Video may have killed the radio star, but the internet killed, well, pretty much everything else.

I am not a technological Luddite by any means. I am supremely grateful for DC Cupcakes and Say Yes to the Dress, for the guilty-pleasure Katy Perry tunes on my iPod, and for the sociocultural phenomenon that is YouTube.  I will defend to the death the situation comedy as social commentary, consider it a global crisis when Facebook is down for ten minutes, and I sent and received at least 160 text messages last night alone.

That being said, sometimes I wonder what life was like for those of previous generations, before modern technology transformed doing nothing from a weekend pastime into a way of life. Having entered the scene smack-dab in the middle of Generation Y (born in 1985), I do vaguely remember a time before the internet (we first got AOL, dial-up of course, when I was 11).It was a simpler time. I played outside with real, live friends — hide-and-seek, T-ball, Capture the Flag. I remember playing a lot of Operation, Battleship, Twister, Taboo, Balderdash, and Trivial Pursuit. I seem to remember reading books (and I mean real books printed on real paper, damn-you-to-hell-Kindle). Lest I wax too nostalgic, let me hasten to add that it’s not exactly as if I was walking uphill to school in the snow both ways in in the early ‘90s — there was still Oregon Trail, of course, and a little something called Super Mario Bros. on NES, and I definitely planted my little hiney in front of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Inspector Gadget every single damn afternoon. I even seem to recall my dad, engineering nerd that he is, trying to teach me to program in BASIC on our old Commodore 64 when I was about eight.

But I do remember, before my introduction to the Web in 1996, spending more time throughout the day interacting with real people and participating in real creative endeavors. Don’t get me wrong, I have always been a dynamic personality who could interact with and befriend the dead — but in 2011, having 1200 Facebook friends enables me to give just a perfunctory nod to each of them on a semi-regular basis without having to sustain any meaningful adult relationships. Similarly, I have always been a writer — but what does it say about me that my output from 1992-1996 was vastly more prolific than any body of work I’ve produced since – including when I was in graduate school studying English literature?

Perhaps I’m just looking for a smoking gun, but I blame the internet.

Sure, if you wanted to be an expert in useless trivia as a kid you could always go to the library and check out armfuls of books on the Titanic or the Battle of Gettysburg or the Salem Witch Trials or whatever it was that happened to catch your fancy. But it took a sustained, concerted effort to plumb the depths of the Dewey Decimal System, usually an encounter with a mean librarian or two, and the likelihood was high that you would stick with your given obsession for at least a week or so.

Not so today. I’ve been on medical leave since early March, so I am painfully, acutely aware of how much time playing on the internet saps out of my day and how little profit I actually derive from this wasted time. This isn’t primarily because there is nothing of interest on the internet, but rather because there is too much of interest on the Internet. “The internet,” Eric Schmidt opined, “is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

Personally, I can’t even trace the linear connection between one topic of interest and the next in my Web ramblings, but I do know that in the last week, I have read about depictions of McCarthyism in the American theatre, the lives of Shel Silverstein and John Nash, the criminal trials of Andrea Yates and Marie Noe, the filmography of the guy who played Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the dating history of Matthew Perry (Chandler on Friends), and common tropes used in 1990s sitcoms. A search through my browsing history reveals that I have Googled the following in just the last 24 hours: Higgs Boson, Stephen King’s The Body, Romper Room, Alec Guinness gay?, Nurse Ratched, An Officer and a Gentleman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories, Girl Interrupted, “Bill Mumy kid from Twilight Zone,” Mary Jo Kopechne, “Demi Lovato and Wilmer Valderrama breakup.”  There is simply no rhyme or reason to this erratic lineup – it reads like it was compiled by either a serial killer or an ADD schizophrenic on meth. All my spastic browsing serves to provide me with is a deceptively superficial amount of information about a wide smattering of subjects, which may serve me well in getting phone numbers, but “Mary Jo Kopechne Enthusiast and World-Renowned Expert on Sir Alec Guinness’s Sexual Orientation” is not necessarily what I want engraved on my gravestone.

“Dost Thou Love life? Then Do Not Squander Time, for That is the Stuff Life is Made Of,” Ben Franklin once observed (and a quick IMDB search will reveal that it’s also written on the gate of the plantation Twelve Oaks in 1939′s Gone With the Wind).  At what cost have I obtained all this cocktail-party pseudo-wisdom? (And even that designator is generous, since much of what I do online — *cough* watching deleted scenes from no longer syndicated TV shows and horror-movie remixes of romantic comedies on YouTube *cough*- does not even qualify as pseudo-wisdom.) When I was 10 years old, I used to have long discussions about moral theology and Charlotte Bronte with my friends. Fifteen years later, I have long discussions about… Cracked.com? Retrograde motion, indeed. It seems to belie the truth of evolution of the species.

Many have recently lamented the death of literature, the fact that there has not been a “great” American novelist since Hemingway (or since Steinbeck and Kerouac, if you’re feeling generous). The fact that Stephanie Meyer is the best we have to offer an entire generation is as deplorable as it is sickening. But while literary critics have scratched their heads about this phenomenon to no avail, I should think the answer was pretty mind-blowingly obvious:

The people gifted with the passion, talent, imagination, drive, and attention-span to create world-shaping art are now spending their days watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes on YouTube.

People like me and you. Sad, isn’t it?

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Nothing hurts me so much as hearing the word slut dropped into conversation. This is because in tenth grade my English teacher recommended Leora Tanenbaum’s book, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. Not a book I would have picked up on my own, but I liked this teacher and would have read anything he recommended.

At the time I still considered dating beneath me, but even I noticed that a creed of acceptable behavior had formed. For a while a sentimental chain poem circulated on people’s AIM profiles. It was a very inspiring poem, something about wearing your combat boots and saying no even though it’s hard. It was dedicated to ‘all the good girls’, i.e. girls who don’t put out on their first date.

I was deeply moved. I had the mind of a Puritan and approved of rules. Sex struck me as scandalous. So did revealing anything more than your ankles and wrists.

Then I read Slut and Leora Tanenbaum blew my mind. When she was a freshman in high school Tanenbaum made the mistake of making out with the boyfriend of a very popular girl. For the next four years she was branded a slut and socially ostracized. Motivated by this experience, she posted an advertisement in the newspaper and interviewed girls with similar experiences. Slut! cataloged their stories. I don’t remember the details, but Tanenbaum’s main point was that the entire concept of a slut exists to repress female sexuality.

Most professions are geared towards men and require prefixes or suffixes when applied to females. Actor. Actress. Steward. Stewardess. The only exceptions are whore and slut. When applied to men they become man-whore and man-slut. A slut, as defined by the dictionary, is a promiscuous woman.

That’s the crux of the insult: promiscuous women. It’s an insult with so much power that frequently I’ll hear girls asking each other if their outfit is too slutty, or worse, calling another girl a slut, and well, you don’t want to be labeled a slut. It doesn’t mean you’re bad like an evil mastermind with superpowers, it just means you aren’t worthy of respect. You aren’t a person. You’re degraded because your vagina is like an old trash can that’s been emptied into one too many times.

Tanenbaum ended the book not by urging readers to drop their use of the word slut or broaden their definition of what is sexually permissible, but by urging readers to have the same standards for males and females.

I chose to erase slut from my lexicon, and did my best to strip off the Puritan mindset. It seemed ridiculous to judge someone’s morality based on how many people they slept with or what they’re wearing.

Even so, I was called a slut once. At the time I laughed because it was ludicrous. My mother wore more provocative clothing than I did.

But there it is, despite all I say or what I believe: when called a slut, I feel the sting of it. I need to tell you that, no, I haven’t slept around, yes, my shirts bare no cleavage. I don’t say the word slut. I tell you I don’t believe in the concept, but throw that word at me and I fall to pieces.

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn’t have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend’s rape. She ended not with an appeal for women’s rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word ‘rape’ so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. ‘The test raped me.’ ‘His smile went up to justifiable rape.’ These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here’s the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo.

I didn’t know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn’t want to tell anyone.

If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged. But she was raped, and it took me approximately a year to talk about it, not because I didn’t want to, but because I sensed it was forbidden territory. Even now I feel a little clumsy, as if I have spilled someone else’s secret, even though I know she does not want her rape to be a secret.

I still wouldn’t talk about it casually, the way I talk about my roommates getting robbed and relish people’s reactions. And yet, that reluctance seems to give rape too much importance, as if to say it’s so bad it can’t be talked about, something so terrible and ruinous that the victim must forever be silent. Silence bothers me. I’m mostly silent about what I’m ashamed of.

It is almost—and you must forgive me if I phrase this poorly—almost as if there is some rule that says, to rape someone is to take something so important away from him or her, but usually her, that she can never be the same again.

A boy who liked my friend got drunk once and said, “I would have given my life if it could have prevented…” He could not say the word, maybe because it referred to reality: “…what happened to you.”

When she retold it, my friend shook her head. “Ugh. No. It’s not worth that. Not worth a life.” The thing is, a lot of people do believe preserving the sanctity of a vagina is worth a life. The question is whose life?

Perhaps that’s why the silence.

The hardest part about rape, my friend has said, has been the silence. The rape is part of her, it is something she’d like to refer to casually—‘Oh yes, I learned that law term after I was raped,’ or ‘I’ve become more alert after I was raped,’ and she can’t. She has to stop herself and gauge the audience. Do they know she’s been raped? If yes, will they be able to handle the reference? If no, does she want to tell them? She is the most socially graceful person I know, but she practices in her head before she tells people. How to introduce it? How to strike the right note of seriousness without verging into the melodramatic? She doesn’t want to be seen as ‘the girl who was raped,’ but she does want people to know because it’s part of her personal experience, because there’s far too much silence already.

She doesn’t want pity. She just wants to talk about it. It is surprisingly difficult to procure this combination.

I imagine most people don’t know she was raped. Rape isn’t something you write to the school bulletin about. Actually, after I learned about her rape, it seems like we gained entry into a club, a whole list of other rapes that had never been spoken about until now. Other friends. Parents. Teachers. Coworkers. There are so many people who have been raped and who do not speak of it. It is far easier to speak of edgier, metaphorical rapes.

I know. I do it all the time. I still feel like I’m betraying her trust whenever I mention her rape.

There is a word I say all the time, and it is fuck. This is a problem now that I have left the carelessness of college life for office hallways and button down shirts. At work people have trained themselves out of using expletives. Even when they are under duress and slip up, only damn, shit, and hell slip out. Fuck is consigned to some forgotten corner. I bite back fucks at work, turn them into coughs or fishes.

What puzzles me is that people who are willing to slut-bomb all over the place, or riddle a sentence with rape, back the fuck away from fuck. Somehow it sits at the top of the expletive hierarchy, the biggest and baddest of them all that still remains marginally socially acceptable.

Fuck is defined as ‘to engage in coitus with’. The second definition of fuck is to be cheated. What happened between the first and second definition? How is it that fuck became taboo? Fuck created us. Fuck gave us life. Who got cheated? How?

To have sex is to be cheated, to mention it is obscene, to appear to want to have sex is socially taboo, but to force sex upon someone is permissible.

Fuck that.

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This is an album of strange pain. The cover artwork says so itself, just gaze into it: a blurry image of a naked woman tied up on a bed.    Are you telling me this is a woman as a lover?  Who is this girl?  Is this punishment?  Some kind of  sadomasochism?  What is happening?

What we (seem) to have here is a collection of love songs gone astray due to unfathomable violence, identity confusion, and self-loathing. They are racy, militant recordings mostly about hellish experiences. The lyrics are dirty and suck like black holes. Often, the titles speak for themselves:

• “In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall”
• “Guantanamo Canto”
• “You’re Pregnant, You’re Dead”

Even when names appear harmless they merely disguise the perverting and machinating minds behind them; take for example, track #7 “Black Keyboard”:

A child is nothing without hate.
Be certain he feels his love is trash.

All of this is sonically complemented by energetic, manic contrasts. These sounds are appropriately beautiful, as well as disturbing; the range is alarming, the blending fantastical ––

Like in the last song, “Gayle Lynn”, that operatically belches. Only to churn, then to talk; only to squall: lulling and laving thousands of emotions into one master, all-encompassing expression. Remorse, ebullience, curvaceously vexing ––

This is Xiu Xiu, this is Women as Lovers.  This is a fly recording, something worth purchasing and loving for years and years.