Has Internet Culture Ruined Love and Sex?

In a world of too much stuff, too many images, and too many opinions, it’s a compliment to call Future Sex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25), culture reporter Emily Witt’s first book, useful. Because Witt is beautiful and writing about sex in the internet age, she’s gotten media attention. But she’s bristled at calling her work a memoir. Although being single at 30 led her to her topic, Witt travels beyond her own psychic distress and into a journalistic tour of 21st century mating. The result serves as a new economics of sex or, equally, an economics of new sex.

Witt, now 35, is at the tail end of Generation X, which believes its role is to reject what the boomers stood for—including post-pill free love—because that ended in divorce and neglected children. However, instead of the loyalty, procreation, and helicopter parenting she thought would be her demographic destiny, “another kind of freedom had arrived: a blinking cursor in empty space.”