Like most of us, Emily Witt grew up with a set of expectations about how her life would proceed. It was pretty much the same sort of life her parents, most of her friends, and most of the characters on TV and in the movies had: after a period of experimentation, she envisioned, as she puts it, “my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face to face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station of life: the future.” Or, as my best friend once sang while drunkenly stumbling down a sidewalk late one night in our mid-20s, “Someday my prince will come, someday I’ll ge-et some.”
He does no better when faced with a search bar on an actual computer screen that promises to guide her to any kind of date or porn video she could imagine, if only she could imagine it. She can’t get over her embarrassment during orgasmic meditation or bring herself to lift up her shirt during a webcam conversation on Chaturbate. She lacks the courage of a friend who seeks out casual encounters on Craigslist with the explicit goals of collecting some entertaining stories and becoming really good at sex. Witt finally finds a sense of freedom at Burning Man and also a deep personal connection and amazing sex—though each, alas, with a different person—but she realizes that the reason Burning Man is so successful is because it exists outside the constraints, and the laws, of the regular world. She ends her odyssey in a very similar place to where she began. “Younger people, I hoped, would not need autonomous zones,” she writes. “Their lives would be free of timidity. They would do their new drugs and have their new sex.”
By Emily Witt
