Pornography online, sometimes called “cybersex,” has been assimilated to the discourse on sexuality as a mode of liberation for humankind through the exploration of sexual and political alternatives (Hunt 1993). The question is whether cybersex offers new constructions of pornographic exchanges.
The definition of pornography has not changed much over the centuries. It is the deliberate representation of obscene material about the body in order to create sexual arousal. Three conditions to create pornographic desire are necessary: anonymity, an intimate and yet alien relation to the other’s body, and the possibility of replacing one body with another (American Journal of Semiotics 1989). Computer technology meets these three conditions of erotic arousal: it offers secrecy, interaction with strangers, and repeatable substitution.
Seen within this framework, cybersex is traditional pornography disseminated through another medium. The Internet carries erotica, the description of detailed aspects of sexual relations, and exotica, representing perversions and deviations like sado-masochism, zoophilia, and necrophilia. They appear on “free” bulletin board systems like alt-sexbestiality or alt-sex-bondage, on the tacit understanding that the user trades his or her words or images for access. They are mostly, however, to be found on pay systems like Laura’s Lair or Pleasure Dome.
Cybersex holds the promise of total sensitization that the machine provides for users in its virtual reality format. Artificially simulated intimacy is present, in the form of three-dimensional images like Virtual Valerie (the creation of Mike Senz), the first articulated doll to participate in erotic games on a computer; or in the form of exoskeletons with goggles, data-gloves, and sensors that allow the client to meet partners in virtual space. From a human rights perspective, they are presented as less exploitative of the real body, often the female body, and women are quite active in Internet pornographic discourse, as can be seen in magazines like Mondo 2000 or Future Sex.
The changes in pornography mediated by the Internet are with respect to the relation to the other’s body. Sexual exchanges on the Internet have accelerated a tendency of pornography to annihilate the body in the name of desire and to intellectualize sex. This was already the case in the writings of the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century. New technology annihilates the body because it replaces the other’s body with the computer, as a low tech sexual aid like a dildo replaced the other’s body in earlier times. It intellectualizes sex because the computer interface and the use of (hyper)text substitute the language of negotiation for advancing, accepting, or resisting flesh, thus releasing the sensation of pleasure as a drug for the brain, not for the sexual parts of the body.
The screen as an interface for sexual exchange allows these two tendencies to develop fully. It is central to high tech pornographic sex, as it fulfills the conditions of anonymity and distanced intimacy, and it does so because it gives extensions to the body while forbidding the other to have complete access to it. The screen interface renders the body invisible, thanks to a technology of simulation that fosters dissimulation. Interaction does not take place with the body of the other but with computer data, through which desire itself is digitalized. The interface redefines the body and its discourse as part of the cybernetics package of information processing (Stone 1995; Green 2001).
To counter the risk and fear of physical contact, the computer offers the possibility of substitution by digitalized contact. The interface, by images and through aliases, avatars, and hypertextual journals, diaries, and other writings, allows the expansion of this new form of expression. It plays on the fuzzy lines of hypertext as a new means of contact-discourse. The openness of this writing process offers liberating, even libertarian possibilities that Theodor Holm Nelson (1993), the inventor of hypertext, extols as the essence of computer innovation. He considered that “teledildonics” (giving oneself sexual pleasure with technology, especially via computers) was the first outcome of the computer technology (Rheingold 1991, 345).
The Internet offers a multiplicity of imaginable sexual relations – a catalogue of pornographic styles. This follows the typical Sade-like practice of excess and subversion by saturation that builds up the paraphernalia of virtual sex, the third order of sex: after sex as nature and sex as discourse, sex as an unproductive state, without secretion and seduction, that would be characteristic of the postmodern condition (Kroker et al. 1989, 182; Cooper 2000).
Cybersex also offers a third order of evolution in the construction of sexual exchanges by technology, as new communication devices push the historical limits of pornography, testing the confines of what is socially permissible. In the first order, before print technologies, pornographic transgression was organized around forbidden objects of desire (religious taboos) that could not be imagined at a distance. Sensitization with the other’s body was necessary for arousal. In the second order, with the arrival of print and audiovisual technologies, transgression became organized around fantasy, as the objects of desire could be imagined at a distance. Sensitization became possible by projecting desire onto the other’s body. In the third order, with the advent of the Internet, the objects of desire no longer have to be socially acceptable, as they can belong to imaginary realms and constructions. Transgression takes the shape of substitution. Sensitization of contact is possible by simulation, as the pornographic exchange consists of interfacing with the data of a virtual body (Frau-Meigs 1996).
Questioning reality follows from the traditional justification of pornography. It functions according to an authenticity code that denounces the artifice of normal relationships and social taboos. With cybersex, the relation to signs and to representation has been reversed such that only what is imagined, dreamed, fantasized has real value. More than a criticism of the world in political terms, cybersex tends to eliminate the external reality of politics and social life, to take refuge more completely in a temporary utopian zone, a site where politics and society can be redefined in individual, fictitious, and abstract codes.
References:
- American Journal of Semiotics (1989). Special issue on pornography, 6(4), 12–180.
- Cooper, A. (2000). Cybersex: The dark side of the force. London: Routledge.
- Frau-Meigs, D. (1996). Technologie et pornographie dans l’espace cybernétique. Réseaux, 77, 39–60.
- Frau-Meigs, D., & Maarek, P. (1998). Cybersex, censorship and the state(s): Pornographic and legal discourses. Journal of International Communication, 5(1,2), 211–227.
- Green, L. (2001). Technoculture: From alphabet to cybersex. Boston: Allen and Unwin.
- Hunt, L. (ed.) (1993). The invention of pornography: Obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500– 1800. New York: Zone Books.
- Kroker, A., Kroker, M., & Cook, D. (1989). Panic encyclopedia. New York: St. Martin’s.
- Nelson, T. H. (1993). Literary machines, 93.1. Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press.
- Rheingold, H. (1991). Virtual reality. New York: Touchstone.
- Stone, A. R. (1995). The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.