by Mark Dery
The decisions demanded of the viewer by New Machine Publish-ing’s CD-ROM Nightwatch are rather less weighty; one set of multiple-choice options includes “SPANK HER” and “GET UNDRESSED.” Transforming the user’s PC screen into the central surveillance monitor of a beachfront apartment complex, the voyeuristic scenario revolves around a curvaceous security guard on her nightly rounds; animated sequences and QuickTime footage of live actors (which may be rewound or fast-forwarded) flesh out the bawdy escapades of oversexed tenants, glimpsed through hidden cameras.
According to New Media magazine, the best-selling title in the brief history of the adult-oriented CD-ROM is Reactor’s Virtual Valerie, released in 1990. Valerie, a cheesecake dream with gravity-defying proportions, is a direct descendant of Maxie MacPlaymate, the curvy cyberbimbo who debuted in 1986; both characters star in X-rated interactive games for home computers conceived by the underground cartoonist Mike Saenz. Saenz, a former Marvel Comics illustrator, is the creator of the cyberpunk graphic novel Shatter, the first comic book produced on a computer. Intriguingly, Saenz’s games are rooted in the artist’s feverish childhood dream of a machine that would “explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique”:
I was kind of a street urchin growing up in Chicago, and . . . we collected torn, soggy pieces of porn rags. And one day-I must have been only 6 or 7-a friend of mine said, “You gotta come over to my place: I’ve got a Boner Machine.” I had a wild imagination as a child: I imagined this greased-up, heavy-industry fuck device. And it was just a kind of flow chart collage-greasy little snippets from beaver magazines plastered on his wall. So I’m thinking, this is it, the Boner Machine? Shit, I could build you a Boner Machine. . . . The idea then went dormant for twenty years.66
Saenz sketched the fuzzy outlines of that dream in the wildly popular albeit crudely cartoony MacPlaymate, the first erotic software for the Macintosh PC. With a click of the mouse, MacPlaymate users strolled into Maxie’s bedroom, disrobed the animated pinup, and satisfied her urges with an assortment of sex toys, to the accompaniment of moans and groans. Virtual Valerie is a sort of pervert’s progress: players proceed, step by perilous step, from the street to Valerie’s bed, where anything can happen. In 1993, Saenz’s company released the CD-ROM Donna Matrix, an S and M variation on the Valerie theme featuring a spike-heeled, bullet-pumping “21st century Pleasure Droid” named Donna Matrix, whom Saenz describes as “a cross between Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Saenz, like so many denizens of fringe computer culture, looks forward to sex in virtual reality with unabashed anticipation-a deep-seated yearning that points, ultimately, to the failings of X-rated interactive games, pornographic MUDs and MUSEs, .GIF swaps, and text sex. “As sexy as the WELL is, as the best conversations are,” wrote Matt Stevens in “Sex in virtual communities,” a discussion topic on the WELL, “one element is missing: smell ;-).” A user with the on-line handle “You must be joking (leilani)” added, “Let’s not forget touch and sight, while we’re at it. Reading stuff on a screen is no substitute for being able to see and smell and taste and touch a real person.” Tom Mandel splashed ice water on the subject: “It is probably a good idea to remember that sex per se does not occur at all in virtual communities. Writing and communicating about sex does occur a lot, but that is not the same thing.”
Cybersex
Cybercultural dreams of machine sex and sex machines, once hazily defined, were captured with razor clarity in the “cybersex” scene that is the movie The Lawnmower Man’s sole contribution to popular culture. Few who have seen it will forget the scene in which the protagonist and his girlfriend, suited up in virtual reality equipment, engage in coitus artificialis. In cyberspace, they appear as featureless, quicksilver creatures, their faces flowing together and oozing apart in a mystical communion that dissolves body boundaries. Like the angel sex described by Raphael in Milton’s Paradise Lost, their conjunction is “easier than air with air.”
Ironically, this unmediated, transcendental sex, in which bodies melt and souls commingle, occurs in the utterly mediated environment of a computer program, accessed through user interfaces that seal off the senses and inhibit physical movement. Seen from outside their computer-generated hyperreality, the two lovers appear silly, solipsistic; outfitted in bulky helmets and suspended in giant gyroscopes, each embraces himself, tongu-ing the air, thrusting into nothingness. Lebel’s critique of The Bride Stripped Bare–“onanism for two”—applies to cybersex as well.
Time magazine’s 1993 cover story on cyberpunk features the eye-grabbing “VIRTUAL SEX” cover line and Lawnmower Man cybersex still that have become fixtures of mainstream coverage of cyberculture. Paraphrasing Rheingold, the authors inform readers that virtual sex would be facilitated by
a virtual reality bodysuit that fits with the “intimate snugness of a condom.” When your partner (lying somewhere in cyberspace) fondles your computer-generated image, you actually feel it on your skin, and vice versa. Miniature sensors and actuators would have to be woven into the clothing by a technology that has yet to be invented.67
In other words, dreaming about incorporeal intercourse, at least for now, amounts to fantasizing about a fantasy; it is no less ludicrous than the unspoken desire, apparently harbored by more than a few men, to make it with Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon vamp in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The technical hurdles to be leapt in realizing Rheingold’s vision of virtual sex, or “teledildonics,” as it is phallocentrically known, are daunting.68
In Rheingold’s scenario, each participant slips on 3-D goggles and a high-tech bodystocking, then steps into a “suitably padded chamber.” The inner surface of his or her “smart” suit is covered with
an array of intelligent sensor-effectors-a mesh of tiny tactile detectors coupled to vibrators of varying degrees of hardness, hundreds of them per square inch, that can receive and transmit a realistic sense of tactile presence.69
Plugging into the global telephone network, the user connects with similarly equipped participants. All appear to each other as believable fictions: lifelike characters inhabiting a three-dimensional environment. “You run your hand over your partner’s clavicle,” imagines Rheingold, “and 6,000 miles away, an array of effectors [is] triggered, in just the right sequence, at just the right frequency, to convey the touch exactly the way you wish it to be conveyed.”70
Reality is mutable here; years could be added to or subtracted from one’s age, and crow’s-feet, bald spots, love handles, and cellulite could be corrected with a few keystrokes. Of course, when radical transmogrifications require only a few more seconds’ worth of computation, why stop at alterations that are merely cosmetic? New genders and ethnicities could be explored; hermaphroditism, multiple sex organs, and the grafting of animal genitals onto human bodies would almost certainly become instant clichés among the outré. One might assume the guise of a celebrity, a historical personality, a fictional character, or a mythic hybrid-centaur, satyr, Minotaur, mermaid. A virtual reality graphics program could assemble an interactive 3-D “clone” from nude self-portraits of the user, shot from every angle and scanned into computer memory; add a voice synthesized from a database of phonemes recorded by the user, and the narcissist’s age-old love affair could at last be consummated.
Not that the human sexual imagination need confine itself to the biological world: The posthuman landscape of Ballard’s Crash stretches before us, with its sexualized aircraft engine nacelles and pornographic pileups. Devotees of Crash sex might opt for congress with commodity fetishes. In a WELL topic called “Dildonics,” the artist and multimedia designer Mike Mosher imagines the arrival, by the year 2000, of Or-gasmatrons that will combine “visual, auditory, touch and possibly olfactory stimulus” to bring users to “thrilling orgasm.” He predicts that “the sexual content of many appealing things will become obvious,” including “objects (sex with a Russian MIG fighter, with a Ferrari Testarossa, with the dome of St. Peter’s).” Mosher conjures the wor
ld of Pat Cadigan’s SF novel Synners, where an image junkie’s home entertainment center is equipped with
a screen for every porn channel, jammed together in the wall so that food porn overlapped med porn overlapped war porn overlapped sex porn overlapped news porn overlapped disaster porn overlapped tech-fantasy porn overlapped porn she had no idea how to identify.71
Cybersex will grow exponentially stranger as virtual reality technology develops. Not everyone will want to interface with anonymous partners on-line; some may opt, in the privacy of their own Orgasmatrons, to boot up software that allows them to experience the recorded performances of the famous and the infamous. Imagine the union of Rheingold’s tactile sensor-effectors with a record/playback apparatus like the Yamaha Disklavier, a computerized player piano that can flawlessly replay performances stored on floppy disks, down to the subtle nuances of pedaling. Add computer graphics wizardry descended from that used to create the nearly seamless illusion of Elton John and Louie Armstrong trading riffs in the 1991 TV spot for Diet Coke, “Nightclub.” Voilà: cybersex with the man, woman, or creature of your fantasies.
Most of us will limit ourselves to the occasional steamy romp with Raquel Welch or Robert Redford, while the irretrievably perverse will take part in threesomes with, say, the arch conservative crusader Phyllis Schlafly and the Devil-worshiping debauchee Aleister Crowley. Many personalities will be available only as simulations, of course, and efforts to re-create the lovemaking techniques of Cleopatra, Casanova, Marilyn Monroe, or JFK will doubtless give rise to a new market for the skills of historians. At the same time, there will always be celebrities willing to don DataSuits and act out virtual sex scenes, their every grope and groan recorded for the delectation of the mass market. But given the present prevalence of “body doubles” who stand in for stars during nude scenes in films, how could the cybersex consumer be certain that he was savoring the favors of the advertised celebrity, and not a stand-in? Mike Saenz wonders,
[W]hen you’re getting a virtual blow job, by a virtual Madonna . . . did they take some sensor-clad dildo and fuck a goat? Or did some weird cybernerd sit hunched over a computer at 4:00 A.M., editing and tweaking the data? Whose data is this?72
Whose indeed? And how can the cybernaut showering after on-line revelry be certain that he or she hasn’t just had sex with a highly evolved artificial intelligence, perhaps a distant descendant of a grandmaster-level chess program? Amazingly, an interactive, undeniably libidinous machine intelligence already exists, after a fashion, in the form of LULU, a pornographic program written by the Finnish computer scientist Pekka Tolonen. Based on Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous ELIZA program, a surprisingly convincing dialogue emulator based on nondirective psychotherapy, LULU began life in 1984 as YRTSI, a simulation of a drug-addled, fifteen-year-old punk which, according to a WELL post by Tolonen, “raised deep emotions among those who discussed with it.” The logical next step in developing an artificial personality, decided Tolonen, “was to continue the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll theme of YRTSI, and expand the sexual part and convert it into [a] female.”
LULU was born in 1985. Installed by Tolonen on SUOKUG, a BBS for Finnish Kaypro users, the program was activated at random in order to fool users into believing that they were receiving real-time messages from a fellow subscriber in “chat” mode. The program’s seeming unpredictability and its uncanny ability to simulate an ordinary human typist-making and correcting typos, pausing as if searching for the right word-convinced many SUOKUG users that LULU was human. “Although LULU operated only with text, it provoked the user to express his most secret sexual wishes and fantasies,” writes Tolonen. “The semantic system was based on models analyzed from pornographic literature. But when the system was run the discussions were saved on disk and analyzed later, which made it possible to expand the model.” Using a heuristic approach, LULU “learned” what come-ons lured users into conversation.
By 1990, when the program was demonstrated at the Thinking Machines Exhibition organized by the Finnish Science Center HEUREKA, LULU had evolved into a multimedia package, complete with text, graphics, the appropriate sampled noises, and a two-voice phoneme synthesizer; visitors interacted with the software by means of a mouse-driven menu and Windows-style software. “LULU handled nearly all imaginable sexual interactions that can be expressed in written Finnish,” writes Tolonen. “A deep male voice spoke what the user typed and an electronic female voice with special robotic effects spoke the LULU part.”73 Ultimately, LULU was shut down after complaints by visitors who weren’t ready for virtual intimacy from a computer. “But before LULU was removed,” notes Tolonen, “[the computer’s] hard disk had registered hundreds of ‘hotter than hell’ discussions, which testify that teledildonics is really what people enjoy.”74
Unfortunately, true teledildonics is “an early-to-mid-twenty-first-century technology,” according to Rheingold.75 It would require a global fiber-optic network in concert with massively parallel supercomputers capable of monitoring and controlling the numberless sensors and effectors fitted to every hill and dale, plane and protuberance of the body’s topography. Furthermore, a reticulated fabric of safe, high-speed micro-vibrators is only a mirage, given the state of the art in current technologies.
Even if such challenges were met, how would changes in temperature-crushed ice poured down your underwear, hot wax dribbled on your bare chest-be approximated? Moreover, while masochists will undoubtedly demand technology that can re-create the sensation of being branded with a white-hot iron, less adventuresome souls may hesitate before slipping into suits capable of such effects. As William Gibson quips in a Future Sex interview, “[W]ho’s going to test-dick the force-feedback vagina?”76 Home appliances have a tendency to go haywire, and a malfunction in a patch of tiny effectors simulating hot wax could have grisly consequences.
Barring such disasters, what about the senses of smell and taste, so important in sex? For most, sex without olfactory or gustatory stimuli would be like sex with a condom over one’s entire body. “You look at virtual reality, what senses does it get?” asks the virtual reality theorist Brenda Laurel. “Sight, sound, maybe touch, no taste, no smell. It’s upside down.”77
Finally, there’s the clumsiness of the interface. Few of us relish the prospect of standing in a high-tech phone booth dressed in a futuristic scuba suit pimpled with microvibrators. On-line topics have grappled with just this problem, and the endlessly inventive participants in these discussions have come up with some novel, if not entirely practical, solutions.
Eric Hunting, also a contributor to the WELL’s “Dildonics” discussion, uses holography as a point of departure for a cybersex technology that resembles the Star Trek “replicator,” a mysterious device that materializes solid objects out of thin air. Hunting theorizes a “computer-generated matter technology” based on “scanned field photonic emission holography backed up with scanned field gravatics.” Decrypted, that translates as the spatial manipulation of electromagnetic and energy fields to synthesize matter.
Failing the arrival of such an invention, Hunting imagines an outlandish contraption inspired by an unnamed seventies SF novel: an “artificially intelligent bed . . . capable of making love to its occupant, a consequence of [its] being composed of a synthetic flesh-like material which could form any shape, contour, or texture.” He goes on to describe, in some detail, the engineering of such an “amoebot,” a sort of protean waterbed made of “an amorphous material of dynamically variable density and muscle-like motor function capable of extruding fully animate shapes under direct computer control.” Hunting extrapolates from phase change fluid, a recently invented “polymer suspension which changes instantly from solid to liquid in the presence of an electrical current.”78 Coupling with an amoebot would be rather like having sex with the T-1000, the liquescent, polymorphous android who, in Terminator 2, is able to assume any imaginable form in the twinkling of an eye. The Amoebot, writes Hunting,
operates in a very stra
ightforward manner. The computer constructs rigid and semirigid forms by controlling current flow through the matrix of polymer ‘nerves’ and directs fluid pressure through these forms to inflate and extrude them and to provide motor function. It can dynamically create pressurized chambers, tubes, and fluid joints and vary their density and solidity as needed to construct whatever form is desired. The outer skin senses the contact and relative position of the user or of objects and the internal pressure sensors determine force applied while also providing feedback on variable internal pressures used by synthesized motor systems.79
Terminal Congress
I have been through eight or ten Q&A sessions on virtual reality, and I don’t remember one where sex didn’t come up. . . . And I did overhear the word ‘DataCondom’ at one point. . . . Maybe the nerds who always ask this question will get a chance to make it with their computers at long last.
–John Perry Barlow80
What accounts for the broad appeal of text sex, .GIF swapping, interactive X-rated cartoons such as Virtual Valerie, pornographic “expert” programs such as LULU, and teledildonics? The virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier has done his best to burst the hype bubble surrounding cybersex, emphasizing that “[t]he reality here, the virtual reality, is that you’d have a girl made of polygons. And no one wants to have sex with a bunch of polygons.”81 How, then, has an improbable proposition that crosses phone sex with Nintendo become so deeply embedded in the popular imagination as to be all but inextricable?
