(CAUTION! Today's entry discusses the author's sex life in sometimes pornographic detail; those who wish not to read such details [including as always the author's family] would be wise to skip the entry altogether.)

Did you know that it's been two and a half years since I last had sex? Well, okay, that's not technically true; there's been a couple of isolated experiences in there as well, half-intimate things that rarely led to full intercourse, with people I barely knew and in most cases never saw again. So okay, to be technical about it -- it's been two and a half years since I last had full intercourse with someone who lives in Chicago and who I run into on a regular basis. And that, as they say, is a long-ass time for a sexually active person to go without sex, especially someone like me who just five years ago was having sex with someone new every week (as part of book I was writing at the time on Chicago's swinging community).

Frankly, there are big chunks of the year when this lack of sex doesn't bother me in the least; indeed, when I see it actually as a benefit, in that I'm not wasting all that time trying to meet people and set up dates and go out on dates and attempt to be impressive on dates, et-fucking-c. And those chunks of the year not so coincidentally tend to line up with the winter months here in Chicago; it's difficult to get excited about the dim prospect of sex, after all, when you're looking at a half-hour bus ride and 15-minute walk through four inches of snow in 20-below weather just to make it possible. (Okay, maybe it's possible for people to get excited under such circumstances, but not me.) Ah, but once that warm weather hits here again every April or so, and once everyone starts spending a whole lot more time outside in a whole lot less clothes, look out -- it's the mighty annual appearance of Horny Jason again, as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano each year (and as full of birdshit, some might argue).

And sure enough, it's started turning warm here in Chicago again, and sure enough I find myself a little more...er, distracted these days than normal. But I'm caught in a weird situation these days, when it comes to the prospect of casual sex, because: 1) I'm not swinging anymore, because I'm afraid of it interfering too much now with my daytime career goals; 2) all my old fuckbuddies now either have boyfriends or live in other cities; 3) I don't have any current platonic friends of the type I could ask to be new fuckbuddies; 4) I have ethical problems with the idea of hiring prostitutes (and can't nearly afford it anyway, so is a moot argument); and 5) I don't want to put some poor woman through the charade of a real relationship for a month or two, just because I wanted to get laid on a regular basis for a little bit, ultimately to unceremoniously dump her ass six weeks later. I did that enough in my twenties to last the rest of my life, you know?

So I'm stuck in a sense; in a mood to have casual sex, but with seemingly no options for finding partners. So I've been looking into other options, frankly, especially online ones that allow people to be sexual with each other without having actual sex (hence making it attractive to a greater number of people). For example, regular readers will remember my first explorations about a year ago into the world of IM-based erotic chat and photo exchange, using a couple of volunteer readers who were game for helping out an enthusiastic newbie. And it was fine for what it was, I suppose, although it confirmed yet again that I'm mostly a visual person when it comes to sexuality. It made me wonder two things, in fact, when all was said and done: of what such an experience might be like when live webcams are added; and if there's a central place online where horny people with webcams get together, expressly to do sexual things with each other. This is half the battle, after all, when it comes to online sexual activities; actually, now that I think about it, it's more like 90 percent of the battle, in that it's very hard to find these places but very easy now to acquire the technology to make it all work.

Yeah, so, guess what? A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that a friend of mine here in the city had a decade-old webcam on a shelf at his place, not being used, and he agreed to let me take it home and try it out when I asked. And even though it was a Windows cam and over ten years old, I still managed to track down a freeware driver online that lets it work perfectly fine on my Intel OSX Mac. (Oh, internet, is there anything you can't do?) Okay, so I have a webcam! Now...what to do with my webcam? Like I said, this is 90 percent of the battle when it comes to the subject; sure, I now have the means to broadcast my wee-wee to the world, but where do I find people who would actually want to watch it (and mirror my actions in kind)? So I just kept doing what I've been doing for the last year or so, which is to fire up my IM software whenever I'm in a particular randy mood (usually late at night), in the hopes that some old lover will contact me out of the blue, or perhaps a random reader who's feeling like being a little naughty. (Hey, ain't like I'm getting paid to maintain this website, you know what I mean?)

And indeed, last week a random reader did contact me out of the blue one late night, and we sat around gabbing on IM for a couple of hours about all kinds of little subjects. It was her who told me of a service called Camfrog, which she claimed was just what I was looking for; a place that combines chat rooms with webcams, in other words, along with a central interface so that strangers can easily view and contact other strangers. And so I downloaded their proprietary software (cross-platform, thank God), booted it up, and...and what do you know, it actually worked! And not only that, but turned out indeed to be an almost perfect implementation of what I had been ideally expecting -- a place where anonymous naked strangers can quickly and easily find each other, check each other out, either move on quickly to the next stranger, or have a dual voyeuristic/exhibitionistic sexual experience with, if you're both willing, and with the options of text chat and audio too. And it's free! Fuck; what's not to like?!

How Camfrog works will be pretty familiar to anyone who's used chat software before; you basically create an account, which includes a username and profile, letting you share as little or as much info about yourself as you want. Then you log on, at which point you're presented with hundreds of "rooms," each of which have a certain amount of other people in them at any given time. When you visit a room yourself, then, a new window opens, showing the transcript of the group public chat on one side, a list of everyone in that room on the other side. Where the Camfrog software starts getting clever, though, is with that list of users; all one has to do is click on a name to immediately load up another new window, giving you a live, real-time view of that person's cam. This new window then also gives you all the other options of a traditional IM service as well; send a private message, view their profile, add them to your buddy list, etc etc.

This is all freaky enough, of course, and enough to get just about anyone addicted at first, sexual or not, but the killer aspect of Camfrog is this -- that whenever someone is viewing your particular cam, their icon in the big list suddenly acquires two giant green eyes, letting you immediately know that they're watching you. (In fact, I think the Pro version even sends you real-time alerts in the corner of your screen.) It is this one single feature, in fact, that is the entire key to meeting up with anonymous strangers for sexual activities there, in that you don't even have to talk to the other person under such a system; you simply watch each other's cams, using the mutual green eyes to prove to each other that you're both actually watching each other at that moment.

In effect, it creates a digital version of something the gay male community has had for decades, which is a cruising location; a series of danceclub-like spaces (most even have dance music playing, as well as bar-type trivia games), where people are literally hanging out naked and checking each other out solely in terms of if they'd like to immediately have sex with them or not. Ah, but, you see, it adds something as well that you can almost never guarantee at any physical cruising location, which is a layer of safety to it all; if anyone starts getting the least bit snippy with you, after all, you can always turn your computer off, or ban them from viewing or contacting you, or just wait for one of the overzealous administrators each room has to kick the person's ass out. And so this, of course, is what convinces women to get involved with the cruising too, as well as couples who would normally never go swinging, not to mention men who would never normally go cruising. My hat is off to you, Camfrog; you're freaking geniuses!

Now, just because I'm sure at this point that any Camfrog employee reading this is about to have a cardiac arrest -- let me me it clear that the majority of Camfrog's services are non-adult in nature, non-sexual as well, and that 100 percent of Camfrog's official marketing and promotion goes towards the family-friendly stuff there. In fact, it's quite clear that Camfrog is suffering the same dilemma right now that Yahoo Groups did in the '90s, back during the original Dot Com Boom; that their most passionate users are there for the one thing the company wants to de-emphasize the most, creating an environment where they must simultaneously support these users and not support them. For example, like Yahoo, Camfrog doesn't really put any kind of central structure into place for what kinds of activities are appropriate for which rooms; and so no matter what the name of the particular "adult" room, over the course of Camfrog's history a set of regular users have congregated in that room, and made "house rules" that may or may not have anything to do with what the room is titled. So a room called "Wild Girls," for example, may kick you out immediately for showing your penis on-cam, while a room called "Wild Girlz" may berate you for not showing your johnson. Yeah, very confusing, not to mention that it makes the goal of finding a good room a bit of a wild goose chase.

Now, let's not kid ourselves; if you're a single straight male, like everything else when it comes to easy sex, you're going to find a lot more hurdles than anyone else and a whole lot less successful hookups. To be sure, there are real women at Camfrog -- anywhere from 5 percent to a third of any particular room's total makeup, in fact -- but it's also a fact that many of these women have their cams off, or pointing to a wall, or sometimes set in "Private" mode (another feature of the Pro edition), which means that they may or may not being broadcasting a pre-recorded video instead of a live cam. (How can you tell? Look at their icon; the addition of a blue "P" means they're in Private mode, although not necessarily that they're showing a video.) And of the women left over in a room, whose cameras are on and are definitely real, most of them remain clothed the entire time, either chatting with friends or actually playing trivia or making fun of a bunch of naked schmos because she can. There are definitely erotic pleasures to be had for straight males, which I'll get into a little later; but just like all other things concerning this subject, most women who get involved can expect to be flooded with responses, while most men can expect no response at all.

No, the best thing about Camfrog for me, and what keeps compelling me to go back and back, lies with the bisexual's best friend, hot man-on-man homoerotic action. Thank you, hot man-on-man homoerotic action! Stop having a heart attack, Camfrog marketing staff! And in this, Camfrog's extra layer of safety and anonymity works wonders as well; it convinces just hundreds of normally straight guys, in fact, to suddenly derive pleasure out of wanking their dick in front of a bunch of other guys, guys who would normally be physically cruising if not for the creepy, dangerous aspect of the physical version. The biggest all-male rooms there, in fact, are just these cornucopias of sexuality: from 18-year-old built skaters who like showing off, to old rich queens who like fucking them, from politically active club queers looking for boyfriends, to laid-back bisexual alterna-emo-slackers like me just looking for someone to rub their dick with. And like a perfect cruising environment, you have a number of means at your disposal for interacting; you can either put on a show and see who comes to you, or watch the group chat and see who's advertising a show, or simply view random cams in no particular order and see who will notice and watch back.

It is fascinating, I have to fucking admit it, and I'm sorry to anyone out there who is offended by such a thing, but it is. Because ultimately, it's kind of like the homoerotic experiences I had in my swinging days, which mostly were deliberately with laid-back pale emo slackers like myself, because those are the guys I mostly get attracted to via the limited bisexuality I have. (For those who don't know, I consider myself about 80 percent straight.) But in a way, it's kind of like going clubbing in Chicago's Boystown for a night, or New York's Chelsea, or Munich's Gaertnerplatz; if you want, you can spend the entire evening watching nothing but pretty muscular boys, naked and oiled down and doing just the most disgusting things to their humongous cocks you can imagine, all of it voluntarily just because they like putting on a show. But then it's kind of like a suburban sex club; couples are of course encourage to appear on-cam together, and most rooms have several, and most of them are actually having sex on their cam that you can also watch live. But then again, it's also kind of like a singles bar for those who are legitimately gay; lots of men keep their face on-cam the whole time, for example, and are looking mainly for people they click with and can have an ongoing relationship with.

It's all of this bundled into one -- like a fucking mall for fucking, for fuck's sake! (I hereby apologize for the preceding play on words.) You can see why I've gotten kind of obsessed with this place over the last couple of days, right? Sure, it's a free sexual service, which is going to make it popular no matter what, but it's a whole lot more; it's one tool that lets you simultaneously be a voyeur or exhibitionist, depending on your taste, dominant or submissive depending on your mood. It lets you try out fantasies that would normally stay in the mind for one's entire life; lets you do things in front of others that you won't admit to your friends you even know exist. It lets you be a slut, without the danger or stigma of being a slut. And most importantly for many of the most mainstream people there, it lets them explore a side of sexuality that the circumstances of their lives (job, marriage, kids, etc) simply don't let them normally experience. That makes Camfrog's denizens not only a bunch of dirty little fuckers, but an entirely different breed of fuckers than a place like a swinging website; not just the hardcore lifestylers, but a whole lot of good-looking suburban middle-class white-collar workers and students too, who are sometimes the dirtiest ones there but who you would least suspect if encountering on a sidewalk.

For example, as I mentioned, there's definitely a legitimate erotic pleasure for straight men to have there; and that's because in almost every room at almost any time, there is at least one very real woman who is putting on a very real show for others to watch, as well as granting requests posted in the group chat and sent via private message. And sure, a fair amount of them are Asian prostitutes or American strippers, but you'd be surprised how many are just the normal everyday women that you see in all other facets of your life; college students, housewives, freelancers, doing stuff on-cam that you normally only see from porn stars, gladly acceding to just some incredibly graphic requests being posted in the public room. In fact, this might be the most brilliant thing of all about Camfrog -- that ultimately they get both the men and the women to the same sexual state (naked and doing filthy things for each other's amusement), even though it was almost opposite motivations that got them there to begin with.

I've talked with enough women about this, so I know it's true in a lot of cases; that when a woman is excited about stuff like this, a lot of it is about the seduction involved, the power, knowing that sometimes several hundred men are all watching you at once, all of them being driven to orgasm by what you're doing (which, don't forget, you're watching onscreen as they happen). I'm not saying that all women are into this, or that there never exists nights when a woman just gets all horny like a man and wants to grind her pussy in some stranger's face; but based on what I've now seen there, the comments a lot of women make and the things they do, I think it is this slow seduction and power exchange that is getting them the most turned on about it all. And again, I have to fucking admit, sometimes it is just the hottest goddamn scenarios a straight male could ever imagine: for example, undergrads in their dorms in the late afternoon, slipping in a naked quickie between the end of classes and when their roommate gets home; or sometimes these toned middle-aged soccer moms who initially start just as clothed spectators, but who end up all turned on and with a dildo inside of them before you know it.

I'm not saying that this stuff is for everybody; I am saying, though, that about 75,000 people there at any given time seem to be into it, and that is more than enough to have a satisfying sexual experience almost every time, which is the closest I'm having to sex these days so I'll take it. If I were to have a complaint, in fact, it's simply that it's still exclusively a one-sided relationship when it comes to the women there; no matter how many female cams I've watched, I've never had a single woman check out my cam for even a second, which of course leaves something just a little lacking in the whole thing. Of course, as mentioned, I do have cam abilities in Yahoo [username: jasonpettuschicago] and Skype [jasonpettus] as well, plus the ability to send photos through AIM [pettuschicago], GTalk [ilikejason] and MSN [ilikejason@hotmail.com]; maybe some female reader out there will have a little too much wine one night, and decide to beep me* in the mood for a little ridiculousness. As the great Billie Holliday sang, "I ain't too proud to beg."

Okay, so that's it with the dirty silliness for today; and if I haven't given my haters enough now to rag on for the next three months, I don't know what else I can do, besides possibly eat my own shit just to see what it tastes like. Until that day, I and my patched-together webcam look forward to your call.

*I can of course also meet up with fellow Camfrog users for private sessions, but you'll have to write first to get my username there; I purposely had my computer just pick a string of random letters and numbers, so that a witty username wouldn't give me away. As always, you can drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com if you're curious.