Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Aside from raising obvious questions about the extent to which the feminization of objects can be extricated from the objectification of women, the mantra does not so much clarify the fetish as strategically redirect it from the living to the nonliving. In so doing, it raises the specter of necrophilia, which is the lens through which the sexualization of artificial humans has been viewed since the establishment of sexology as a field of study, when “sexual pathologies” were first documented and catalogued. Although mention is made in Krafft-Ebing’s landmark Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) of a “paraphilia” involving statues, including a reported incident of a gardener attempting to fornicate with a replica of the Venus de Milo (525), Iwan Bloch explores the preference for the artificial at greater length in The Sexual Life of Our Time In Its Relation to Modern Civilization (1928). In a chapter dedicated to sexual perversity, he highlights two variations of necrophilia, the first being “Venus Statuaria,” the desire to have sexual intercourse with statues or other representations of human beings, a passion that he states can seize some merely by walking through a museum. The second, “Pygmalionism,” is the desire to enact the animation of an inanimate statue, usually by having real women stand atop pedestals pretending to be statues and then gradually come to life. Such a request was, Bloch suggests, common in Parisian brothels at the turn of the century.4 Connected to the desire for statues is, according to Bloch, the use of new technologies to construct anatomically-correct human models for explicitly sexual ends:

  There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a “pneumatic tube” filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of “Parisian rubber articles.” (648)

  While in the case of “Venus Statuaria” Bloch makes a distinction between those who become sexually aroused by statues because they are artificial and those merely responding to a naked human body despite its artificiality (the latter of whom he suggests comprise the bulk of the documented cases), in general he tends to collapse distinctions between the various desires that circulate around the inanimate and to suggest that they are all equally perverse. Moreover, he treats such tendencies as a separate topic from fetishism, a category that he reserves for those who invest sexual energy in a part of the human body at the expense of the whole.5

  Writing in the 1970s, A. Scobie and A.J.W. Taylor draw a greater distinction between “agalmatophilia” or the love of statues and Pygmalionism, the desire to bring a statue to life (49), while Murray White, whose article appeared three years after their study, dismisses agalmatophilia entirely, stating that a negligible number of cases has been cited over the course of two thousand years, none of which are verifiable. Moreover, he attributes the interest in the phenomenon to the “insatiable preoccupation with deviant nosology” of sexologists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (248), many of whom, in their own fetishistic zeal, failed to make the distinction between fantasy and reality:

  Agalmatophilia has been sparingly treated as a pornographic fantasy, but there is very little evidence supporting its status as a behavioral perversion. Early scientific researchers of sexual behavior appear to have sometimes confused fantasy (the process of imagining objects or events in terms of imagery) with perversion (sexual behavior which differs widely from normal standards and which is typically prohibited by law). (249)

  The constellation of artificial love schematized by Bloch has, however, been revived by Patricia Pulham, who suggests that the current popularity of life-sized silicone lovedolls, such as the Realdoll, indicates that with the help of new technologies, “agalmatophiliacs are alive and well, even if their objects of desire seem somewhat dead” (13).6 Drawing on Meghan Laslocky’s interviews with Realdoll owners documented in her 2005 Salon.com article “Just Like a Woman,” Pulham compares the lovers of silicone dolls with both Pygmalion and Lord Ewald in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve, and she suggests that while some men attempt to enliven their dolls through a variety of techniques, including heating the silicone skin before engaging in physical contact, the resonances between their desires and necrophilia are “difficult to ignore” (14).7

  Her views are, in fact, echoed in the first film to use a Realdoll as a character, Love Object (2003). A horror film that was, according to writer-director Robert Parigi, inspired by the visual similarity between Realdolls and the dead bodies that he had witnessed on a visit to the morgue, Love Object centers on a shy office worker who has a silicone lovedoll made in the image of a female coworker (named Lisa Bellmer, a reference to the dolls of Hans Bellmer, discussed below) on whom he has a crush.8 At first it appears that the doll will serve as a successful transitional object to real women (a role that a Realdoll will later fulfill in the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl); as he wines, dines, and otherwise engages his doll in a typical courting ritual, he gains an experiential confidence that enables him to relax around and ultimately start dating the woman on whom she has been modeled. The film suggests, however, that whatever pathology enabled him to invest life in a dead thing has a life of its own that requires an empty vessel for its fulfillment; and, since he disposed of the doll after he started to date the woman, he attempts to de-animate the woman through plastination in the story’s horrifying climax.9

  While there are clearly areas of overlap in the various desires around artificial bodies, the ongoing development of technologies for meeting such desires, as well as for the anonymous sharing of preferences within networked communities (the specificities of which tend to evolve in relation to one another), has made it somewhat easier to chart their distinctions. My own interviews with the buyers of life-sized silicone lovedolls and with ASFRians, and perusal of their respective websites, have led me to believe that, in general, they are two distinct groups.10 Moreover, while “death” in general, and the “death drive” in particular, are of relevance to their proclivities (as I will discuss below), necrophilia is too reductive and misleading a term for understanding the broad spectrum of behavior associated with either.11 Considering ASFRians in and of themselves, it is somewhat difficult to generalize (other than the fact that, with a small number of exceptions, they are predominantly male). As one member of the message board Fembot Central wrote in answer to one of my queries:

  the characteristics that any one of us “fetishizes” is always different—and often to a large degree—from anyone else’s. But also, the psychological undertones and the way we integrate this into our lives is entirely individual. The common ground is pretty small. In the broadest sense, I suspect that each of us here can agree with the broad definition, “I am attracted to things that look like people but aren’t.” And that each of us will further want to qualify that assertion in some way that we feel is important. (online communication, 17 June 2009)12

  Although meaning does vary from one individual to another, the group makes a distinction between two (somewhat oppositional) tendencies, the first indicating the desire for a robot that is entirely artificial (“built”) and the second devoted to the metamorphosis between the human and the robotic (“transformation”). Nevertheless, there are certain kinds of images and erotic practices that appeal to both groups and that appear repeatedly in relation to the fetish. For example, scenarios in which a real person is acting the part of a robot would likely be of interest to both groups, albeit for different reasons. Indeed, the majority of the ASFRians that I interviewed described their earliest fetishistic experiences as occurring while watching actors and actresses playing robots on such sf television shows as The Twilight Zone (1959-64), Outer Limits (1963-65), and Star Tr
ek (1966-69). Moreover, the primary indicators of mechanicity on such shows, which include silver and gold costuming and mechanical behavioral mannerisms like robotic speech, stilted movement, and repetitive motion, often enacted within moments of transition (such as when a robot is booted up, shut down, or programmed) are equally exciting to both groups. A large part of ASFRian activity revolves around the recreation in private of both the costuming and performances of these actor robots, giving the fetish a kind of do-it-yourself quality on which Katherine Gates comments in her book Deviant Desires. Gates places A.S.F.R. alongside slash fandom as a group that appropriates sf effects in homemade productions to their own erotic ends; ASFRians often write their own stories, create their own pictures, and construct their own robot costumes using shiny materials like latex, PVC, and Lycra to which they attach toys that “blink, bobble, and glow” in order to create the illusion of circuitry (229).

  The emphasis on mechanicity complicates the relationship between ASFRian fantasy and the reality of artificial companions that achieve human verisimilitude; in fact, the state of tension and liminality—whether between the robotic and human or between control and loss of control, appearance and interior, motion and stasis—seems to have greater relevance to the fetish than the robot per se. As Gates notes, unmasking is a key aspect of the fetish, and many of the most exciting fantasies involve the sudden revelation of artificiality either through robotic malfunction (in which a human/robot gets caught in a repeat loop) or disassembly (in which a panel opens or a part is removed to reveal the circuitry beneath the semblance of humanity). While the latter is difficult to perform, ASFRians either search television and film for such moments (which they then list obsessively on their websites) or they produce disassembly images themselves in the manner of ASFRian artist Kishin, who either renders them from scratch in a 3D program or adds exposed circuitry to figures from erotic magazines using Photoshop, a practice that some call “rasterbation” (see Figure 2). When I asked Kishin what it was about such imagery that he most enjoyed, he replied, “It’s something about the contrast between the cold hard steel and the circuits and the wiring and the smooth skin and the soft flesh.” The “come shot” for Kishin occurs when a female robot reaches up “to remove the mask that is her face” because “it’s like a revelation of who she really is” (personal communication, 24 July 2001).

  But who is she really?

  In his essay “Fetishism” (1927), Freud tells us that in all cases a fetish is “a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus, which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego” (205-206). It embodies an ambivalence, a double attitude towards female castration for which a compromise is struck by which the absent phallus is conjured elsewhere, a new point of erotic fixation that serves as both an acknowledgement and denial, “a sort of permanent memorial” that may manifest itself in a single part, like a foot, which the fetishist then worships, or a set of opposing attitudes that involve both hostility and reverence, such as “the Chinese custom of first mutilating a woman’s foot and then revering it” (209).

  The ASFRian fetish object is, however, less a “permanent memorial” than a vacillating sign; it is, to use Freud’s analogy, like mutilating one foot while keeping the other whole, an ongoing reminder that a deformation has occurred. To the extent that it attempts to assuage the ambivalence around an absence via a displaced presence, it also repetitively restages the exchange between presence and absence at this alternate location, re-enacting the trauma by which it was, theoretically, constituted. In this sense, it smacks of the compulsion to repeat that Freud links to the “death instinct.” Indeed, there is a distinct similarity between the hiding and revealing of the mechanical interior of the robot female in ASFRian fantasy and the compulsive throwing away and retrieving of the wooden reel by the child in the game fort/da, described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (13-14).13 There is, moreover, a correspondence between repetition compulsion and what is being revealed—the “who she really is” of ASFRian fantasy—that is bound up less in technology per se than in automatism, the revelation of a force (imagined as programming by ASFRians) beyond the rational mind or conscious will that controls behavior, and that is brought to the fore in moments of robotic unveiling or breakdown. Gates argues that the automatism at the heart of the fetish is a metaphor for sexuality itself: “the sense that we have no control over it; that we respond mechanically to stimuli; and that our sexual programming makes us helpless. Fetishes, especially, are a kind of hard-wired sexual subroutine” (228). In this sense, the erotics of automatism, as embraced by A.S.F.R., is a fetish whose object is, in part, a revelation of the compulsive mechanism of fetishism itself.

  Figure 2 Kishin: “Who She Really Is”.

  Read more generally, however, A.S.F.R. not only points to the slippage between the subject and object of fetishism, but also to the ways in which the circuit between them is wired with both biological and cultural contact points, the exposure of which is potentially denaturalizing (for the object) and self-revelatory (for the subject). For example, while many ASFRians are fascinated by the film The Stepford Wives (1975; remade 2004), for many its primary interest resides less in the idea of the perfect housewife than in those scenes in which the Wives break down or become caught in a repeat loop—scenes beneath which foreboding music plays and that are intended to evoke horror. These are moments of vertiginous rupture that offer a glimpse of the robotic programming beneath the ideal exterior of the Wives and that also throw into relief the cultural norms through which such ideals are constructed. Indeed, in the film, such scenes serve as feminist commentary on the extent to which real women (and men) have been socially programmed. A connection is also made in the original film between the domestic scripting of women and television advertising; many of the Stepford Wives speak as though they are actresses in commercials for household products.

  It is, perhaps, of no small significance that ASFRians get particular pleasure out of those scenes in which normative gender roles, as shaped by media imagery and embodied by the female android, are short-circuited. Most of the ASFRians whom I interviewed came of age in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and while their fetish is a product of sf television shows, it is also a reaction to a historical and cultural moment in which mass consciousness was shaped by the centralizing force of media programming and advertising. Indeed, if the media in general, and television in particular, tend to codify normative social rules and behaviors, then science fiction stands out as a site where the normal rules are suspended and other worlds are imagined that, in many cases, serve as a critique of and an alternative to the conventions of our own world. Although one might apply the stereotype of the sf geek to many ASFRians, the shared attributes that stood out in the men I interviewed were a high degree of sensitivity and self-consciousness coupled with social awkwardness and difficulty reading social cues.14 Puberty was, for these men, an unusually fraught time during which they felt both confused by and compelled to conform to the rules of social engagement and political correctness. Interestingly, many of the ASFRians I interviewed considered themselves to be feminists—after all, many had come of age at the height of second-wave feminism—but they expressed confusion about how to reconcile the way they were raised—i.e., “to respect women”—with their sexual impulses.

  The female robot is, to some extent, a way out of the quandary: she represents the promise of a simplified playing field in which the rules of the game are programmed in advance, thus sidestepping gender politics and eliminating the anxiety of making social mistakes. Within that simplified playing field, however, ASFRians imagine endless concatenations of possible moves, the erotic loci of which are moments of tension and rupture between opposite states—the human and the artificial, control and loss of control, exterior and interior. Such rupture is, I would argue, both a metaphor for and a condensation of the eruptive effects of adolescent desire on the socially-regulated body; it is a re-enactment of the tension between biological
and social programming, between the chaotic flux of inner experience and the unified and controlled self as mandated by the social order. Moreover, to the extent that it is an attempt at their reconciliation, it is through recourse to a third category, which has the potential to destabilize such dualisms as self and other, subject and object, and even male and female.