(This is not a gardening post, by the way, which I am sure many Friends of the Blog will be happy to hear.)

Just as I was getting used to facebook as my one-stop social networking site, I've started getting invites to google+.  Soon enough, you can be sure, facebook, a $50 billion empire, will be a ghost town, as users migrate to the newest, nowest social subdivision on the web.  It may or may not be google, but it'll be somebody big.

Because folks of a certain age (and there are a lot of us out here) want a one-stop shopping option for social networking.  A kind of gated community where we can feel safe and relatively respectable.  Sure we still slum outside the walls when the urge strikes, but facebook has all the perks of the kind of virtual home on the web we're looking for. 

I think what facebook has managed to do is make the web — at least a little corner of it — safe for grandmas.  And that's no mean feat.  I think it was my aunt that invited me to join her network.  Since then my network has grown to extended family and old friends, and now I'm adding a few new friends now and then. 

Everyone is fairly well-behaved. 

Of course, I know that not everyone on facebook is nice and polite, and that the same rule that applies in real-life social circles applies online: lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

I had a young cuddlebuddy for a couple of years who sent me a friend request last December.  He's one of these art-school twentysomethings with 3000 friends trying to create a scene in Boston, god love 'im.  I'm not about to jump into his real-world milieu — not my scene — but even joining his social network online flung open the gates of my manicured virtual community to all sorts of, er, elements, as my grandma used to call them.

So it was that I passed another milestone on my facebook adventure the other day. No, not a thousand "friends". Someone called me a "whore" on my wall-to-wall! 

It was one of my young friend's friends, of course. One who had only a couple weeks earlier sent me a friend request (something I rarely do — I've sent, like, a handful over the years — I'd have maybe three friends if I never answered friend requests in the affirmative). 

This was the culmination of a week of escalating drama with this little facebook klatch.  First my ex-cuddlebuddy noted that I had been "liking" only pics he had taken in which one of his friends was tagged. 

His friend (who is closer to my age and has been perfectly well-behaved through all of this) had sent me a friend request and we were now "friends", with our own little wall-to-wall thing going on.  He happens to be shirtless a lot — like, in every pic I've ever seen of him.  He's a very sexy guy who revels in his sexuality.  I "liked" his pics, because, well, I liked his pics. 

My ex-CB didn't see it that way.

I find if very uncomfortable [he wall-to-walled me] when you only "like" undressed pictures of my best friend and none others

just think maybe you should cool it on that

Social control is obviously a central component of social networking these days.  You can "like" pics of my friends, but you have to "like" the ones I want you to like.      

"Friending" is no different.  The friend of my friend who had friended me with the express intent of hooking up with me (he claimed we had met once before back in '04 with that intention, but that nothing had happened — I had no recollection, which is often the case when nothing happens to recollect), objected to my friending an ex-friend of his who was still a "friend" of his (it's all so confusing).

“FB told me you are now ‘friends’ with X”, he texted me ominously the next day.

"tis true, tis true,” I texted back.

“You know I told you how he treated me.” he replied after a time.  Something about that "you know I told you" struck me as kinda psycho.

“Yes you told me,” I replied.

“I find it a little odd, but whatever. If you want to befriend him, by all means.”

“Thanks.”

“Have fun with that.”

Then a few minutes later: “that aside, do you want to hang out again?”

Um, no. 

Seriously? 
 
Yes, we had "hung out".  Twice in fact.  Enough for me to know it wasn't a match, no hard feelings.  But this was getting weird. 

I mean, after a week or two as facebook "friends" and two "meh"in-the-flesh encounters, you're telling me who I can "friend"?  And it's not "befriend" — I don't know this person and have no intention of meeting him.  I'm "friending" him.  On facebook. Big deal.  Let it go.

People are crazy.  And they're keeping score.

So, anyway, I'm a "whore". Ding-ding-ding!  Of course, I'd rather be a whore for actually sleeping with his "friends" than for just "friending" them, but I'll take it.

I've always thought it's funny when gay men call each other whores.  I've said it once, I'll say it again — calling a man a whore is the height of redundancy.  I spent too much time in Europe in the gay '90s and the early noughties to take the New England puritan's complaint to heart. 

I sleep with whom I choose.  Sex is a wonderful social lubricant.  It's true that sometimes sex comes with complicated emotions, which test our social skills.  Just as often, refreshingly not.  I happen to think that sex is splendid sport.  At it's best everybody scores.

I understand how, for my generation, sex became a high-stakes game — I came of age at the tail end of the AIDs crisis.  But it's high stakes for the next generation for a different reason.  Fully comfortable with the reality of the virtual world, with its brutal narcissism, they've been privy to each other's private thoughts. 

Things we never used to say out loud are common parlance online.  Judgment is sharp and often calculated to shock.  The Id, so well-hidden in the workaday world, is on full display.  Young people today have grown up understanding that their worst fear — that everyone else really is thinking the horrible thoughts they themselves are... is true.

The baseness and brutality of our disembodied selves has made us all the more suspicious of what lurks beneath the surface of the flesh.  But it's not disease we fear so much these days as disdain.

But back in the day things were a little different. Or at least seemed so. 

Whoring about Europe for nearly a decade from my mid-twenties to thirties taught me most of what I know about human nature.  Even at the height of my whoring I felt I was a discerning whore, and I think the fact that I rarely have had to deal with the kinds of people who post "you're a whore!" as if it were a scandalous epithet on my wall-to-wall proves the soundness of my judgment in whoremates. 

But occasionally you slip up, and, well, you get what you get.  That's a story for another time, when the statute of limitations has run out.  Even whores have ethics.

I will say this: I topped.  So, um, "stud" would be the more appropriate epithet, methinks.

It's interesting that among men who whore with other men, "whore" seems to connote someone who assumes the passive role.  Men who top-whore are "studs" while men who bottom-whore are, well, just "whores".  And it is very often a designation of great derision, accompanied by the female pronoun.  "She's such a whore!" 

And while "bottoms rule" may be the mantra of tops the world round, it's more lament than praise.  An old prejudice exists within gay culture: tops are men, bottoms are, well, the women of the gay world, a world in which misogyny is still rife.  Which is why calling another man a whore is still intended by some to be an insult.  

When I got that scrawl on my wall-to-wall it reminded me of a segment from the gameshow Jeopardy!:


It's interesting, isn't it, that the reaction to Ken Jenning's very understandable "What is a hoe?" was so pronounced? (Obviously the writers were having a little fun backstage with that one.) 

"Rake", on the other hand, aside from being old-fashioned, is understood to be masculine.  It has a devil-may-care feel to it, though it's essentially the male version of "ho." 

But if you called your Uncle Bertrand an "old rake," he would be flattered and everyone would chortle their approval.  Call Aunt Betty a ho.  I dare ya.

I know I'm expecting a sophistication in wordplay here that you're not likely to get on your facebook wall-to-wall. 

I do appreciate the sentiment, though.