Revealed: The Inertia hates sex!

Questions surrounding Venice-adjacent website's existence finally answered!

It all finally makes sense. Every bit of it. For the last three or so years, you see, I have been absolutely dumbfounded by Venice-adjacent’s downhill skateboarding website The Inertia. How on earth does it exist? Who on earth visits? It didn’t seem there were enough never-before-sexed 45-year-old egg-riders to justify its URL. And so I was left scratching my head in sheer confusion.

Well, today it was revealed that the website does indeed hate sex. Shall we read from its posting Why Surfing is Better than Sex: A Philosophical Examination? I know we shouldn’t but let’s anyhow.

As teenage surfers, I recall that it seemed important to us, in our philosophical moments, to compare surfing and sex, wondering which is better, as though one has to choose between them. Three decades of surfing later, now a professional philosopher, I have returned to consider the question in my recent book, Surfing with Sartre. I’m still comfortable with my teenage answer.

You don’t have to choose between surfing and sex, if you play your cards right. Yet, if you have to focus more of your energies on one rather than the other (because life gets complicated), surfing is worthier. If I really had to give up one, but only one, forever, I’d give up sex.

Yes, surfing is that good. It’s totally wonderful, at least when you’re good enough at it and the waves are pumping.

How so? How are sex and surfing even comparable? We teenagers noted certain structural isomorphisms, especially when it comes to the “tube ride,” the act of riding inside the tube of a wave. You insert yourself inside of the tube when the wave offers the opportunity. You’re sliding along, perhaps “pumping” for speed, and then exiting, in some cases while the wave “spits.” I suppose the surfboard even has something of a phallic shape.

What really motivates the comparison, though, is that surfing and sex are both joyous and climactic and enthralling when they happen. They’re something wonderful enough to wait for or chase as a peak of human experience.

Yet if surfing is better than sex, it surely can’t be just that it is more intensely pleasurable than an orgasm, as though anything could be more intensely pleasurable than an orgasm. (Doesn’t a heroin high mainly prolong something like the same mental state?) Yes, surfing is really, really fun, but it is wonderful precisely because it is about much more than having a pleasurable state of mind. It draws you out of yourself.

This is totally for reals and goes on and on and on and on and on talking up surfing and talking down sex.

Yeah. I guess at the end there are enough never-before-sexed 45-year-old egg-riders to justify its URL and I’m sort of sorry for making so much fun of The Inertia’s founder-in-chief Zach Weisberg now. His life is clearly hell. Like, really and truly hell.