Questions about Sex Shopping

Many of my friends are fans of Manhunt, the popular online nexus for gay sex shopping. Most have strong opinions about the value and overall impact of Manhunt, but I try to stay clear of taking any of those opinions as my own, being that I’ve never used the site. However, I have a few questions you may be able to help me with:

Q1: Interactions at clubs often feel like awkward financial transactions, so I understand how a more efficient consumer’s medium like Manhunt makes sense. Complex social variables are distilled into an online form that follows function. Your identity coalesces around your dick, your worth is easily quantified and bartered for goods, and your self-esteem is decoupled from anything more confusing than your stat marketed success. I’m impressed by the efficiency, but at what point does one tire of being a consumable product? Granted, we’re all consumed as product on a daily basis through our jobs, and we market ourselves obsessively in all facets of our lives, but from my own experience, I don’t feel very good about life or myself when I wear masks for extended periods of time. I just become frustrated and neurotic. With sex specifically, I find masks particularly intrusive to my well being. Is there a limit to the extent we can compartmentalize ourselves without damaging our ability to connect as real people? We are, after all, creatures of habit.

Q2: I have another friend who spends many hours a week on Manhunt talking to his invested community of virtual people, developing personal relationships that don’t transition from the keyboard to the headboard. Some of these friends he’s known for years and has never met. He tells me that he meets a lot of guys on Manhunt who are of the same mind. Is it now typical to build community through websites specifically oriented toward scoring quick sex? Is this unprecedented? Is it easier to develop gay community online than in the real world?

Q3; Could Manhunt be making men passive? With greater selection and ease of accessibility, does sex apathy set in? Most of my friends can't even remember the names of their tricks, so I would guess "yes."

The hunt is instinctual to males, but if you can lay back on your couch and let the dick come to you like a delivery pizza, in time doesn’t that make the modern gay man equivalent to some well-fed, caged animal in a zoo who can no longer exist in the wild?

The currency of online sex shopping is less complicated, but to me it seems that essential aspects of the transaction would lack appeal. You never know what you’re buying until it shows up on your doorstep, and with little more than a glance at the label it’s returned as soon as you try it on. Clicking on the merchandise and putting it your online cart is no substitute for more aggressive manifestations of animal nature: assembling the pack with which you run, roaming store to store, engaging in the hunt, and finding and winning the piece that stands out on the rack. Touching it, trying it on, modeling it in the mirror and contemplating whether it works on you, and maybe, just maybe, taking it home. Then again, that’s just me. Maybe I’m old fashioned.