Escape Velocity (29 page)

I'll die right here, only I'll keep on walking. I'll be dead, and I'll settle down in Orange County, marry a girl vague from TV and downers, and we'll raise anonymous children together, removed from her body like loaves of bread while she's knocked out.^^

Jeter updates the dadaists' vision of the look-alike, think-alike masses for an age of pill-popping couch potatoes. To Limmit, the suburbanite copulating with a "foam-rubber ersatz whore"-a sick-funny image that perfectly captures the soullessness of a thoroughly commodified existence-is little better than a robot himself

The equation of the archetypal suburban consumer with a mindless automaton is an all-purpose metaphor, serving opposed ends: the feminism of The Stepjord Wives (1974), a black comedy about suburban chauvinists who dispatch their mutinous wives and replace them with brain-dead happy homemakers created in the image of Playboy centerfolds, and the beery misogyny of Charles Bukowski's short story "The Fuck Machine."

Bukowski's robotic love doll Tanya is a cross between Barbie and the Bride of Frankenstein. On the outside, she is "all ass and breast," but her torso is stuffed full of "wire and tubes-coiled and running things-plus some minor substance that faintly resemble[s] blood," and her stomach and veins once belonged to a hog and a dog, respectively.^^ The fear and loathing of female sexuality bubbling beneath this image oozes out when the scientist who built Tanya declares, "[EJvery woman is a fucking machine, can't you see that? [T]hey play for the highest bidder!"^"* Bukowski's virulent misogyny is inflected with a horror of consumer culture not unlike Jeter's:

poor Tanya . . . she had had no desire for money or property or large new cars or overexpensive homes, she had never read the evening paper, had no desire for [color] television, new hats, rain boots, backfence conversations with idiot wives. ^^

In an America where humans have come to resemble mass-produced widgets, where one might pass "half a hundred fuck machines in a 10 minute walk on almost any main sidewalk of America-the only difference being that they pretended that they were human," Tanya's saving grace is that she is what she seems to be.^^ Ironically, the hollow, materialistic "fuck machine" so reviled by Bukowski is the culturally constructed product of male desires. The "assembly-line love goddess," to use McLuhan's phrase, is only as the media gods made her.

But the reality of the living doll-starved to pubescent proportions, douched, depilated, and deodorized-inevitably falls short of the male dream of robotic glamour. The female sex machine serves not only as a shiny surface on which male visions of femininity may be etched but as a mirror whose reflection reinforces the masculine sense of self The result is a narcissistic closed circuit that resembles what the Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the "mirror stage" of psychological development, the phase in early childhood during which the child comes to recognize himself in the mirror and an integrated self-image begins to coalesce. "[W]e arrive at a sense of an T by finding that T reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world," Terry Eagleton elaborates, in his discussion of Lacan. "This object is at once somehow part of ourselves-we identify with it-and yet not ourselves, something alien."^^ Intriguingly, Lacan himself

draws an analogy between the mirror stage and our relationship with the automaton, "in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of [one's] own making tends to find completion."^^

Anthropomorphic yet alien, the electric love doll is consonant with male fantasies to a degree that no human female could ever be, but mocking in its forgery of organic life. This uncanniness is what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori pinpoints when he refers, in Frederik Schodt's Inside the Robot Kingdom, to the "Uncanny Valley," a dip in the index that graphs our relationship with humanoid dolls and anthropomorphic machines. According to Mori, our affinity for our creations parallels the degree to which they resemble us, up to a point; when they begin to look too much like us, their cuddliness turns to uncanniness. Freud, who wrote a well-known essay on the Uncanny, would say that this is because we are unable to convince ourselves that such disquietingly lifelike creations, inert though they are, do not harbor some spark of life. (Significantly, he devotes a substantial portion of "The 'Uncanny' " to a consideration of Olympia, the mechanical Galatea in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman.")

The discomfiting effects of humanoid mannequins, statues, waxworks, robots, and the like are also inextricably bound up in the subconscious fear of our own mortality that confronts us in the image of the doppelganger, the spectral double that haunts its fleshly counterpart. The doppelganger, in turn, has everything to do with the mirror stage (Freud calls the double a "harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling") as well as man-made "reflections" of humanity. In a discussion of the automaton, Baudrillard observes that

There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will. . . . Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. ^^

The uncanniness of the idealized gyndroid and the patriarchal use of Woman as Narcissus's mirror are points of departure for UEve Future ("The Future Eve"), Jean Villiers de I'lsle-Adam's 1886 novel about an "electro-human machine" modeled on a woman named Alicia. Lord Ewald,

a wealthy English gentleman, has fallen out of love with his mistress Alicia ("the absolute feminine ideal for three-quarters of modern humanity") because she is afflicted, unhappily, with a reasoning intellect/^ And, as Ewald reminds us, "The marble Venus, after all, has nothing to do with reason."^'

Thomas Edison solves Ewald's dilemma by constructing the robot Hadaly, an idealized vision of Alicia that epitomizes the nineteenth-century concept of a sublime femininity. Hadaly (Persian for "ideal," according to Villiers) is the very image of languorous gentility, subsisting on pills and gliding through life in a somnambulistic state. Her iron joints are oiled vsdth perfume, and in place of lungs she has two golden phonographs whose sixty-hour "program," recorded by Alicia, was written by the century's greatest poets, metaphysicians, and novelists. An aid to philosophical contemplation, the android is, as Edison observes, Ewald's platonic desire incarnate:

[T]he creature whom you love, and who for you is the sole REALITY, is by no means the one who is momentarily embodied in [Alicia's] transient human figure, but a creature of your desire. ... In short, it's this objectified projection of your own mind that you call on, that you perceive, that you CREATE in your living woman, and which is nothing but your own mind reduphcated in her."^-^

Fashioned in the image of Ewald's metaphysical fantasy, Hadaly is a marble goddess, a mechanical bride who will never be stripped bare (she is, in fact, a living stun gun, able to incapacitate would-be mashers with a jolt from her electrified body). Spiritual, inviolate, she is the obverse of the science fiction sex machine, a divine statue who leads men not into physical temptation but toward the life of the mind. Even so, she is like Bukowski's "fuck machine," Jeter's synthetic whores, and McLuhan's assembly-line love goddesses in that she is a figment of the male imagination-Woman stripped of free will and threatening sexuality. Both paradigms police female desire: In the mechanoid whore. Woman is reduced to a "mechanical cunt," a Picabia-esque spark plug that goes "for ever" once her ignition is switched on; in the android virgin, female sexuality is etherealized and the female sex erased, reduced to a ridiculous blankness like the vacancy between Barbie's legs.

Ladies' Home Companion

As might be expected, science fiction is largely devoid of female mechano-erotica, an inequity the Mondo 2000 editor "St. Jude" (Jude Milhon) has attempted to redress through "technoporn" written from a female perspective. In Steven Levy's chronicle of the computer revolution, Hackers, Milhon is introduced as a computerphile who "noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.'"*^ "Woman's Home Companion," a piece of SF erotica by Milhon that appeared in Mondo 2000, is a lighthearted rewrite of the Westworld scenario. Lounging in her Jacuzzi, the narrator is serviced by a Personal Robot, "all black rubber and chrome," whose five, nimble-fingered hands attend to her every erogenous zone. In addition, her handy household helper is fitted with a daunting assortment of protuberances: "Mistress, I am equipped with four copulatory devices. Shall I demonstrate them for you?'"*"* Milhon's story inspired "What do humans really want from their CYBORG LOVE SLAVES???" a WELL discussion topic in which several female contributors spun out lickerish fantasies. Tiffany Lee Brown confided that her

idealoid luv slave would be programmed with hundreds of personalities, from which it would select completely at random. I hafta have that element of surprise. I wouldn't mind having one program switch my borg baby back and forth from Jeff Gold-blum to Geena [Davis] mode, at excellently timed intervals.

Erika Whiteway's

would be able to read my mind, would always be ON, would do whatever I want and not just sex either but grocery shopping and ministering to my every need, desire, whim . . . and inexplicable craving for HeathBarCrunch ice cream at 3:23 a.m."*^

Transporting Lady Chatterley's lover to the world of Neuromancer, such imaginings are animated by a quirky humor missing, for the most part, from male visions of robo-bimbos. Milhon's Personal Robot, with its fon-

dlers, diddlers, and dildos, spoofs a long line of futuristic labor-saving devices for the modern housewife epitomized in those preposterous kitchen utensils familiar from TV infomercials ("It slices, it dices, it juliennes . . ."). Heirs to several decades' rhetoric about the cybernated "House of the Future," Milhon, Brown, and Whiteway envision Personal Robots and cyborg love slaves that would attend to more than June Cleaver's housework.

Orgasmatron

The RoboCopulatory fantasies of Milhon and her fellow WELL-dwellers spring in part from what McLuhan called the "hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique." It is a received truth that mass desire plays a strong role in "willing" technology into being. Where there's a will, there is often a ^.vay, and the craving for something like the Orgasmatron, the orgasm-inducing booth imagined by Woody Allen in Sleeper, lurks beneath the surface of cyberculture. According to the cultural anthropologist Arthur Harkins,

Already there is talk of creation of androids for sexual purposes. I think you are going to see an industry develop in the sexual-appliance area. At first it will be machine appliances, and eventually you will see biological substitutes or surrogates for human sexual organs being employed in stationary and mobile machine systems."*^

Harkins's words may prove prophetic if cultural momentum propels events on their present course. Sex with machines, together with dalliances conducted in virtual worlds, seems a seductive alternative in an age of AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases. In cyberculture, the widespread yearning for untainted love has given rise to the on-line sex play that the technology writer Gareth Branwyn calls "text sex"; interactive, X-rated computer programs; and everyone's not-ready-for-prime-time fantasy, sex in virtual reality, or "cybersex."

You're alone, it's late, and the lights are low; your face is bathed in the phosphor glow of your PC screen. Connected by modem to the

information service America Online, you browse through a hst of user-initiated group discussions called "rooms." The topics range over a vs^ide spectrum of interests, from pop culture to politics, but in the BBS's "People Connection" section, sexual themes predominate. Room names scroll dow^n your screen: "Romance Connection," "Naughty Negligees," "Hot Bi Ladies," "Gay Room," "Naughty Girls," "Women Who Obey Women."

Highlighting one, you click your mouse and "enter" the room. A small square w^inks into existence in one corner of your screen. The names of the various conversationalists appear at the top of the inset box; their typewritten comments scroll by below. Summoning your courage, you decide to dive in. Typing a brief message in the small text entry window near the bottom of your screen, you select send. In the blink of an eye, your note, or "post," takes its place among the accumulated messages, at the end of the list.

Here as elsewhere on America Online, sexually explicit conversation is conducted warily, since public rooms are policed by "guides" recruited from the membership and paid in free on-line time. Derided as "cybercops" by those who frequent blue rooms, guides are empowered to delete dens of iniquity whose language and subject matter are not in keeping with the system's guidelines. Repeat offenders run the risk of having their memberships suspended. Like the habitues of conventional singles bars, BBS users tend therefore to scan rooms for potential partners with whom they might slip away to more secluded quarters.

Skimming the posted remarks, you settle on the author whose sentiments, sense of humor, and sexual preference harmonize with yours. Using the private message command, you send the likely prospect a flirtatious note that pops up on his or her screen alone. Curiosity piqued, your partner responds in kind. Things proceed apace, from the coyly coquettish to the blatantly salacious, in the sort of breathless exchange that one denizen of the Internet termed a "heated sendstorm."

Inevitably, you and your partner decide to retire to the virtual boudoir. After activating the create private room program, you zap the bedchamber's name and password to your partner via private message; wdthin seconds, both of you have rendezvoused onscreen. Hunched over your computer keyboards, separated by a sea of wires, you tap out erotic messages that materialize, like spirit writing, as glowing characters on each other's

screens. Soon, you find yourself typing with one hand. Coitus in cyberspace, like intercourse in the physical world, progresses from foreplay to climax; orgasms are signaled by cartoony exclamations: "ohhhhhh," "WOW!!!" and the perennial favorite "I'mmmm Commmmmmmminnnggggggggg!!!!!!"

According to the Wired contributor Gerard Van Der Leun, text sex dates back to "the dawn of on-line." Branwyn cites three types of "text-based sexual exchanges" in his South Atlantic Quarterly essay "Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts." Most common, he reports, are sexually explicit descriptions of what each participant is purportedly doing. Another variety, favored by orgy-goers, involves the communal creation of sexual fantasies, a form of consensual world-building reminiscent of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Such scenarios, notes Branwyn, require the nimble negotiation of the inconsistencies that inevitably result when stories are collectively improvised by scattered strangers. Branwyn imagines a narrative with a short circuit, and a quick fix:

BethR types: "I'm climbing on top of Rogerl04," not noticing that Rogerl04 has just stated that he is having sex standing up, in the corner, with Nina5. To work around this story "violation," Rogerl04 might type: "Nina and I get so worked up, we roll onto the floor. As NinaS falls off of me, the always randy BethR, not missing a beat, climbs on top of me."'*^

Finally, there is what Branwyn wryly calls "teleoperated compu-sex," the preferred mode among couples who swing on-line. "Teleoperation" is the computer control of remote robots by human operators; teleoperated sex, by extension, involves the acting out, by one party, of instructions given by another, far removed: "Sal, I want you to slurp grape jelly out of Frieda's navel. . . ."

Sex among the disembodied is wondrous strange, as are the issues it raises. In an E-mail message, Branwyn described an encounter wdth an online prostitute who offered to have text sex vdth him in exchange for an illegal copy of a computer game. There are laws against software piracy, but is online prostitution, in which bodies never touch and no fluids are exchanged, illegal or even immoral? In fact, does the term prostitution even apply to sex-for-software barter when the "sex" in question consists of what the Esquire

writer Michael Hirschorn calls "techno-onanism"-pornographic E-mail zapping back and forth between furiously masturbating users?

Stranger still is the notion of on-line adultery: Should significant others be jealous of their partners' on-line indiscretions? "If you have 'virtual sex' with someone," writes a user (who prefers to remain anonymous) in the well's "Text Sex" topic, "is that in essence . . . cheating on your [significant other] ... or more like interactive fantasy? And if you have an ongoing virtual relationship, is that in effect an affair?" Susan E. Fernbach doesn't think so. "If the [on-line] involvement brings something extra to the primary relationship, then it's probably healthy," she writes. "If it drains energy from the primary relationship, there might be ... a problem.'"*^

Text sex is stealth sex, performed by unseen, unseeing participants whose identities are masked by the medium. Because on-line communication reduces human interaction to symbols hammered out on QWERTY keyboards, it effectively masks gender, a vertiginous state of affairs that some find liberating and others profoundly disconcerting. Victor Lukas confirms,

Sex in cyberspace happens in a VERY surreal landscape! The phenomenon of males masquerading as females is quite widespread, but oddly enough, it is not necessarily an indication of gay preference. I introduced my male office mate, a shy man with a bit of an inferiority complex, to . . . CompuServe. [S]ince he wasn't a verbally skilled person, he had difficulty making friends or finding conversation partners. . . . On a whim, he changed to a female handle, and suddenly he was "popular."'*^

Users who pose as members of the opposite gender are commonly known as "MorFs." The term, short for "male or female," is also a pun on "morphing," the computer animation technique used to seamlessly dissolve one image into another. Not everyone adjusts easily to the notion of gender morphing, an observation amply-and amusingly-evidenced in one of Branwyn's posts:

Things sometimes get real weird on AOL with people arguing over a person's true gender. The other night a "woman" was

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accused by another "woman" of not being a woman. She thought the "woman" in question was too aggressive to be a woman. The "woman" in question gave her phone number to several people so that they could call to hear her voice. After doing so, a "man" verified that "she" sounded like a female. The "woman" who had raised the allegations was not impressed. "She" said that lots of TVs sound like women. Someone then asked "her" how we were to know that SHE was a woman. "She" said that there were images of her available for downloading. Funny how she thought this was somehow more solid evidence than the other person's phone voice. She said she could also fax people pix of her. Wild!5o

To those endowed not with bulging abs or plunging cleavage but overdeveloped brains, group gropes and one-night stands between discar-nate minds look a lot like Utopia. In a private note to Branwyn, one devotee wrote, "In compu-sex, being able to type fast and write well is equivalent to having great legs or a tight butt in the real world." Linda Hardesty, a participant in the WELL's "Sex in Virtual Communities" topic, offers a more romantic perspective on the subject:

The idea of falling in love with a person purely through writing seems to me to cast some light on the whole concept of falling in love. We do tend to fall in love with some image of the person that we have created in our own minds. Ways that people react on-line, coupled with one's own conditioning, create that image. ^'

The narrow bandwidth of on-line communication strikes some as erotic in itself. The mental image Hardesty mentions derives its seductive power from the same source tapped by Muslim veils that conceal all but the eyes: the delicious mystery of the unseen. Then, too, to a true logophile, the written word can be almost aphrodisiacal. "[S]ex at best *is* a conversation," writes "Afterhours (gail),"

and virtual * intercourse* is what the WELL can be when it's working. ... we want our words to stroke one another, envelop

one another, move one another, . . . What Hank said is true. Falling in love with writers is easy. The difference here is that you can intertwine words with the writers you love, interactive and expressive and responding to your ideas.^^

Alan L. Chamberlain, another WELL user, suggests that on-line, among the bodiless, the mind is an erogenous zone:

[I] have friendships and unspecified relationships with women i have met through the WELL, where . . . the attraction began as a result of exposure to each other's ideas, rather than physical attraction, in some instances, there has been a physical attraction following, but the fundamental thing has been attraction to each other's minds.^^

Getting ItOn(-Line): MUD Sex, Net.Sleazing, and Beyond

Not all netsurfers are as platonic-or as logophilic-as Chamberlain and his fellow WELL-dwellers. There is a fast-growing underground of adult BBSs, of which Event Horizons, with sixty-four phone lines and twenty-five thousand users, is possibly the most popular and undoubtedly the oldest (Event's president, Jim Maxey, claims his was the first adult BBS). Most adult BBSs feature electronic conferencing, which permits users to comment on various topics; many, like the New York-based Aline or Monrovia, California's Odyssey, specialize in X-rated "chat," or real-time teleconferencing, where a number of users congregate in an imaginary room to engage in group conversation via keyboard. A classified ad for Lifestyle BBS entices potential subscribers with the promise of

[c]omputer sex talk: couples and siiigles interested in making real contacts with very open-minded adults meet on the nationwide Lifestyle BBS. 32 lines serve 1,500+ active members more than 1,300 times a day. 54

Some sexually explicit BBSs cater to gays and lesbians. Frank Browning describes two typical gay computer bulletin boards:

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One board calls itself "Station House" and organizes its user codes around the jargon of the police. Each user, identified as an "officer," is on "patrol" in a numbered "car," and chooses from several topical areas labeled as "squad rooms." Another bulletin board is called "Backdoor"; on-line users slip into "glory holes" and choose among topical "stalls.""

On the Internet, one finds systems that are home to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons, Dimensions, or Domains) and MUSEs (Multi-User Simulation Environments)-text-based role-playing games that enable multiple users to simultaneously explore a shared environment. Assuming fanciful guises, players engage in derring-do in labyrinthine caverns, enchanted forests, and similarly otherworldly geographies, all spun from narrative threads (the eye-zapping computer graphics and ray-gun sound effects familiar from video arcades or PC games are absent here). "When you encounter other characters, the interactions between you become part of the game," writes Howard Rheingold, in "What Are Muds and Muses?" an article published on the WELL. "People gather treasure, slay monsters (and each other), gain experience points, and thereby become wizards, with powers that are useful in playing the game."

There are those, however, whose idea of game playing includes carnal frolickings; increasingly, unbridled lust is intruding on the sword-and-sorcery scenarios of these Tolkienesque worlds. "Flirtation, infatuation, romance, and even TinySex' are now as ubiquitous in MUD worlds as on real college campuses,'' write Rheingold and Kevin Kelly, in the July/August 1993 issue of Wired magazine. According to the WELL user Tim Oren, TinySex (alternately, "tinysex") is "sexually loaded or explicit language . . . typed between users on a MUD or other multi-user system. I suppose it got called TinySex' because some of the original systems were called Tiny-MUDs."^^ As Rheingold notes in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, it is conducted in character. Rheingold also makes mention of net.sleazing, which he defines as "the practice of aggressively soliciting mutual narrative stimulation ... an unsavory but perennially popular behavior in MUDland."" Taken further, net.sleazing turns to MUD-rape, which the feminist cultural critic Anne Balsamo defines as an "unwanted, aggressive, sexual-textual encounter in a multi-user domain."^^