours into Soylent, I asked someone what she did, and she replied with…
…a picture of a cake.
I should add: this was a totally innocent picture of a cake.  She was a baker.  She was showing me her craft.  But to a man condemned to slurping goop, she might as well have sent me pornography.
And as the day went on, one by one, my so-called “friends” started sending me pictures of food.  “Miss this yet?” they’d ask, texting me a photo of a turkey dinner.  A Dunkin’ Donuts coffee narrowly missed my hunger mark, as it wasn’t iced.  Chocolate chip muffins were displayed like a stripper’s nipples.  Which led, eventually, to this conversation:

The lesson: my friends are dicks.  (But they make me laugh.)
But come the end of Day Two of Soylent, and I have found this new diet to be… weirdly revealing.  Because my days are now as gray as the goop in my glass.
See, I never realized this before the (literal) gravy train ended, but I tended to parcel out mini-rewards to myself over the course of the day.  Did I just untangle a hard math problem?  Hey, time for a low-fat Rice Krispy treat.  Do I feel like I’m halfway through the day at work?  Let’s commemorate the occasion by grilling up a nice juicy turkey burger!  And of course, after I put in my ninety minutes of writing in the evening, a nice cold glass of chocolate milk goes down smooth as the author’s reward.
And those various flavors provided both a pulse and a variety to the day.  I worked in my same living room, I checked the same email programs, I checked the same websites – but come my 11:30 snack, would I have a buttered hot dog roll, or hummus?  When it came to the sugary treat I’d allow myself, would it be a S’mores Pop Tart or a bowl of cereal?  For dinner, would it be roast chicken or meatloaf or a balsamic salad or Italian wedding soup or…?
Food, I’ve come to realize, was what broke up the sameness of routine.  Food and books were the two things that were endlessly mutable for me, and now without one, the days take longer.  I have no real way of marking time at work – oh, sure, I can look at the clock, but I’m sippin’ goop and wrangling code, sippin’ goop and wrangling code, sippin’ goop and wrangling code and God, what time is it?
Time passes slowly without these markers.
And you realize how much “eating” is actually a skill.  My blood sugar levels kept rising and crashing, rising and crashing, because my stomach would take a glass of Soylent and extract the ingredients with clinical efficiency in a methodical way.  You need to not just drink big gulps, swilling four separate glasses a day doled out in discrete intervals; you need to space out the fuel, because otherwise your body will just greedily process it all and leave you in a trough of starvation.
When I ate during the day, I had an unconscious library of how to eat, a library so comprehensive that I hadn’t even recognized how thoroughly I’d internalized it – am I crashing? Have a glass of milk.  Want something to last me an evening? A nice, dense chicken breast.  Need to think clearly? Sugar blast.  I understood how to manage my energy levels and moods by stuffing various organics down my gullet, and now I have just… Soylent.
And yet… Soylent has removed something stressful from my life.
There is a pleasant purity about it.  There are no bad choices to be made.  Particularly after they’ve cracked open your chest to rewire your fat-clogged heart, every meal becomes a crossroads: Do I eat what the doctor wants, or what my instincts want?  How much margarine should I spread on that hot dog roll?  Shouldn’t I be eating fishy old tuna instead of this marvelous chicken a la king?  You should be eating more fruit, less Pop Tarts, God, you’re killing yourself, you’re literally killing yourself, but this food is so good.
I have wept in the grocery store.  Because after you’ve been on the ventilator, you feel this terrible weakness growing within yourself like a cancer.   There are all these worlds closed off to you except maybe in tiny snippets – no more cashews, no more juicy burgers, no more tubs of Ben and Jerry’s – and whenever you do allow yourself that one-time pleasure, it comes mixed with the horrified realization that you have just thrown a spadeful of dirt onto your own grave.
After the triple-bypass, there are only foods you hate but must eat, and foods you love that will destroy you.
Yet all I can have is this Soylent.  I can’t have too much.  You can’t want too much of this.  And it feels – well, safe.  It’s boring, but it’s a path that means I can’t overdose on a the heart-strangling meat of prime rib, can’t eat a weekend’s worth of calories in one hot fudge sundae, can’t lie to myself about what I ate.
No, it doesn’t have all the micronutrients that natural foods have.  But honestly, how many natural foods am I eating?  If I was leaving behind my vegan diet of roots and berries to go to Soylent, well, that’d be insane.  But truth is, I’m eating turkey hot dogs and Instant Breakfast Bars.  It’s probably a net growth in health to eat this.
And when I go to bed at night, there’s no heartburn because I was hungry at 9:30 and gorged.  There’s no question that what I ate was at least okay.
There are no decisions, but there are no bad decisions.  And it’s only day two.  I don’t know whether I could live like this.
But I could see how much better it might be if I could.
TOMORROW: Not Without My Anus

And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: Soylent, Day One

I’m one of those annoying gits who actually calls himself a foodie, and I usually don’t feel too ashamed about that.  Over the past two years I’ve made it a quest to dine at Michelin-starred restaurants to find out what great food truly tastes like.  I’ve eaten plenty of weird stuff.
So when it came time to eat the food that was not a food – the weirdest food that could be – of course I had to try it.
I found out about Soylent at the same time mainstream America did – when that New Yorker article went live.  Soylent was a gray goop that contained all the nutrients a human needed to survive, and several pallid men had replaced their entire diet with this sludge and were still living – well, if you can call a life without a good steak “living.”  They’d developed their own culture, where “pleasure eating” was a kind of weakness, touting a new lifestyle that was purer because you didn’t have all of these sugar-frosted distractions.
Also, they farted a lot.  Like, ambulance-engulfing clouds of pure toxic sulfur.  So I’m told.
So for a foodie, what better experience could you have than trying to live without food as we understand it?  What would it be like to spend a week dropping that experience from my daily life?  Sure, the physical changes would be intriguing – but mentally, what does drinking goop do to you? Would we become placid nutrient-animals, the next level of the hipster-food crowd turned to goop-enlightenment, sniffing haughily that really, you don’t need that quinoa, when the pure stuff is in this sedimented glass?
Or would we be grabbing our friends’ lapels and thrusting our noses into their mouths, huffing, “Please. Lemme just smell your food. I can tell – that’s popcorn, isn’t it? Oh, God, I miss popcorn, let me lick your teeth, I’ll give you a dollar.”
So my wife and I bought a week’s supply and committed to a week of Soylent. Because frankly, we live our lives to maximize our chances of whacky sitcom experiences, and this seemed like the sort of dumb-ass bet that the Seinfeld crew would commit to.
The interesting thing is that we started debating what “food” was even before the games begun.  I rummaged around in my pocket for my keys and wound up asking, “Hey, does this gum count as food?”  (It did.)  My wife had to write her obituary for her mother, and we both agreed that a glass of wine to dull the pain would be acceptable – but then I talked her into taking a Xanax instead, just to keep the experience pure.
Yes, we are sufficiently hardcore that we are Soylenting it up during funerals.
When you order Soylent, you… don’t get Soylent. My initial Soylent order was back in May and they sent it at the end of October. Apparently, reprocessing all those dead humans takes some time. So if you’re sufficiently encouraged to go, “I’d like to replace this delicious food in my fridge with nothing!” well, sadly you’re going to have to keep your taste buds primed for the next half a year until the Gods of Soylent send stuff out to you.
(Alternatively, you can make your own Soylent by going all Breaking Bad with a bunch of ordered-in chemicals, but… I’ve done crafts projects before.  I’ve seen how my first sad attempts to build a jewelry box went.  And I thought about eating the equivalent of that warped and badly-sawn jewelry box, and decided that feeding myself my own incompetence was probably not the way to go.)
But when you do get Soylent, this is a day’s supply.

Inside the packet is a grainy sand that looks like dry pancake batter mix. It smells malty, with a surprisingly sharp sting of artificial sugar in it, even though there’s no artificial sugar. It doesn’t feel threatening, though at any moment we hoped a small sand worm would burst from the surface so we could proclaim ourselves the Muad’dib of the goop circuit.

Then you pour the Soylent into the airtight jug they give you. They make a big deal about it being airtight, which I guess is because if it wasn’t vacuum-sealed then the other foods in your refrigerator would lend it flavor. And then you’d drink and be reminded that hey, this is a ludicrous idea, we have fucking cheese in this fridge, and then you’d fling the airtight container at the wall and eat a bowling ball-sized hunk of cheese.
…also, I now wonder whether hipster Soylent fanatics are going to remind us that they don’t have a fridge in the same way that annoying hipsters go way far out of their way to remind us that they don’t have televisions.
“So the power went out the other day at my apartment…”
“Oh?” *slurps Soylent conspicuously* “That must have been so hard for you, what with that gigantic power-wasting appliance full of perishable foods and all.”

Then you pour the fish oil into the Soylent, which was a major concern to me. As a heart patient, I have to take four fish oil tablets a day, and if you buy the cheap kind you get what are known in the biz as the “fish burps” – wherein every five minute or so, you burp and your nostrils are filled with the rich scent of rotting salmon.
If I were a genie and wanted to wish a living hell upon my enemies, I would give them all ENDLESS FISH BURPS.
But the fish oil had no smell – literally. I shoved my nostril right over that bottle like I was about to spritz some nasal spray right up in this schnozz, and all I smelled was the pain when my wife beat me about the head and shoulders and yelled “STOP PUTTING THAT BOTTLE UP YOUR NOSE, WE ARE DRINKING THAT.”

Then you add water! Doesn’t it look delicious?

Gini does not think it looks delicious.

But after you shake it up, you have two glasses of goop. Gini had hers on the rocks, much like our marriage after I suggested this lunatic idea; I had mine with crushed ice, crushed like my dreams of eating food ever again.

And we toasted. Gini’s toast was, “The problem with performance art is that eventually you have to perform.”

And…
It wasn’t terrible.
Basically, what you had was a grainier Slim-Fast (or Ensure, if that’s your recovering-from-dental-surgery jam) that wasn’t overpowered with sugar to make it palatable. People said it was like drinking thin pancake batter, but that’s inaccurate, at least when it’s cold – pancake batter has a sort of eggy, sweet edge to it, whereas this is basically drinking chilled yeast. You have to keep swirling the glass to keep it from sedimenting, which makes you look like a douche – the glass-swirl is the trick of wine connoisseurs everywhere, and you look like, “Hrm, what kind of top notes am I detecting in this quicksand?” when really you’re just trying to stop all of the muck from collecting in the bottom and the ice from melting at the top.

But the first taste wasn’t bad.
Yet what nobody’s discussed about Soylent that I’ve seen is the fermentation problem.
Because when you drink Soylent, you get a muck-slick at the back of your throat. That stuff washes over your tonsils like the sea pulling out at low tide, leaving them coated in a fine grain of Soylent-sludge. And that’s not too bad – you wind up swallowing convulsively like a dog eating peanut butter, but that’s a worthy sacrifice to make for Goop Life.
(I didn’t choose the Goop Life. The Goop Life chose me.)
Yet as the minutes wear on, the sediment in your throat reacts with your back palate, and in about twenty minutes there’s an olfactory pit created back there that starts jamming the odor of “bad barback” up the underside of your nostrils. It’s the scent of dive bars everywhere, that beer poured onto a mat and left to just do its own beery thing, the alcohol long since evaporated but the grains living on. And it seems to grow at the back of your throat like a chia pet, fuzzing more and more like that yellowish slick you find on your tongue after a hard night out, and then you run to the kitchen for a glass of water to try to wash out the back of your mouth.
It’s not that bad, actually. But it’s a little distressing when you’re typing emails and realize you’ve got a petri dish growing at the back of your throat that needs to get dealt with.
But hey! That first glass went down pretty damn well. What could go wrong after this?
TOMORROW: The terrible things your friends do when they find out you’re drinking Soylent.

They Lied To Me About Small Talk, So I Want To Be Honest About Consent.

When I was fourteen, people talked about “breaking the ice” with strangers.  It was an appropriate metaphor.  For most folks, striking up conversations with people they didn’t know was as simple as stepping through the scrim of ice on a puddle.
For me, I was trapped under a foot of thick ice underneath a pond, drowning, hammering uselessly on that barrier with wet mittens.
I would later get a term for that fear: social anxiety.  But as a teenager, I realized that the world punished people who weren’t good at talking to new people – and so I bought several self-help books to try to master the art.
The books lived in some weird parallel world to me.  They were written from a place where every person you talked to lit up with happiness the moment you said “Hello” to them.  When you sat next to someone on a train in this world, they had nothing but spare time for you, as though they were NPCs in a videogame waiting for player input.  They were all seeking friends as badly as you were!
Everyone in this happy small-talk world had two settings: sports and weather.  They were encyclopedic experts on sports and weather in every sample conversation.
And the people who tried to talk to strangers?  They were nothing like me.  Their “Hello” never died as a whisper on their tongue.  They never mouthed their introductory sentence over and over again, trying to work up the courage to speak.  They never cleared their throat, then felt the lighthouse beacon of someone’s attention sweeping across them, then froze in that attention like a deer in the headlights.
All their conversations ended so well.  They walked away with friends.
I never did.
I think they meant it to be encouraging, creating this artificial world.  I think they wanted to show me how easy this all could be, to pluck up my courage.  But what really happened was that it made me feel that everyone else could do this, and that I was uniquely useless.
When you’re alone to begin with, feeling like you’re uniquely alone cuts like a razor.  And so for years I sat alone in my room, seeing decades worth of friendless days ahead of me, having resigned myself to the fact that I was broken.
This was nonsense, of course.  Lots of people don’t want to talk to strangers.  Over the years I’ve come to realize that small talk is rife with missed connections, awkwardnesses, grumpy men and women who’ve got no time to chat – but that’s not personal.  Most conversations fail, at least on the level that I wanted them to succeed, which was to say “Hi, I know no one here, maybe we can be friends.”
But by presenting this shiny happy world as though walking away with friendship was the norm, these cheerful tutorials dug out the quivering remains of my self-esteem and crushed it.
And that’s what I thought of when I read this Erika Moen cartoon on consent.

Click to see the full comic, as you should!

I adore Oh Joy, Sex Toy!, and this is a perfect example why: the first half of this is absolutely wonderful, talking about how consent works and how consent doesn’t, discussing badgering and drunk people in clear, perfect, and very nonjudgmental ways.  I love how Erica creates a universe where there’s no shame about sex, as that is largely the world I live in, and boy is it wonderful.
But then we get to the second half, the one where every sexual act is explicitly negotiated in advance like you’re interviewing for a job, and, well….
…I hear the cheerful voice of my self-help books postulating yet another parallel existence.
What we have here is a world where everyone sits down sanely whenever they discover an attraction, having decided via some meeting that “Yes, sex is about to happen” – and before they move forward to the kissing stage, they have coffee and plot out what will happen in the course of the evening.  I imagine schedules: 8:15 p.m, kissing starts, 8:30 the shirts come off, 8:45 unleash the oral sex.
And that’s a world I’ve certainly visited.  Just this last weekend, I exchanged several emails with a girl I was going to play with, detailing what I would do to her nipples (not much, as she’d just gotten pierced) and what sort of cuddling I’d need afterwards, and it went as planned.
But this world of consent here has nobody who just starts kissing someone and has it go from there.  It has no conflicts, where you were really getting off on doing X, and now he doesn’t want to do X, and while you’re okay with that now the sex is less interesting.  It has no surprises.
And most importantly, it’s a world where everyone knows their desires expressly and is fearless about revealing them.  It’s a world where a tentative “Uh… sure, I guess?” is seen as a lukewarm “No,” because that’s not enthusiastic consent, whereas some of my most fulfilling sexual experiments came from me being hesitant about The Thing, even maybe a couple of minutes into The Thing, but eventually discovering that The Thing was awesome.
I’ve got no problems outlining my kinks.  But I can easily envision that ice, breaking – for me telling you “Sucking my nipples will send me into orbit” is a small frozen puddle, but I know there are people trapped beneath the ice-rimed lake.
There’s power in positing a world without negatives.  I know that.  There’s all kinds of storylines that erase the microaggressions that, say, minorities face in the course of their lives, presenting a world where everyone just gets along, and those narratives often provide power.  Minorities read these worlds where they’re accepted as easily as a hug, and that lets them dream a world that they then work to create.
Unfortunately, lots of other people see that fantasy world and go, “Well, that’s how things are now!” and act as though the war has been won – and furthermore, that anyone who does get shunned or discriminated against must be somehow making that up.
Making worlds where everything Just Works has both the power to inspire, and the power to isolate.  And in this idealized version of Consent Culture, I worry we’re leaving people behind – the folks who aren’t as in touch with their sexuality as we all should be, the folks who are embarrassed to discuss what really turns them on, the folks who are more instinctive than intellectual about their sexuality.
It’s a new culture we’re creating these days, and in most ways I totally support it.  This is the first generation we’ve had where information on sexuality was easily accessible thanks to the Internet, and now we’re creating a new and exciting world where we talk about sex in great and happy and shameless new ways.  The rise of Consent Culture has created great spaces, and it’ll continue to, so I hope this brand of discussion continues.
But the world isn’t perfect, and I think that too many people go “Consent is easy!  You just say yes enthusiastically!” when really, what’s happening here is that they’re mapping their preferred method of interaction across a complex and shifting spectrum of personalities.  And since it’s easy for me to do that, it’d be easy for me to go, “Yeah, this is simple!”
Then I remember the people who were good with small talk.  I remember how the culture I grew up in expected me to be skilled at talking to strangers, and if I couldn’t do that, well, you know how not to be lonely, Ferrett.  Chat up someone at a bar.  It’s that easy!
Except it never was that easy, and it still isn’t.  And somewhere, there’s someone who’s hearing about how easy consent is except their sexual desire is this boiling cauldron of scary feelings that dries up into nothingness whenever they express it, and they’ve tried to negotiate the way that everyone says but it’s so intense that they just walk away.
You don’t deserve loneliness.  What you deserve is a culture flexible enough to accommodate multiple pathways to satisfaction.