BY ANNALEE NEWITZ (05/26/00)
Annalee Newitz's article on habitual clusterfucking among programmers is not a portrait of a new breed of sexual revolutionaries; it's a sad picture of an arrogant and maladjusted group of people who are spending far, far too much time in their cubes to ever develop real and lasting relationships. An occasional orgy is no substitute for the real thing, and spending hours toiling away in Photoshop pasting cuddly penguins onto pictures scanned from a Victoria's Secret catalog is hardly indicative of a healthy attitude toward sex. Ms. Newitz and her friends should stop thinking so highly of themselves and consider occasionally dating someone from another line of work -- perhaps someone who holds a job involving reality.
-- Craig Payst
Photographers talking about chemicals and water baths while getting it on in hot tubs; ceramicists talking about heat and reduction and marvelling about how their profession is reflected in their sexual lives as they strip down and get hot with several others; hackers talking open-source code while practicing open sexual relations. I didn't realize that the discovery that people's ideals and professional passions are reflected in their sex lives was a news flash.
Geeks are people that think that the minutiae which fascinates them is equally fascinating to others; this article was a major case of geekiness.
-- Kathleen Hudspeth
I am so glad that someone in Annalee Newitz's article finally got around to the sci-fi connection to polyamoury. Anyone who has ever gone to a science fiction convention is likely to have noticed the incredible overlap of pagan, poly, bdsm and science-fiction.
But while Stallman says that there is "a tendency in science fiction fandom to accept non-standard relationships," I wonder how much of that has to do with the isolation in which these groups develop. Geeks have long been considered unsexy social misfits, and one wonders if the embrace of atypical expressions of sexuality formed in response to a society that told them that they were non-beautiful people who wouldn't get laid.
-- Laurent Castellucci
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