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Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 23 Aug 2002 14:58 BST

Monday 19/08/2002
Welcome back Metafilter (www.metafilter.com)! There are lots of places on the Internet where people post sites trouvee, and a great deal of pleasure to be had in finding the lists that get the tastiest morsels first. It has practical benefits too: if you have an acquaintance who insists on emailing you endless lists of their finds, regardless of whether you find them interesting or not, they can soon be squelched by you telling them that you knew it already. Metafilter -- known to its fans as Mefi -- is great for that.

Like all good sites, it has discussion areas for people to comment on finds and bring their own contexts to the party. Because Mefi's server was overburdened by the popularity of the site, it had stopped accepting new registrations and the place was in a form of stasis. A meatier server has now been procured, and new online blood is once again doing its cybercorpuscular thing.

One example of the delights to be found: someone reported a news story from Italy where a couple were caught enjoying watery congress in a public swimming pool. "Stop that at once!" demanded the forces of public decency. "Not at all," said the man, "not until we've properly finished."

The Mefi discussion started on the question of whether this was arrant machismo or enlightened sensitivity to the woman's needs, with undertones of "oh, those hot-blooded Latins." Up popped a Portuguese speaker, who said that Anglo-Saxons didn't know the half of it: he then provided a long list of phrases for different sorts of sexual intercourse (not the word he used) and the social expectations for behaviour during each. There's the 'fodhina' (the itsy-bitsy one), something of a quicky; the 'fodhina bom dia' (the good morning one) which takes advantage of the physiological consequences of a long sleep; the 'fodinha como-quem-não-quer-a-coisa' (I'm not going to translate) which is undertaken just before you go out for the evening and your partner is looking so nice you can't resist. The code for that one is that makeup and clothing mustn't be disturbed.

Perhaps the one with the biggest potential, though, is the 'fodhina obrigada', or 'the thank-you one' where the requester's feeling like it but the requestee doesn't, and doesn't even pretend. These are seen as favours, our correspondent reports, counted and "owed". Like any form of commerce, this may lend itself to online arbitration and the invention of tokens -- "I promise to lay the bearer on demand" sort of thing. Given how much time and effort people spend using the Internet for sexual purposes, it can only a matter of time before e-commerce raises its ugly head.