Sex parties, polyamory and porn: Minnesota native explores modern love in 'Future Sex'

The book wasn't supposed to be about her.

Emily Witt expected to write a researched, arm's-length exploration of modern sexual relationships focused on her interviews with other people. But after moving to San Francisco and delving into sexual subcultures there, she realized that her questions about sex and women were clearly tied to one woman, in particular: herself.

Witt, who grew up in Minneapolis and now lives in Brooklyn, was single and in her early 30s. The future that she had pictured — marriage and monogamy — hadn't materialized.

"I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center," she writes in "Future Sex," her first book, to be published this week. "I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future."

With "the West Coast and journalism as alibis," Witt instead found herself exploring — tentatively, at first — different sexual options. She not only interviewed three lovers about their open relationship, she attended their sex party. She weighed feminist theories about pornography, then witnessed a filming. She not only reported on orgasmic meditation, she tried it out.

"I came to understand that in writing about sexuality, if you're just writing about other people, there's something always kind of clinical about it and abstract," Witt said in a recent interview. "If you're trying to write the most honest book possible, you have to come from a place of subjectivity."

Witt, 35, who graduated from South High School, also discussed language's role in today's sexual culture, the safe space created by live webcams and how pornography surprised her. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What inspired this exploration?

A: I always just assumed my life would be like my parents' life. They met in their mid-20s and got married and had a family. I thought maybe the timeline would be more delayed for me — I would be in my late 20s or early 30s — but still the same thing would happen.

It suddenly was apparent to me that the kind of person I had seen myself as was actually just a story I was telling myself — that there were other ways to be, other ways to consider and explore.

Q: At what point did that become a book?

A: It's funny, because the book came first. I was almost lying to myself: I thought of it as just a journalistic project, that I would write a book I wasn't in.

It just seemed to me one of the most urgent questions of being alive right now and something on the mind of a lot of my friends. It was clear there had been a technological shift, there'd been a demographic shift of people getting married later, or not at all. There'd been a moral shift, too — a lot more tolerance for different ways of living and way more openness. That, to me, seemed like an urgent contemporary story that I wanted to tell.

But I didn't realize ... how much it would affect me until I started actually going and meeting with people.

Q: Did you then start writing in first-person? Is that what naturally followed?

A: It was hard. There's this idea about serious journalism not being about you. Obviously, there was a reluctance to write about my own sex life. It's embarrassing — your parents are going to read it. I kept rewriting and putting more of myself in. But there are still parts where I'm hiding a little bit.

Q: Your chapter about live webcams and the people who use them was fascinating. What surprised you about that form?

A: Going into it, I wasn't sure there was a story there — thinking that the story of the live webcam is just the story of pornography, the story of peep shows, the voyeuristic dynamic where a woman performs for a man.

Then when I started interviewing people, I realized that for a lot of the people on there … it wasn't really about earning money. There was another thing going on where people were using this space as a kind of vacuum in which they could experiment with role-playing, with different fetishes they might have, with all kinds of different things that out in the world they wouldn't be safe messing around with in the same way.

Q: You showed a similar surprise or change in your thinking about pornography. You had never really watched it, but it's clear you were familiar with the feminist debate around it. How did watching it shift how you thought about the intellectual debate?

A: I really had trouble admitting to myself that it turned me on. Then I had to ask myself: Why does that freak me out? Why does that feel wrong?

So then I went back and thought about all the teaching I had gotten from feminism, from older ideas, from Christian morality about what was wrong about pornography. What did it mean to be turned on by images that do not represent the sex you want to have or the world you want to live in or the gender dynamics you think are right?

What I came to terms with was that it shouldn't be so scary — these things don't need to dictate who we are. And pornography, like the live webcam space, it is a place where you can go and consider and name and have to come up with search terms for what activates responses in your body. Me — maybe a lot of other women — we're not very good at naming those things. I thought, I can't name when something turns me on: It's this mysterious alchemical miracle when I want to have sex with somebody. And maybe it doesn't need to be that.

Q: That's so interesting, because there are various points in the book where you have to name it. In these groups, they ask you that question over and over again.

A: It was hard for me, and it's honestly still hard for me when somebody asks me what I want. I want to not have to say what I want, kind of. [Laughs.]

Realizing that I had this difficulty was kind of amazing to me. I thought of myself as a kind of enlightened, not sexually repressed person.

Q: If someone wanted to undertake a similar exploration, do you have any tips for that tour?

A: Just be forgiving of yourself. If you don't like something, don't feel like you have to like it.

When you have good experiences, name them. But also when you have bad experiences, forgive yourself for having them and not blame experimentation. Accept and forgive the negative experiences that you might have pursuing adventure or something different.

Q: I loved your tweet about the book's style guide — with Kink.com alongside kombucha. It points out the grappling you have in the book around language. What role do you think language and vocabulary play in today's dating culture?

A: Language plays a huge role in it. You know, at the end of the day, there's actually nothing new about any sexual practice. Everything's been done before. [Laughs.] But it's really the stories we tell about it, the language we use that differentiates our feelings about it. There's a lot of new words now — there's polyamory, there's hooking up.

You know, hooking up is something everyone's parents did also, it just wasn't called that. It's not like the act of hooking up is new. All of a sudden, the culture became concerned with this idea of sex that was detached from a narrative of romance and what that meant. That's how we differentiate the past from the present and from the future, is the words we use.

Q: Any words you find particularly useful in describing how things are today?

A: Among my friends, I don't know if it's just because I'm older now, but all the variation … in the words that describe open relationships, as opposed to the old vocabulary of cheating. Now there's this vocabulary that allows free love to be thought of as free love instead of cheating and philandering and the kind of cuckold language.

Q: You investigated polyamory, getting to know this group of three people who have these open sexual relationships. How did you end up feeling about that and whether it was something you could do?

A: I'm really glad I went and looked at this stuff, and it made me so much more open to this situation, should it arise in my life. But I don't personally think I want to have multiple partners in a long-term way. And I think it's OK to say that, and you're not closed-minded if you say that.

The main thing is that finding a way that's not just you asserting something because the bigger culture says you're right — but because you've thought about it in your own way and within the context of your own experience. Instead of just inheriting the assumption that this is the way the world should be and using that as the reason for choosing monogamy.

Q: I suppose you're getting this question now that you've written about your life: You mentioned you're in a new relationship?

A: The book took me roughly four years to write, and I had a boyfriend for two years of that. It was hard to write about this stuff while also trying to have a relationship and managing my interest in experimentation. For whatever reason, the relationship ended the second I finished the book.

And then I got lucky. I met somebody I really like. So I'm in a new relationship. And now the question is: All these ideas that I explored, what do I bring into the relationship? I do think having gone through this process of inquiry has just made me happier with my sexuality. I just feel that I'm better at being in a relationship for having done this.

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168