ANOTHER VOICE

How to stop heterosexuality ruining people's lives

MATTHEW PARRIS

Few who follow the correspondence columns of the Times can have failed to chuckle at recent letters from parents of children who keep computer pets.

The idea is not hard to grasp: to grow the image of a pet on a screen. A specially made little computer supplies its owner with a pic- ture of a baby, a fanciful creature created by computer-graphic design. Keyboard func- tions permit the holder to exercise his pet, feed and water it, put it to bed, keep it clean and watch it grow. Internal programming ensures that if the pet is properly cared for it will grow with each passing day, thriving just like a real pet. The image will languish, how- ever, if the owner is inattentive. The creature can starve, or die.

Overstressed executives with no room in their lives for real pets have taken to this hobby, and soon, no doubt, people with no gardens of their own will grow virtual flow- er-beds on computer screens. Children are proving enthusiastic screen-pet owners, with active encouragement from parents who prefer a pet which makes virtual rather than real puddles on the carpet.

Children, so often trail-blazers in fashion and innovation, are sometimes ahead of us too in speaking unconscious truths from which adults shrink. Parents have been telling the editor of the Times that off- spring, not content with leaving laundry on the bedroom floor and shoes to pick up from the stairs, have started asking mums and dads to wake, feed, water and exercise their screen pets too. Parents now receive urgent telephone calls from children who had rushed off to school in a hurry, asking them to tend to the virtual needs of the new, virtual member of the household.

Good, as I say, for a chuckle; and all too believable. But ask yourself what chilling message this true story has for us. Does it not prove, in a beautifully neat way, that the wish to care for another may be perfectly unrelat- ed to the needs of the other, being instead a simple human appetite? We 'care', not to make a difference to any other life, but to indulge ourselves in our own.

If I am wrong, then what is it that a child who telephones his mother at lunch and asks her to feed his screen pet thinks he is doing? He is no fool and under no illusions. He knows that no sentient being (other than himself) will suffer as a result of fail- ure to push a couple of keyboard keys. He knows the 'animal' appearing on his screen is only a trick of electronics and light. He cannot be accused of deluding himself into a belief that his pet is real (as adults some- times wrongly suppose little girls do with their dolls). He has constructed this screen image himself, it corresponds to nothing real, and he knows it. His motives are therefore selfish.

Nor is this an exercise in personal creativi- ty, or imagination. The pet's whole life must run within rigid parameters laid down by the computer program, the owner having no power other than to choose between prefab- ricated alternatives. Nor is the child driven by curiosity to learn what happens — as when we read fiction. The plot here is of infantile simplicity and comes as no surprise. It is an interactive computer game he is play- ing — with himself.

And the human drive involved is as basic as the instinct for self-preservation or reproduction. It is a kind of self-gratifica- tion. We get a kick from looking after something, as does a sheepdog from herd- ing sheep. The beauty of the example pro- vided by information technology is not that it points to any previously unsuspected ele- ment in our nature, but rather that it iso- lates that element, stripping away the rea- sons we might have preferred to offer for involving ourselves in the lives of others.

The same element, of course, is at work beneath an infant's 'play' with soft toys, a soap addict's anxiety over the fate of some fictional television character, or a novelist's convoluted internal game with the person- alities of their own creation, but these examples of acting out our needs through fantasy can be excused as 'art', curiosity or exploration. Crude, predictable, unlovely and inherently uninteresting, the screen pet can avail itself of no excuse for our atten- tion, and leaves us staring at what we really are: control freaks, ourselves programmed to derive pleasure from playing God to something or someone else, something we can affect, be it only a set of illuminated lines on a screen.

The beauty of virtual relationships is that nobody gets hurt. Hours, weeks, of harm- less fun may be had attending to the needs of a moving piece of computer graphics. Even the instincts for brutality, neglect, self-recrimination and shame may be indulged — and nobody, nothing, bleeds. Since the act of caring for another creature almost always tends to smother and hurt, fellow-humans and animals are protected, too, from that cruellest and most destruc- tive of our drives, our love.

Which brings me to the present lively con- troversy about the age of sexual consent.

There is much to be said for virtual rela- tionships as opposed to the other kind. In my observation, gay men have raised to the highest levels the art of the virtual relation- ship. I do not myself think this is because homosexual love is intrinsically less (or more) consuming or redeeming than any other sort of love, but because for homo- sexuals the external constraints — of law, of religion, of employment and housing, and of social pressure — have always favoured the temporary and casual over the permanent and committed type of relation- ship. There are startling parallels between this culture of caprice, deeply rooted in the shared attitudes of most gay men, and the accounts we have of slave society, where permanent relationships were forbidden or discouraged for the obvious economic rea- son that it could not be within two slaves' competence to insist that they be bought or sold only as a pair.

Your typical gay relationship is thus remarkably similar to owning a virtual pet: cultivated to satisfy an appetite people have to manipulate or control, and to follow the fashion for keeping somebody or something as your own. Both partners may see each other in the same way: each has a virtual pet. It hardly involves anyone else, and of course it never results in children. The affair can be conducted conveniently alongside a busy life and career: an amusing game.

This strikes me as ideal. It is so much less messy than those encounters where individ- uals try to buy seriously into each other's lives, almost always with unhappy conse- quences.

More people should be encouraged to jettison their expensive, pavement-fouling dogs or serial-killing cats, and substitute for these a clean, cheap, low-maintenance screen pet. And more of our countrymen should be encouraged to desist from wreck- ing each other's lives through fixed-term, man-woman, child-begetting relationships — in favour of the reliable, low-investment, steady whimsicality of a variable-term homosexual coupling. The age of homosex- ual consent should be further reduced to 15, and the age of heterosexual consent, so much more dangerous, raised to 30.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist for the Times.