sex, and whatever else is on the mind.” Of the 302 members, about 24 were doable in a classic sense. Most were from bourgie-approved locales like Washington, Atlanta, and Chicago. Rasheed dubbed himself “The Originator” and demanded that we go forth and mull over heady topics like: “The Champagne Brunch,” “Your Standards Are Too High,” “I Caught Him Peeing in the Shower,” “Fuck Yeah, Dow Jones,” and “Addicted to RBBDA.”

I authored a few new topics myself, most notably one entitled “The Kinsey Scale,” which I wrote after watching Liam Neeson, as real-life nerd-turned-sexpert Alfred Charles Kinsey, have movie intercourse with his straw-haired wife and manly researcher. Since he literally wrote the books on sex, I assumed we could have a robust debate about “the down low” and whether men having sex with men were gay. Thoughts? None.

They (I use the third person plural here in order to protect the innocent from any lame-doing) even planned a “conference” in D.C. that I reluctantly chose Netflix over only after a robust debate on which would be more productive. “Dude, you met these people on the Facebooks? What are you now, a forty-year-old white lady?” Gina did not approve. But then again, she was no less single than I was. RBBDA was planning a second conference, and I decided to take Raj’s advice and “leave the hating ass friend at home.”

RBBDA 2.0 was taking place in New York that summer. I gave a Chinese woman wearing a fanny pack thirty bucks for a ticket to Thirty-fourth Street on a charter bus that looked like it’d had a hard life. “You going New Yawk?” she asked, already herding me into the line of graduate students and staff assistants to Sen. Somebody. My bag was sentenced to the hull before I could answer, “Yes! I going New Yawk to find me a man.” I grabbed a seat near a window, sat back, and watched Mission Impossible II.

Dexter and I were broken up, and this time I was serious about it. He said he had “weird in-between feelings” for me, so I was determined to get someone else between the sheets. Well, not really. The only one-night stand I ever had ended eleven months after with tears and a “what relationship?” So maybe I’ve never had one. Really, I just wanted to do enough heavy petting to warrant mentioning on Monday when Dex called to ask how my weekend with those “probably psycho-killer online sex chat friends” went. Because in-between feelings were still feelings, after all.

So. RBBDA. There were three distinct factions on “the boards”: newbies, regulars, and lurkers. I was a semiregular with lurker tendencies. It seemed as if every thirty minutes spent working damaged my brain in such a way that I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d checked the groups discussion board, wall, or news section that day. Trusting my gut, I’d get as far as “www.fa…” before my computer did the rest. Once inside, I spent the next hour reading posts, showing the pervier ones to my white work wife Emily, and then deciding not to make any potentially-harmful-when-my-husband-is-trying-to-win-Iowa comments of my own. That was the lurker in me—getting off on the sex diaries of others but remaining stingy with mine. To a certain extent. Once I did share a few lines about the time an old friend gave a valiant if brusque effort in a Los Angeles hotel room. But that was it. And the other time with a seven-foot college basketball star who could lift his leg behind his head and squeal like a gymnast half his size. Okay, fine, I was a perv too.

As such, I felt like I “knew” these “people,” who up until now had been only thumbnails to me. But I wasn’t a regular either. Despite evidence to the contrary, I did have a full-time job and a part-time life.

Of the regular chicks, there were five in New York: Justine, Tonya, Courtney, Reiko, and Dee. These were girls I’d never seen after five or in the flesh. On the guys’ side there were Douglas, Van, Raj, Chris, and Stu—all super cute in miniature, like doll-house furniture. Looking back, the black-and-white glamour shots should have tipped me off. Who takes a picture of just their eye?

After making it off the Chinatown bus with only the slightest case of SARS, I met up with the group at a dive bar in the West Village. The only people I’d met in the nonvirtual world were Hillary and Raj, who