I got this computer virus the other night called the "Antivirus Soft" virus. So obnoxious. It's a form of rogue security malware whose aim is to trick you into paying for fake malware-removal software. It's mostly very annoying and juvenile, and continues to act like it wants to protect you from itself even when it's very obvious it doesn't. I mean, here it's popping Viagra and porn ads up on your PC screen. (The porn was so bad I was tempted to buy the Viagra, but I had a virus to attend to).

It's a kind of wussy brand of ransomware, to tell you the truth. It tells you your files are infected, but it doesn't really infect them, from what I've read, which is what I spent Saturday night doing — reading about viruses. It's not totally off-topic. I have lately been rediscovering the always erudite and engaging Susan Sontag, and was just wrapping up AIDS and Its Metaphors, which she wrote in 1988, a few years before the epidemic peaked in the US.

It's part of an on-going project of puzzling out why sex with twentysomethings always seems so blah (Brazilians excepted)*. I'd like to be able to blame them, each and every one individually and in person, but I think the answer is somewhere in the sexual culture they've inherited, the legacy of the plague years I came of age in.

It's not the same atmosphere of high drama as when I first flew to Amsterdam twenty years ago in search of something sinful and found a society ravaged by fear and paranoia instead (and that's before you factored in the weed), but it's still an undercurrent. What was immediate and explicit for men of my generation has become submerged and sublimated in the generation coming of age today. It has grown diffuse, like the fear and anxiety in society at large, another sneaking suspicion among all the others.

Sontag sums up the legacy of the Plague Years brilliantly, of course.

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness [which, I might add, educates us in our relation to The Other in general] a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission from the past.... AIDS reveals all but long-term monogamous sex as promiscuous (therefore dangerous) and also as deviant, for all heterosexual relations are also homosexual ones, once removed.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I remember sitting in a sad little bar with my friend Jeremy on that trip to Amsterdam, and being perfectly content to watch the hot '70s porn, those pre-condom classics they were showing on the video monitors in the corner. Actual action back in the back didn't appeal to me in the least. I still have fond memories of those videos. And it's no wonder, really, when you consider the come-on line in those days was some variation on the theme: "Hi. You're cute. Are you positive?"

You could try to be really cute, and say something like: "Yeah, I'm positive — positive I'm hot for you!" But that would get you a blank stare, not a blowjob, in return.

HIV was just not something you could be cute about. And it's still not. But nowadays it's right there in the profile. You just tick off "pos" or "neg" under "status" (it's right under "cock size" and above "into").

Because virtual reality — from TV to the internet — is saturated with sex, we don't always think of the times we live in as sexually stifled. Sontag, at the time she wrote AIDS and Its Metaphors, recognized the

neo-celibacy and waning of sexual spontaneity — sexual exchanges are to be carried out only after forethought — among the educated in this decade. Machines supply new, popular ways of inspiring desire and keeping it safe, as mental as possible: the commercially organized lechery by telephone that offers a version of anonymous promiscuous sex without the exchange of fluids.

Camming and chat sites have taken up where sleazy phone-sex lines left off, but the exchange of fluids remains pretty taboo to this day.

Because no one wants a virus. But no matter how careful we are and how far removed from actual bodily fluids, we get them. You know, it's back to my malware. All intercourse has its dangers. As William S. Burroughs famously put it: language is a virus.

But it does get me all out of sorts when something like this happens. My friends are like: "Get a Mac. Get a Mac. Get a Mac. Dude. Seriously. Get a Mac."

OK. First of all, I actually started out, back in the day, with the original...


That's right, you hipster bitches. I mean, I know you fucks think you invented beards, chunky glasses, skinny jeans, masturbation and Macs, but guess what? My first laptop was a Mac, too...


Complete with the black-and-white screen and state-of-the-art tracking ball. That's right. I'm old-school, from way back.

I lugged this bitch all up and down Italy one summer, thinking it would get me laid. But once I became a proper ex-pat, it became impractical to have a Mac. And by the time I returned to the States Macs had become the Platinum Elite of computers. I couldn't afford one again until recently.

And now, frankly, I'm not sure I want one. I mean, yeah, they're sleeker, safer, and clearly superior to PCs, but where they used to be the quirky upstart they've kinda become the mean girl of computers.

There's something about Apple's sleek new boutiques that's slightly off-putting too. The one on Boylston reminds me of a space-age sanitarium. They do effectively convey a germ-free environment, but there's something sort of OCD about it. And when did Apple merge with Benetton? There's a cultish, Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers atmosphere inside. When any consumer product reaches cult status it creeps me out a little.

And their ad campaign makes it worse, with its outright scorn for not only their chief competitor's product (which is not unwarranted), but for those who would be square enough to purchase it as well. It's the hipster version of middle-school mean-girl peer pressure.

But I will say this: it does make actually going to the Apple Store an event. It felt like my first day at a new school. I was nervous all night beforehand and spent three hours getting dressed in the morning — skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors with the peacoat and scally cap, army-issue horn-rims, and courier bag slung over my shoulder, or just go with an ironic t-shirt and ratty scarf? — and doing and un-doing and re-doing and re-undoing my hair, so that I wouldn't set off the PC alarm when I walked in.

But it was no use. They could tell. They can always tell.

And when I asked one of the clerks if there was an installment plan, there were audible gasps and hisses of "PC" from the pod-people, who skittered away from me to avoid any viruses I may have brought in with me.  I realized my faux pas immediately — never speak of the cost — and issued a general apology.

The clerk raised an eyebrow and took a step back.

"We don't have an... installment plan," he said dryly, reaching for a disposable face-mask (they have them in dispensers all over the store). "We do have a credit card you can apply for."

"But," he added, and I quote: "it's just like... a credit card."

I was about to ask, "well, is it a credit card or is it like a credit card?" when he slapped on his face-mask and ran away.

(It's one of those no-money-down-no-interest-for-a-year-on-your-first-Apple-purchase-22.5%-APR-thereafter credit cards, I discovered when I looked it up later at home, since everyone had disappeared in the Apple Store.

Needless to say I left without a Mac, cursing myself.

"I'm such a PC!" I muttered on my way out.

But somehow, while scanning my computer in safe mode for three hours, I found consolation in the fact that viruses play an essential role in evolution, increasing diversity by transferring genes between different species! Where there is life there are viruses. And vice versa.

Some come in some form of executable code, some come in skinny jeans, and ironic t-shirt, and a ratty scarf.
______________________________________
*If it weren't for the Brazilians, I would think it was just me.