In the decade since William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace," the "consensual hallucination" he envisioned has taken on a reality which is virtual only insofar as it has become a collective, polyvalent and perpetually expanding construct in an imaginary space. Like the national highway system to which they have been all too frequently compared, computer networks have drastically refigured the cultural landscape. On one level, Gibson's rightly paranoiac vision of a world rendered nearly uninhabitable by warring multinational corporations whose policies are enforced by organized crime and whose hegemony is enabled by means of a vast, interlinked information network, mirrors current reality with unnerving accuracy. Late capitalism is characterized by the growth of multinationals that render political and cultural boundaries obsolete, and whose nexus of control is as intangible as it is total: an electronic network that encloses the entire world.
In his discussion of what he terms "the cultural logic of late capitalism," Frederic Jameson observes that "the rise of postmodernism is signalled in parallel developments in our culture: diffusion of power, decentering of contexts, and denaturing of the physical,"(1) or as Jean Baudrillard observes: "The scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication."(2) Although computer networks provide in one sense a "surface of operations" even more seamless than the television networks to which Baudrillard refers, insofar as they are entirely constructed of largely unregulated and exponentially proliferating information, in another sense the seams are prone to ruptures that neither Gibson's paranoid vision nor Baudrillard's dreary decrial of the "obscene" has predicted. Cyberspace has become an increasingly populated universe, a rapidly evolving civilization with its own history, politics, heroes, villains, legends and lore that is not so much parallel to the 'Real World' as an increasingly present aspect of it. Gleeful cyborgs, "the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,"(3) fulfilling one of childhood's most avid and most forbidden wishes, are out playing on the highway that their fathers built. When Michael Heim speaks of the "erotic ontology of cyberspace,"(4) he envisions an ecstatic extension of the self, escaping the confinement of physical existence into an infinite realm of pure, Platonic intellect. But cyborgs, already inextricably mingled with the machinery, simply construct new bodies, infinitely malleable with readily interchangeable parts, dismembering, Dionysian, (into whose realm the erotic is more correctly assigned anyway). And in any variety of makeshift, sprawling encampments alongside the highway, they discover other shape-shifters, gaze into other eyes, glowing, opaque and shining phosphor-bright. Consequently, an entire, hybrid generation has redefined the concept of "doing it in the road."
Phone sex, netsex, or "teledildonics," as the various and increasingly widespread practices of virtual sex have rather unappetizingly, generically and inaccurately come in the popular press to be called, enables erotic interaction between individuals whose bodies may never touch, who may never even see each others faces or exchange real names. On one level, the phenomenon could be regarded as the result of technologically mediated alienation, motivated by fear: of AIDS, of strangers, or of the fact that the body is rapidly becoming redundant in an age of progressive denaturation. Certainly remote sexual interaction has come to the fore at the same point in history that various practices that drastically refigure the human body have become popular: bodybuilding, dieting, working out, piercing, tattooing, plastic surgery, all of which can be read as efforts to exert control over the one medium over which individuals feel they still can. On the other hand, demonstrating an adaptability admirably in keeping with the seemingly endless evolutionary permutations of capitalism, human beings have turned the machinery of power into sources of pleasure, countering "the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance."(5)
According to Heim, interaction with computers is erotically charged from the outset:
Our affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to technology.... The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates out eyes and minds, it captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros.(6)
Heim defines Eros as: "a drive to extend our finite being, to prolong something of our physical selves beyond our mortal existence," into a realm of pure knowledge.(7) "Eros inspires humans to outrun the drag of the 'meat,'--the flesh--by attaching human attention to what formally attracts the mind. As Platonists, and Gnostics down through the ages have insisted: Eros guides us to Logos.(8)
In making his argument, Heim makes some assumptions about the coherence of the self and the extensibility of the ego that are drastically out of keeping with contemporary discourse concerning the "decentered subject." His idealized structuring of the ego's erotic thrust, that penetrates mysterious regions is phallocentric, masturbatory, and counter to the actual experience of individuals for whom 'the erotic ontology of cyberspace' is a real experience. In actuality, erotic interaction in cyberspace requires a constant phasing between the virtual and the actual, the simultaneous awareness of the corporeal body at the keyboard, the emoting, speaking self on the screen, and the existence of another individual, real and projected, who is similarly engaged. Far from producing a mind-body split that allows for the projection of an intact ego, self-awareness must be doubled, multiplied, magnified, to an extent that the the "self" is rendered inchoherent, scattered, shattered. In this paper, I would like to suggest that erotic interaction in cyberspace potentially affords an experience of bodies and pleasure that requires a reconceptualization of how we experience our own, embodied subjectivity.
"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism," Haraway writes. "In short, we are cyborgs."(9) The cyborg is no longer "a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality,"(10) but the lived experience of millions of people who spend most of their time working and playing in digital space. This is largely due to the proliferation of the technology that makes the space accessible. In Gibson's novels, the technology from which cyberspace is accessed is available only to an elite: the corporations that buy, sell, and jealously guard information, and the highly skilled "net cowboys," hackers who make a game and an art of stealing it. In reality, the technology with which cyberspace is accessed and constructed is no so widely available that "virtual reality" has come to be neither the remote, parallel universe of Gibson's fiction nor the scary, computer- generated universe of films such as "Lawnmower Man." It has become not so much a place as a condition, an alternate way of relating with the world and with other human beings. Virtual existence has become so immediate that what constitutes "the real" is becoming dramatically refigured.
For Baudrillard, the real in postmodernity has come to be "not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: the hyperreal."(11) Virtual Reality provides a hyperreal environment, entered by projecting one's consciousness into a constructed self.
'Virtual reality' is most often envisioned in popular culture as: systems that offer users visual, auditory and tactile information about an environment which exists as data in a computer system rather than as physical objects and locations. This is the virtual reality depicted in "The Lawnmower Man" and approximated by the 'Virtuality' arcade games marketed by Horizon Entertainment.(12)
The term also describes the technology that was used in the Gulf War and certain systems currently under development by such institutions as the Human Interface Technology Lab. Another type exists, however, which is not dependent upon complex and expensive gadgetry nor prepackaged experience, but is easily accessible and created primarily by its users. Although the various telephone and on-line chatlines, Bulletin Board Systems, newsgroups and any of a number of commercial service providers that have proliferated in the past several years, roughly fall under this type of virtual reality, perhaps the richest, complex and most comprehensively elaborate environment are MUDs: (Multi User Dimensions (or Dungeons)): "networked, multi-participant, user extensible systems which are commonly found on the Internet."(13)
MUDs are text-based virtual worlds, interactive databases from which it is possible to craft highly complex, extremely vivid environments in which the user experiences a feeling of actual presence. By their users, many of whom have been participating for years, MUDS are regarded as communities, imaginary environments that allow for very real emotional and social interactions.(14) The type of interactions depends upon the particular MUD. Some are used primarily for Dungeons and Dragons style gaming, others, such as LambdaMOO and the other satellite MOOs(15) that have sprung up within the past two or three years are reserved for academic research, professional interactions, and experiments in community organization or collective programming. Still others are primarily known for the readily availability of sexual experiences. Of these, FurryMUCK is the oldest, largest and most famous. Furrys, as its residents are called, describe themselves as anthropomorphized animals, and have invented a number of unique sexual practices, such as trans-species B&D, or copulation followed by devouring.
MUDS are unique among other voice-based or text-based environments in that users can move about within a described space, handle and create objects and interact with other players with bodies that they construct. The sense of being embodied in actual space provides the sense of actually being in a place, to such an extent that frequently the senses are engaged, in a complex interchange of experience between a physical and a prosthetic body. Players similarly engage with each other in meaningful, complex, and frequently intense ways, in the absence of the conventions of nuance, gesture and tone that facilitate human interaction:
Despite the absence of the familiar channels of interpersonal meaning, players do not fail to make sense of each other. On the contrary, MUD environments are extremely culturally rich, and communication between MUD players is often highly emotionally charged. Although they cannot see, hear or touch one another, MUD players have developed ways to convey shades of expression that would usually be transmitted through these senses...On MUDs, text replaces gesture, and even becomes gestural itself.(16)
Players create context in two ways: self-presentation, and in modes of speech whose nuances come to be collectively understood. When a player first arrives on a MUD, her first act is usually to describe herself and to choose a gender. Once assumed, both can be changed at will. Players can "morph" (change from one description and/or gender to another) with a single command, or simply rewrite themselves at any time. They look at each other, their environment and the objects around them with another command. Communication with other players is enabled with a few simple keystrokes. Two modes of communications exist: the 'say,' in which a player makes a statement, and the 'emote,' in which she gestures, makes a facial expression or strikes a pose. If Galatea wanted to say something to anyone else in the room, she would type:
say Hello everyone.
Everyone in the room would see:
Galatea says: "Hello everyone."
If Galatea wished to emote rather than say something, she might type:
:grins and waves like a beauty queen.
Everyone in the room would then see:
Galatea grins and waves like a beauty queen.
Emoting allows for a richness and variety of communicative nuances not easily conveyable in other text-based environments. For this reason, sexual engagement takes on a dimension quite different from other virtually mediated encounters such as phone sex, email, or erotic conversation. The lack of physical presence and the infinite malleability of bodies on MUDs complicates sexual interaction in a singular way: because the choice of gender is an option rather than a strictly reified social construct, the entire concept of gender as a primary marker of identity becomes partially subverted. This is not to say that the subversive potential is always actualized. Reflective of the demographics of Net users, most MUD players are young, heterosexual males between the age of nineteen and twenty five. Steven Shaviro, who has spent some time on various MOOs, sees very little inventiveness in the behavior that he has observed:
But let's not get carried away with utopian fantasies. Most straight men are assholes, and the mere opportunity for expanded gender play on the Net doesn't do anything to change that. A successful drag performance is harder to pull off than you think. Straight guys often pretend to be girls on the Net--I've done it often myself-- thinking that the disguise will make it easier to score with 'actual' girls. But what goes around comes around: the girls these guys meet usually turn out to be other guys in virtual disguise. Face it, the information of which most straight men are composed is monotonously self-referential: it just turns round and round forever in the selfsame loop.(17)"
What actually occurs, however, is not necessarily that simple. If in fact the primary motivation for straight men on the net is to pass as female is to meet girls, then the girls attracted to another woman's attention are likely to be lesbians. If the girls are actually other boys, than what occurs is not a heterosexual experience at all, but either an enactment of a lesbian experience or two boys making love while one or both are assuming female bodies.
The seriousness with which sexual interaction is engaged varies as much on the Net as in "real life." Some are cruising, looking for adventure and novel sensation, others for emotional bonding. Some, especially new arrivals, find themselves getting caught up in emotional intensities that they had not anticipated.
Weaver, a psychology professor, saw netsex as a way to explore aspects of her sexuality that had gone unexplored in actuality: sex with men, and playing out S/M fantasies in a milieu she regarded as somewhat safer. Her first experience became traumatic, as the boy with whom she was playing began to play far more roughly than she had intended, and she found herself far more emotionally and psychically involved in the scene than she had anticipated. She fled abruptly, highly distraught, but remained connected. A woman who had also been involved in the scene became concerned, paged her (paging is a means of players who are not in the same room to communicate with each other), and offered to send a girlfriend of hers, another lesbian, over to calm Weaver.
The "girlfriend" was extremely gentle, very understanding, and Weaver became intimately involved with her. Their involvement included S/M roleplaying, in which Weaver felt more safely engaged with another woman. The woman's confession after several weeks of intense play that she was in fact male in real life, shocked and angered Weaver, who felt duped, betrayed, and multiply set up. His rationale for passing as lesbian was, apparently, to "help women," and keep them safe from men who might hurt them.(18)
What his actual intentions were is impossible to determine. Possibly a group of boys playing at the various roles the freedom of the Net allowed them found themselves caught up in the human emotions they never imagined could come into play in faceless, pseudonymous space. Weaver's story is by no means, however, the only incident of genuine emotional pain incurred in what newcomers naively believe to be an environment in which roleplaying becomes divorced from emotional reality.
The fact that such masquerades can go undetected comes as a surprise to many, both on and off the Net, who assume that fixed gendered behaviors exist and are readily detectable. Experience in VR indicates that this is not necessarily the case. Weaver explains in terms of Cognitive Psychology how it is entirely possible for otherwise highly intelligent individuals to be so deceived by what seems on the surface to be a readily detectable fact :
Think of a farmer... got the picture?...In your head.. of a farmer? Can you see the farmer?[I respond that I get an Image of Mr. Green Jeans.]
Good. that's a schema. I say a word.. you see a whole set of things that go with it. Things that fit: overalls, flannel, tractor...
Ok.. so... I'm a woman. you have a vague image.. very vague. But certain things fit within the limits....When I do something that confirms your impression...you suck it up without even thinking because...because schemas are our brain's way of being efficient. You only have to learn farmer once or twice. then you can just call it up. and you can add new stuff to it to expand. Like a guy in a broad straw hat bending over in a rice paddy, a woman in dry soil with a kid strapped on her back in africa. But... mostly you call up greenjeans....
So... our brains are trying to conserve tasks.. can only handle so much at once. So we construct and call upon schemas for a great deal of stuff. one of our schemas is gender. We Know what women are like. We're willing to be a little flexible but we don't re-invent our social construction of women every time we see one.. we use our defaults and go from there. So when a character is 'female' we bring the schema to bear on our impression of her. that's one concept. the other is about another cognitive process...
Ok.. so the other part.. why we aren't so good at seeing the [gender]bending: two reasons.. one: there really aren't very many consistent differences in the behaviors of men/women. Not really. long story that i could explain with data but the differences are much much more situationally dependent than they are particular to a gender....Just because there is a significant statistical difference between men and women's behaviors doesn't mean that we can use that info to predict their behavior.(19)
A surprising number of men masquerade as women in order to seduce other men. Their motivations vary: some try it on a dare, as a peculiarly '90s form of macho bravado, perhaps simply to see if they can succeed, to be better women than women. Others are motivated by a sense of self-exploration, to see what it feels like to experience from the point of view of a woman. Also, it is not uncommon for gay men to pretend to be women on the net in order to seduce other men. It can easily be argued that the free experimentation with gender roles allowable in VR is nothing more than the reification of the normative processes by which gender is produced in the first place, and to a certain extent this claim is true. In order to enact 'female' and hope to attract partners, one must not only assume the pronouns, but craft a description that falls within the realm of what is considered attractive, and most people do not stretch their imaginations much beyond the usual categorizations: voluptuous breasts, slim waists, flowing hair, etc proliferate as quickly in VR as in any Barbie Doll factory. For some, however, the enactment of the Other thoroughly complicates conceptualization of the Self. One female player, who in real life is male, identifies as straight and who has never had a male lover in reality, has found netsex with another person playing male to be intensely transformative. She explains that for her, being female "has something to do with wanting to inhabit something--elan, humor, emotional presence, communication, words--that I felt so utterly close to but just had no male model for."(20) In another conversation, she expresses the kind of intensity that is possible to achieve while occupying another gender:
When you're getting fucked by a man there's this amazing thing...you realize you're being given all this energy and power...it courses through you and you can channel it, throw it back, turn up the voltage, make it explode, shoot it out your fingertips...Or just surf it like a wave...only it's both inside and outside you, dissolving...God only knows what weird stuff I'm saying about femaleness and...[maleness] and myself and who knows what, but I feel it...strongly....(21)
Besides all the permutations and combinations possible to enact with female and male, some MUDs offer alternative gender choices. The Spivak gender available on LambdaMOO, with its unique pronouns(22) (e, em, eir, eirs, eirself), has proven for some individuals to subvert the customary strictures of biology as well as gender-based normativity. Because the pronouns assigned to em efface gender distinctions, a Spivak can have any morphological form and genital structure e devises for emself. Twine, who identifies as lesbian in real life, or more precisely in her terms: "lesbian seems to be what I'm doing," describes her experience of a Spivak body with an imaginative richness and sensuality that pale the erotic potential offered by simplistic enactments of female or maleness:
For me, spivak is able to transform very quickly...well maybe gradually...say, grow a penis in a few minutes...? And two spivaks means that one could shape the other, as well...if the other allows the suggestions....and for me there's also these little extentions...like very fine root hairs on a tree root...anyway...these little hairs form lots and lots of connections....They are very sensitive...and as lovemaking progresses...they stroke, penetrate, and even fuse. Also, spivak sex, for me, involved musical tones from deep inside the chest, much like cat's purring...and little chiming sounds from those tentacles.(23)
If boys can be girls and straights can be queers and dykes can be fags and two lesbian lovers can turn out to both be men in real life, then 'straight,' or 'queer,' 'male' or 'female' become problematized as markers of identity. While gender as a social construct remains largely unchallenged despite the flexibilty of roles allowable in VR, the concept of gender as a fixed marker of identity loses some of its coherence, simultaneously repeats and displaces, "through hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which [gender constructs] are mobilized."(24) Gender becomes a verb, not a noun, a position to occupy rather than a fixed role, and in many cases, the effect that one individual can have upon another.
The convention of netsex involves a mutual exchange in which someone emotes actions in the third person that she is performing upon her partner, who is addressed in the second person. This convention makes apparent that all virtual interaction is partly highly self-conscious role-play. This is not to say that the roles enacted are in any way necessarily false, or regarded as separate from the person doing the acting. As is true of drama, of ritual, of liturgy and of certain sexual practices, the role can be enacted with such focus and intensity of purpose that the "I" becomes meaningless, standing outside the self, in a state of ekstasis, quite literally a being put out of its place, enraptured: seized by force, bursting, smitten.(25) The sense of seizure, of scattering, of loss of self is often described in terms of violence and a kind of pain.
In The Ego and the Id, Freud states that "pain seems to play a part in the process...by which in general we arrive at the idea of our own body....The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface."(26) Moreover, according to Freud, the giving or receiving of pain is inextricably linked to erotogenicity.(27) Commenting upon this, Leo Bersani observes that for Freud, the "most anguishing problem...is to account for a type of desire that, unlike the desire principally identified with genitality, does not seek its own extinction in 'satisfaction.'(28) He continues:
Not only that; the pleasurable-unpleasurable tension of sexuality--the pain of a self-shattering excitement--aims at being maintained, replicated, and even increased. The human subject is originally shattered, into sexuality....At least in the mode in which it is constituted, sexuality may be a tautology for masochism.(29)
It is a Lacanian truism that desire arises and perpetuates itself in lack, and on the surface, netsex appears to provide a very literal example. The absence of physical bodies requires the individuals involved to mutually imagine, construct and pleasure each other by means of textual exchange. The meeting of actual, physical bodies, constantly referred to in the course of the exchange is also constantly deferred. The construction is similar to the elaborate conventions that produced the highly erotic, but usually strictly textual conventions of Courtly Love.
Within these conventions, the lover creates love scenes bewteen himself and his beloved that take on an intensity and a reality of their own quite apart from the meeting of actual bodies. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari might say that virtual lovers make for themselves and each other "bodies without organs."
The body without organs necessarily lacks the phallus. During netsex, this uniquely privileged signifier, emblematic of male dominance and of asymmetric power relations becomes a toy, a strap-on, available to anyone who cares to construct one for herself. "The Lesbian Phallus," Judith Butler's ironic oxymoron, becomes just one of a set of tools whose availability is limited only by the imagination. Furthermore, the displacement of the phallus as the central organizing principle of power relations has the potential effect of destabilizing the kind of self- reinforcing logic from which phallogocentrism constructs itself. To cast Butler's argument into another context entirely, when the phallus becomes a "transferable or plastic property," as Lacanian logic has it and netsex accomodates, "the distinction between being and having the phallus," from which distinction according to Lacan gender polarity is inevitably maintained, is destabilized.
Displacing the phallus as the marker of privileged masculinity, however, is not the same as disrupting the Word as the central organizing principal around which experience is made coherent, especially within a medium in which one's very existence is a linguistic construction. When the Word is separate from the body, then difference is maintained, and the subject remains forever split, maintained like a fly in amber within the symbolic order. In order to exist in VR, in order to maintain the intensity of erotic pleasure, the individual must maintain eir powers of language.
If the speaking and experiencing, embodied self are necessarily split by the requirement of being in language enforced by the medium, than perhaps the split can be experienced neither as loss or lack, but maybe as pure jouissance, the delirious, lacerating edge between the apprehension of language and the implicit, imminent death of language (of the speaking I) that Roland Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text.(30) Paradoxically, the more intensely that individuals experienced in netsex feel pleasure, the better able they are to evoke bodily intensities in words, leaping onto the gap between utterance and experience, simultaneously enacting the rush of bodily sensation and the writer's ecstasy at producing text, being-in-text and being-in-body. Netsex is unique amongst sexual practices in that it is merges the pleasures of the text with the pleasures of bodies, a literal enactment of jouissance.
Becoming habituated to embodiment as performance, being required to constantly verbalize bodily experience and emotion is not entirely unproblematic. An enormous range of sensory and emotive means of experiencing exist which are simply not expressible in language. Nevertheless, sex, love, pleasure in any form may well afford some measure of resistance against social and technological forces that would divide us from lived experience. Eroticizing our machines might not mean giving up the ghost, but rather giving in to the pleasures of corporeality that simultaneously exists within and outside the physical and the organic. And even if netsex isn't as subversive as ordering a dozen anchovies from Domino's for Newt Gingrich, it's at least as fun.