What is the feel of one hand tapping?

ONCE YOU MASTER THE MECHANICS OF VIRTUAL SEX, THE EMOTIONAL LAND MINE REMAINS.

How fast can you type with one hand?

If you're like me, who can barely type with two hands, the notion of cybersex has not been very alluring. Barring all the politically correct hysteria that pinpoints cybersex as proof of the decline of Western civilization, I couldn't -- from a technical viewpoint -- really understand how people could type and wank at the same time. For women, unless you had a laptop and could lie down, sitting straight up in an ergonomic chair didn't seem comfortable or accessible, not to mention sexy. And for men -- well, there was the messiness problem, wasn't there? Could you blast your can of air at the dollop of jism sticking the j key to the h key?

But now that it's been breathlessly reported in the San Francisco Chronicle and other esteemed publications that sex is the most searched word on the Web, I began to think that maybe I was missing something. Among other groundbreaking findings, the Chronicle also stated that men reportedly turn to the visually explicit sites while women hang out in chat rooms, talking about sex and relationships.

"I'm shocked -- shocked," I told my friend Jemma, the nanny by day and sexual submissive slave by night. I folded the newspaper and ceremoniously placed it in her recycling bin. "This is what we call a slow news day."

Jemma was brushing her cat and looked up at me. "That's how I got to meet all my friends in the S/M world," she said.

"Really?" I sat down on her futon sofa. "Where? How?"

"Alt.sex.bondage," she said matter-of-factly. "I don't go online at all anymore, but a few years ago I met loads of like-minded people there."

This was a story I'd heard from many of my women friends -- that when the Internet was just rearing its Medusa head so many Gates-years ago, they'd spent virtually every minute online, making and breaking relationships, trying out different roles. "I get the feeling though," I said, "that this cybersex/relationship stuff has seen its day. That is, almost everyone I know jumped into it feet first, got burned or annoyed and jumped out. I don't know anybody who goes into those sex chat rooms anymore."

"Maybe," she said. The cat flipped on its back and stretched its furry belly at Jemma, eyeing her with slavish devotion. "I think it's a great idea, though. There's loads of single moms in there who can't get a baby sitter and who just want some sexy, safe fun. And of course, lots and lots of ugly people who type beautifully but who would never, ever get a second glance in real life."

"Explain to me how this works," I said. "You just write sexually explicit scenes back and forth, taking on different roles --"

"I only have one role," Jemma pointed out.

"OK, so you're the submissive slave, and they tell you what to do? I read, 'As Francesca,' and though I really enjoyed it, I kept getting hung up on the mechanics. I just didn't get how she could type and masturbate and do all the things she was told to do at a given time by her mistress."

"You do a lot of scrolling, up and down," said Jemma. "There's a time lag maybe while you're reading, and climaxing."

"Oh," I said. "I thought patience and the Internet were mutually exclusive."

"The mechanics aren't really the problem. Actually, the sex stuff isn't the problem at all." She was picking out the fur from the cat brush and rolling it into little balls, lining them up next to her. "It's the relationships. I guess it's easier if you like to sign on to the Luscious Big Tits site and have fun with that because then you don't have all the other crap to deal with, all the head games."

"Like what?" We had planned a "Prime Suspect" marathon that night, watching all Jemma's videos back-to-back, but I decided Helen Mirren could wait.

N E X T+P A G E +| Boys will be girls