Identity and the Cyborg Body
This is Chapter Three of Elizabeth Reid's thesis Cultural Formations
in Text-Based Virtual Realities (Cultural Studies Program, Department of
English, University of Melbourne, January 1994): 75-95. Another version appears
as "Text-Based Virtual Realities: Identity and the Cyborg Body" in Conceptual
Issues on the Electronic Frontier, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming). This version
appears here with the permission of the author.
MUD systems, with all the factors of anonymity, distance and flexibility
brought into play, allow people to say what they want. That freedom is not
always exercised to the approval of other players, and social systems which
maintain cohesion amongst members of a MUD community have arisen. But the nature
of what people do on MUDs does not provide a complete explanation of such
systems--the nature of the people is just as important. A player of a MUD system
is not a transparent medium, providing nothing but a link between external and
internal cultural patterns, between actual and virtual realities. The player is
the most problematic of all virtual entities, for his or her virtual
manifestation has no constant identity. MUD characters need not be of any fixed
gender or appearance, but may evolve, mutate, morph, over time and at the whim
of their creator. All of these phenomena place gender, sexuality, identity and
corporeality beyond the plane of certainty. They become not merely problematic
but unresolvable. If anonymity on MUDs allows people to do and say whatever they
wish, it also allows them to be whatever they wish. It is not only the MUD
environment that is a virtual variable--the virtual manifestation of each player
is similarly alterable, open to change and re-interpretation. The player does
not constitute a fixed reference point in the MUD universe. Players do not enter
into the system and remain unchanged by it. Players do not, in essence, `enter'
the virtual landscape--they are manifested within it by their own imaginative
effort.
In everyday life, our efforts at self-presentation usually
assume that we cannot change the basics of our appearance. Physical
characteristics, although open to cosmetic or fashionable manipulation, are
basically unalterable. What we look like, we have to live with, and this fixity
underpins our social institutions. Social structures based on bias toward or
prejudice against differing portions of humanity depend on the ease with which
we can assess each other's bodies, and ascribe identities to physical form.
Male, female, white, black, young, old, poor and affluent are all terms that
resonate through our culture, and each depends in part on the fixity of physical
form, and our ability to affix meaning to that form. These kinds of assumptions
go beyond the level of non-verbal communication--they make up not the outward
form of our culture but the substructure of it. Just as we notice--if such an
almost subconscious perception can be called `noticing'--the gender of our
interlocutors before we notice their facial expressions, the symbolism of the
body underpins and shapes our culture. On MUDs, however, the body is not an
immutable property. How one MUD player `looks' to another player is entirely
dependant upon information that they choose to give. The boundaries delineated
by cultural constructions of the body are both subverted and given free rein in
virtual environments. With the body freed from the physical, it completely
enters the realm of symbol. It becomes an entity of pure meaning, but is
simultaneously meaningless, stripped of any fixed referent.
The MUD
system does not dictate to players the form of their virtual persona. The
process of character creation is at all times in the hands, or imaginations, of
the player, although different systems may make the process less or more
complex.[1]
Players may manifest themselves in any way they please, unbounded by the
physical measures that limit our self-presentation in actual life. MUD
characters are much more than a few bytes of computer data--they are cyborgs, a
manifestation of the self beyond the realms of the physical, existing in a space
where identity is self-defined rather than pre-ordained. The consequences of
this for the sub-cultures that form on MUDs are enormous. They begin with a
challenge to the ties between body and self, and lead to subversions of the
categories of gender and sexuality which are so dominant in the actual world.
Self-Made People
MUD players create their own virtual
personas, their own characters. They create, initially, a name. Their first
contact with the MUD program is to direct it to create a database entry which
will serve as their window into the virtual universe, the informational node to
which they will connect in order to experience the virtual reality contained in
a MUD system. Players rarely choose to give their real name to their virtual
persona. Most choose to manifest themselves under a name that forms the central
focus of what becomes a virtual disguise. These names can be almost anything
that the player chooses to make them. They can be conventional names such as
Chris, Jane or Smith. In many cases, the names have clearly been borrowed from
characters from books, films or television shows--Gandalf, AgentCooper and
PrincessLeia. Other names, such as Love, funky, Moonlight and blip, reflect
ideas, symbols and emotions, while many more, such as FurryMUCK's felinoid
Veronicat and LambdaMOO's yudJ, involve plays upon language and conventional
naming systems.[2]
The name a player chooses is the beginning point of his or her virtual self. On
top of that name, the player builds a virtual body, endowing the new-born and
newly-christened database entry with characteristics that mimic actuality.
Players attach textual descriptions to those entries, clothing and defining the
would-be physical form of their character, giving them possessions, and
attaching to them symbols of those aspects of identity to which we give great
importance in actual life--characters are gendered, sexed, identified.
The subversion of the body begins in small ways on MUDs. At the
least end of the virtual surgery that players may perform upon themselves lies
the cosmetic. It is possible to by-pass the boundaries delineated by cultural
constructs of beauty, ugliness and fashion. Players can appear to be as they
would wish. Such changes that a player might make to his or her perceived
identity can be small, a matter of realising in others' minds a desire to be
attractive, impressive and popular:
Lirra is a short young woman with long blonde hair, an impish grin
and a curvaceous figure. Her clear blue eyes sparkle as she looks back at you.
She is wearing a short red skirt, a white t-shirt, black fishnet stockings,
and black leather boots and jacket.
Lirra whispers, "my desc is pretty
real, but I'm a bit plumper than that" to you.
Lirra whispers, "and
maybe i don't always wear such sexy clothes ;)" to you.[3]
Such
manifestations remain within the realm of the bodily constructs with which we
are familiar in actual life. They may enable the player to side-step the normal
requirements of entry into glamour, but they do not subvert the concept. Rather,
such descriptions call upon our pre-conceived notions about the human appearance
to sustain their power. They do not free players from the shackles of the beauty
myth, but they allow them to redefine themselves in accordance with that
myth.
Beyond the bounds of beauty, other players shape their virtual
selves to emulate the signs of influence and affluence which we pay heed to in
our actual lives. Such characters are usually beautiful, but their beauty is at
most a setting, the background for social status rather than the reason for it:
Darklighter
A lean Man standing a metre 73, weighing about 70
kilos. His hair is golden brown with hints of red, the frame his angelic face.
Deep set are two emerald eyes that peer back at you. His vestiage is all in
black with a cloak concealing him. You see on his right hand an emerald
colored ring of peculiar origin. You realize that it is that of a Green
Lantern. You can tell he is the sort of man who can see the strings that bind
the universe together and mend them when they break.[4]
At
the core of such characters is their possession of influential and even
superhuman attributes. Curtis describes this phenomenon in player description as
simply being a case of wish-fulfilment--"I cannot count," he says, "the number
of `mysterious but unmistakably powerful' figures I have seen wandering
LambdaMOO."[5]
In many cases this may be true--certainly the majority of people in everyday
life are neither as extraordinary nor as powerful as many MUD characters present
themselves to be. However, it must be remembered that their personal description
is the only method open to players to substitute for what, in everyday life,
would be a complex mixture of non-verbal social context cues such as accent,
dress and race. If many descriptions show exaggerated, even fantastical,
attempts to indicate social acceptability, it is at least in part a reflection
of the degree to which players feel it necessary to compensate for the lack of
non-textual communication channels. Without reference to the senses on which we
normally rely to provide information, such socio-emotional cues must be made
explicit in textual descriptions. The social information usually spread out over
several different sensual channels is concentrated into one channel and
therefore exaggerated.
Whatever the reasons for such cases of virtual
cosmetic surgery, be they dramaturgical or egoistical, their effect upon the MUD
universe is to free it from conventions of power that rely on physical
manifestation. When everyone can be beautiful, there can be no hierarchy of
beauty. This freedom, however, is not necessarily one that undermines the power
of such conventions. Indeed, such freedom to be beautiful tends to support these
conventions by making beauty not unimportant but a pre-requisite. The convention
becomes conventional--MUD worlds are free from the stigma of ugliness not
because appearance ceases to matter but because no one need be seen to be ugly.
The cosmetic nature of virtual worlds is, however, the least of their ability to
operate upon our physically-centred prejudices. In the realms of gender and
sexuality, MUD systems go beyond the escapist and become creative.
Ungrounding Gender
Of the cultural factors that are most important in
encounters in Western society--typified by the big three of gender, race and
class--all may be `hard-coded' into MUD programs. Race and class are generally
the least problematised of these three, and their representations offer a link
between the cosmetic and the radical ends of cultural surgery. Race and class on
MUDs are generally the concern of systems that are adventure-oriented, and the
choices available are likely to be within the realms of fantasy. Choices of race
are more likely to be between Dwarvish, Elvish and Klingon than between Asian,
Black and Caucasian; choices of class are more likely to be between Warrior,
Magician and Thief than between white or blue-collar. This essential racial and
class blindness is very likely the effect of the pre-selection criteria which
the actual world places on those who would have access to the Internet. MUD
players are necessarily people who have access to the Internet computer network.
They are most likely to live in the industrialised and largely English-speaking
countries that form the greater part of the Internet. They are also most likely
to be either employed by an organisation with an interest in computing, or be
attending an educational institution. People who fit these requirements are
overwhelmingly likely to be affluent and white.[6]
Uniformity decreases visibility, and thus for a large percentage of players,
race and class are taken as a given and so seem to be invisible.
Gender,
however, is brought very much to the fore on MUDs. All MUDs allow--and some
insist--that players set their `gender flag', a technical property of MUD
characters that controls which set of pronouns are used by the MUD program in
referring to the character. Most MUDs allow only three choices--male, female and
neuter--which decide between the families of pronouns containing him, her or it.
A few MUDs demand that a player select either male or female as their gender,
and do not allow a player with an unset gender flag to enter the MUD. Other MUDs
allow many genders--male, female, plural, neuter, hermaphrodite, and several
unearthly genders lifted from the pages of science fiction novels. It is
obviously easy for players to choose to play a character with a gender different
from their own. At least, it is technically easy, but not necessarily socially
easy since there is a lively controversy surrounding the issue of cross-gendered
playing. The subject is one that regularly recurs on the Usenet newsgroups
relating to MUDs. Indeed, the times when the topic is not being debated are far
outnumbered by the times when it is--it is a subject that evokes strong feelings
from a very large number of MUD players.
Almost without exception such
debates begin with the instance, either actual or hypothetical, of a male player
controlling a female character. It is very rare for the reverse situation, that
of a woman playing a man, to be brought up, at least in the first instance. This
one-sidedness runs in parallel to a common claim that male-to-female
cross-gendering is far more common than the reverse, a claim that rests in part
on the notion, common lore amongst MUD players, that most of their number are in
fact male. This may well be so. The cultural pre-selection process which ensures
that most MUD players are white and affluent is also in operation in defining
the sex of the average player. Although the gap is slowly closing, most people
employed as computer programmers and computer engineers are male, and most of
the students likely to have access to the Internet (those studying Computer
Science, or Software Engineering) are also male. It is therefore quite likely
that the folklore on the subject is correct, and that the majority of MUD
players are male.[7]
Since female and male presenting characters are about equally common, it follows
that some of those female characters are controlled by male players.
Whether or not most players are male, the one-sidedness in the
cross-gender debate is strongly related to players' perception of women as being
the minority of their number, and to notions of gender-specific behaviour found
in the external culture. Female-presenting players are treated very differently
to male-presenting players. They are often subjected to virtual forms of those
two hoary sides of a male-dominated society--harassment and chivalry. The latter
can give female characters an advantage in the game world. Players newly
connecting to a MUD system will inevitably require help in navigating the
virtual terrain, and in learning the commands particular to that system. Players
who present themselves as female are more likely than their male counterparts to
find help easily, or to be offered it spontaneously. On adventure-oriented
systems, in which the goodwill of other players can mean the life or death of a
character, female-presenting characters are likely to be offered help in the
form of money and other objects helpful for survival. This special treatment is
not always, however, meted out in a spirit of pure altruism. Players offering
help, expensive swords and amulets of protection generally want something in
return. At the least, they might expect to be offered friendship; sometimes they
may expect less platonic favours to be showered upon them.
Sex is, of
course, at the root of this special treatment. As well as being white and male,
the average MUD player might be likely to be young, since the Internet primarily
serves educational institutions and thus students who are generally in their
late teens or early twenties.[8]
Such young people might well be expected to engage in romantic and sexual
exploration, and the anonymous virtual environment allows this kind of
exploration a safety that could only make it all the more attractive a site for
it. It is hardly unusual for young people to utilise social situations to form
relationships with members of the appropriate sex; since MUD systems provide a
social environment it is not surprising that they are sometimes used in such
ways, and successful liaisons can be intensely felt and emotionally fulfilling.
Romantic attentions are not, however, always welcome or appropriate. In cases
where they are not, the attention paid to female-presenting characters can fall
into the realms of sexual harassment. As I have described, aggression can as
easily be played out on MUDs as can affection. The sexual harassment of female
characters is not uncommon, and is often closely tied to what may begin as a
chivalrous offer of help, as this adventure MUD player describes:
I played a couple of muds as a female, one making up to wizard
level. Other players start showering you with money to help you get started,
and I had never once gotten a handout when playing a male player. And then
they feel they should be allowed to tag along forever, and feel hurt when you
leave them to go off and explore by yourself. Then when you give them the knee
after they grope you, they wonder what your problem is, reciting that famous
saying "What's your problem? It's only a game".[9]
For others the cry of "it's only a game" is itself justification
for permitting cross-gendered playing:
I just paged through about 15 articles on this cross-gender topic.
GEEZ guys get a life. Who cares if someone playes a female or male character
and who cares what sex they are in real life! This is a game, and if someone
enjoys playing the opposite sex, so what.[10]
However, and despite claims such as this one, for most players
gender is of great moment, far more so than the imagined race or profession of
the player. The simple fact is that no player presenting him or herself as a
Dwarvish warrior-mage is likely to be one in actual life, but a female or
male-presenting character could be controlled by a player of that sex. There is
no cause for branding role-playing a Dwarf as deception when a reasonable person
could not truly be deceived; it is only where virtual existence holds close
parallels to actual life that the possibility and accusations of deception enter
the equation. The ethics of this kind of `deception' are subject to debate
amongst MUD players. Opinion is sharply divided. Some players feel that
cross-gendering, particularly in the case of male players controlling female
characters, is a despicable and even perverted practice:
Well, I think it *is* sick for guys to play female characters.
Most only do it to fool some poor guy into thinking he's found the lady of his
dreams, and then turn around and say "Ha! Ha! I'm really male!" Real mature. I
think if you get off on pretending to be female you should go and dress up and
go to some club in San Fran where they like perverts--just don't go around
deceiving people on muds.[11]
There
are three issues which those who oppose cross-gendering are concerned about.
Firstly, they feel that it is `cheating' for a male player to take advantage of
the favouritism and chivalry that is commonly showered upon female-presenting
players in order to get special privileges in the game. Secondly, many feel that
such impersonations are, by virtue of being `lies', unethical. Lastly, many
players obviously feel very uncomfortable and at a disadvantage in interacting
with others whose gender is unclear, and feel even more discomforted on
discovering that they have been interacting under false assumptions.
For
some, this is where cyberspace ceases to be a comfortable place. We are so used
to being provided with information about each other's sex that the lack of it
can leave many players feeling set adrift. Gender roles are so ingrained in our
culture that for many people they are a necessity, and acting without reference
to them seems impossible. Many people are simply unable to negotiate social
encounters without needing to fix, at least in assumption, the genders of their
interlocutors. It is indeed a truly disorienting experience the first time one
finds oneself being treated as a member of the opposite sex. My own forays into
the realm of virtual masculinity were at first frightening experiences. Much as
some of us may deplore what we see as the negative sides of our culture's sexual
politics, we are brought up to align ourselves with gender-specific social
navigation mechanisms. Once deprived of the social tools which I, as female, was
used to deploying and relying on, I felt rudderless, unable to negotiate the
most simple of social interactions. I did not know how to speak, whether to
women or to `other' men, and I was thrown off balance by the ways in which other
people spoke to me. It took much practice to learn to navigate these unfamiliar
channels, an experience that gave me a greater understanding of the mechanics of
sexual politics than any other I have ever had.
For some players it is
precisely this chance to swim unfamiliar seas that attracts them to
cross-gendered playing. If it had not been for my intellectual interest I would
probably not have persevered with my attempts as male self-presentation since it
was often stressful and bewildering. Others, perhaps more adventurous and less
self-conscious than I, claim this as the most rewarding aspect of virtual
existence. The chance to see how the other half lives is enjoyed by many as
liberating and enlightening, as is the opportunity to take a holiday from the
confines of one's actual gender. The demands of masculinity, or femininity, can
be daunting to those not brought up to them, and even those who are can
appreciate the chance to side-step them:
Melina says, "What I really liked about having a female character
was that I didn't have to do all the masculine bullshit--all the
penis-waving."
Melina giggles. "Penis-waving... I love that
phrase..."
Melina says, "I could just chat with people! It was great!
No having to compete, no *pressures*, no feeling like I'd be made fun of for
talking about my feelings."[12]
The
ability to adopt and adapt to the erosion of gender requires a great deal of
cultural and psychological flexibility. At its best it might help those who can
play this game to understand the problems experienced by actual members of the
opposite sex. Men who have experienced first hand the kinds of sexual harassment
that for women has often been, as Gloria Steinem described it on a televised
interview, "just part of life", may be less likely to perpetuate the social
structures that enable such harassment. At the same time, such virtual fluidity
acts to erode the places from which many of us speak. What, for instance, will
it mean for feminist politics that in cyberspace men can not only claim to speak
for women, but can speak as women, with no one able to tell the
difference? The subversion of gender is not always a happy or enlightening
experience. The problematising of identity, and of the speaking positions which
are so crucial to our politics aside, many cross-gendered players experience the
opposite of liberation--they are caught in a backlash against it:
There are also those who think it is an abomination to be playing
a character of a different gender... and if it becomes known that a female
character is actually being played by a guy, some of these guys will hunt down
and kill the female character repeatedly for the "crime" of being a
genderbender.[13]
The
tools utilised by MUD players to enforce and maintain social structures and
social coherence can be used to support any number of different ethical and
moral systems. If methods of enforcing such systems can be called into effect in
an effort to shore up the virtual holes in players' perceptions of traditional
gender roles, they can also be used to enforce a different kind of `political
correctness':
I am female. I choose to play female chars on muds. And people do
harrass you. Its not just casual convo or compliment. I stopped playing muds
where playerkilling is not legal. People tend to value there characters. If
they really start harrassing you, you, or some other high level, killing them
a few times tends to stop it short. On the muds i play im happy to kill people
for harrassement [...] But i went on a few no pk muds recently and it was
costant harrassment. I was getting tells like "How big are your tits" or "You
want to mudfuck" which is reallly annoying. So to the females who have
problems, head to the player killing muds where you can avenge yourself...[14]
The
structure of MUD programs destroys the usually all but insurmountable confines
of sex. Gender is self-selected. This freedom opens up a wealth of
possibilities, for gender is one of the more `sacred' institutions in our
society, a quality whose fixity is so assumed that enacted or surgical
reassignment has and does involve complex rituals, taboos, procedures and
stigmas. This fixity, and the common equation of gender with sex, becomes
problematic when gender reassignment can be effected by a few touches at a
keyboard. MUDs become the arena for experimentation with gender specific social
roles, and debate over the ethics of such experimentation. The flexibility of
self-presentation provided by MUDs makes it possible for players to experiment
with aspects of behaviour and identity that it would not normally be possible to
play with. Players are able to create a virtual self outside the normally
assumed boundaries of gender, race, class and age. The possibility of such
experimentation governs the expectations of all players of MUDs. Some find the
lack of fixity intimidating; others show a willingness to accept this
phenomenon, and to join in the games that can be played within it. Whether an
individual player enjoys the situations that come of this potential, or is
resentful and wary of them, exploitation of it is an accepted part of the MUD
environment. Most players seem to be aware, and some have learnt through bitter
experience, that not all characters reflect the identity of the player. MUDs
challenge and obscure the boundaries between some of our most deeply felt
cultural significances, and force the creation of new cultural expectations to
accommodate this.
MUDs both erode gender and bring it to the fore. In
the instant that a player assigns a sex to his or her character, that split has
been recognised. The need for conscious assignment makes gender meaningless as a
reference point in some claimed reality, but it also marks it as a vital
cultural referent. On MUDs sex and gender are subverted by the whims of
imagination. The attributes and social options society allocates each gender
offer both negative and positive experiences. The chance to experience life on
the other side of what is usually an all but insurmountable divide can make the
MUD world into a stage for inventive and subversive cultural games. At their
most liberal, systems where this playful subversion is an accepted by-product of
virtual existence can be dynamic and challenging places.
Nevertheless,
as Stone has also noted, the gender-specific roles that our culture prescribes
have not been changed by this virtual freedom from the shackles of gender, but
the rules delineating who may use which social mode have been clouded. The
appropriation of the other is an accepted, though not always liked, feature of
the virtual terrain. The virtual colonisation of the body of the other in the
often culturally uncharted waters of the cyberspatial frontier, to offer a mix
of landscapes and similes only possible in virtual reality, is commonplace.
Gender is divorced from the body, and given a purely social significance. The
man who can behave as a woman, and the woman who can behave as a man, are
virtually accepted as legitimately owning such presented identities. The cyborg
entity, to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, walks wary though the virtual landscape,
sceptical of the `real world' significance of what is culturally signposted, yet
politic, amenable to the games played within that space. The gendered subject is
separated from the sexed body, if not finally divorced from it. MUDs do not
grant a decree nisi to the gender roles that permeate our social
existence, but they do offer equal opportunity casting.
Cyborg Sexuality
Stone tells us that, in describing the act of
computer-mediated communication, people she had interviewed would "move their
hands expressively as though typing, emphasising the gestural quality and
essential tactility of the virtual mode."[15]
Communication through the fingertips rather than through sound, a necessarily
tactile connection, a social touch, albeit one distanced by computer cable, is
the breed of sociality expressed on MUDs. The pose command and the feelings
commands are the most richly used of all those communicative tools available on
MUD systems. This obsession with the physical in a non-physical environment is
hardly contradictory--a consensual hallucination is, after all, in part a
sensual hallucination. Spanning the senses as well as the imaginations of the
participants, MUDs are as grimily sensual as their name suggests, and can be a
stage for sexual expression.
FurryMUCK is one of the most popular social
MUDs on the Internet, and one that has a reputation for being rampant with
sexual activity. I cannot say whether this is deserved or not--MUDsex seems to
happen on all systems, and it is impossible for me to say whether it is more or
less common on FurryMUCK. However, questions of social and sexual identity, and
of the unfixed and unfixable nature of the cyborg body, are prominent on
FurryMUCK. The very theme of the MUD draws these questions to the fore, for
every character on Furry is inhuman, and most are anthropomorphised animals clad
only in virtual fur. Cats and bears are legion, most of them sleek-furred and
svelte or broad and brawny. The nature and culture of the body is the primary
theme of FurryMUCK, and the ideal is animalistic allure. Sexuality is a vital
aspect of this kind of cyborg body, and most character descriptions reflect
this. There are few `mysterious but powerful' mage-warriors on FurryMUCK, but
many flashes of velvet-pelted thighs, glints of slitted pupils and touches of
sharp-taloned paws.
`Touches' is indeed the operative word. FurryMUCK is
by far the most `physical' of the MUDs I have encountered. There is much
back-scratching, fur-patting, hugging and kissing between Furries, that being
the name by which they are both called and self-identified. This virtual
touching is rarely overtly sexual when performed in the more public areas of the
FurryMUCK world. It is always affectionate, and indeed FurryMUCK is one of the
most friendly MUDs I have used. Nevertheless, beneath the affectionate snugging
and purring is a strong undercurrent of revelry in the decidedly beautiful and
sensual nature of Furry bodies. If one looks for them, areas where semi-public
sexual play is common are not hard to find. The FurryMUCK hot-tubs are both
popular and well sign-posted with warnings about the nature of the behaviour
both allowed and to be expected inside them. The Truth or Dare games played in
their own specially designed and, again, signposted, areas are a deliberate
invitation for sexual expression. Just as the games of Truth or Dare played by
actual humans, as many adolescent memories will attest, nearly always concern
themselves with questions about desires and dares to act on them, so do the
games played by Furries.
The mechanics of sexual activity on MUDs are
very simple. It is a form of co-authored interactive erotica. The players
involved in a particular virtual sexual act type out their actions and
utterances:
Arista continues to nip little kisses back down your
neck.
Pete mmmms, his hands stroking a little at your
sides.
Arista presses her body to yours, rubbing herself like a cat
over you.
Pete groans softly, laying back on the long seat, writhing
softly under you.
Arista moves her mouth down over your chest
slowly.
Arista plants open mouth kisses over your left nipple as she
flicks her tongue over it gently.
Pete's body arches up towards your
mouth, softly.[16]
From
all accounts MUDsex can be a lot of fun for the participants, and many a crude
reference has been made in the MUD-related newsgroups as to the manner in which
it improves a player's ability to type one-handed. Beyond its mechanics
MUDsex--or tinysex as it is often called, in erroneous implication that most of
it occurs on social-style MUDs--is not at all simple. MUDsex falls into a realm
between the actual and the virtual. Players can become emotionally involved in
the virtual actions of their characters, and the line between virtual actions
and actual desires can become blurred.
Virtual sex is the least and the
most expressive of virtual interactions. In its descriptions of purely would-be
physical interaction, it is the least overtly cultural of interactions. It draws
most heavily on external cultural factors in its dramaturgical nature, and it is
without doubt among the most dramatically affective of virtual happenings. Real
desire and arousal are evoked between participants, a reaction hugely dependant
upon each person's external cultural experience. As Stone describes the
relationship between phone sex workers and clients, the speaker--or
typist--textually codes for gesture, appearance, or proclivity, and expresses
these as tokens, sometimes in no more than a smiley, and the listener, or
reader, uncompresses the tokens and constructs a dense, complex interactive
image.[17]
In these interactions, Stone continues, "desire appears as a product of the
interaction between embodied reality and the emptiness of the token."[18]
That emptiness is filled with the cultural and personal expectations of the
virtual lovers--good cybersex consists of the empathetic understanding of and
response to the cultural symbols represented by a partner's symbolic tokens.
Such descriptors are loaded with assumptions and meanings; that they can be
transmitted along with the text is a tribute not only to the linguistic skill of
the interlocutors but to the facility of the virtual medium for such dramatic
and intimate play. The human body is represented through narrow bandwidth
communication in all its culturally laden fleshiness through the coding of
cultural expectations as linguistic tokens of meaning. Desire is no longer
grounded in physicality in cyberspace, in triumphant confirmation of the thesis
that the most important human erogenous zone is the mind. MUD sex may never
replace actual sex, but it does provide some erotic satisfaction to those who
participate in it.
"Textuality as striptease" is no longer just a jibe
directed by the script writers of the BBC production Small World at a
particular breed of American postmodern cultural critics.[19]
The textual nature of MUDs strips the confines of a particular body from
players, and allows them the freedom to play with, in and through any body they
desire. Cyborg bodies are not, as Stone claims, "preorgasmic".[20]
The "erotic ontology of cyberspace" lies most clearly in its concentration of
the erogenous into the imaginative.[21]
Cyborg bodies are, in many ways, superior to their actual counterparts. They
cannot tire, stumble, or subject their inhabitants to any of the embarrassments
or failures that flesh is prone to. Thus cyborg sex is a concentration of the
erotic, a purifying of prurient imagination, a romantic idealisation of sexual
encounters worthy of the most airbrushed Hollywood art.
The Cyborg Self
Cyborgs are born out of virtual sex. At the moment of
virtual orgasm the line between player and character is the most clouded and the
most transparent. Who it is that is communicating becomes unclear, and whether
passion is being simulated on or transmitted through the MUD becomes truly
problematic. Born from primeval MUD, these cyborgs redefine gender, identity and
the body. In this part of cyberspace, a place as far divorced from the natural
world and the animal, as far from the flesh as human inventiveness can get, the
lines between the animal and the conscious are erased.
FurryMUCK seems
almost too good for cultural analysis to be true--an imaginary world populated
by conscious animals consciously sensualised, all represented by pure linguistic
symbolism and represented within the confines of electricity, silicon and
magnetism. At the margins of physicality, these Furry cyborgs play with the
margins of sexuality. They have none of the boundaries of the actual to confine
them. They may take on any physiology that passion and imagined convenience
invites. Any configuration of human and animal components may be mixed to create
as many sexual possibilities as can be imagined. Bisexual, multisexual,
polysexual--they can be all, but always consensual. For the players there is
always the off-button; for the cyborg characters, implements of sensual overload
are as controlled or as uncontrolled, as gentle or as cruel, as the simulation
demands. Perversion is as common on MUDs as in the `real world', but in
cyberspace perversion can be perverted into any form. In the dim recesses of
Internet cyberspace, there are MUDs, known only by word of mouth--or touch of
keyboard--with themes as controversial as that of any specialist brothel. Kinks
of any kind can be found if looked for, all bent to the demands of the cyborg
entities who portray them for the amusement of the humans shadowed behind their
technologies. FurryMUCK is the lightest side of this twisting of cyborg gender
and sex--the fluffiest and the snuggliest. Darker cyberspaces can be found,
painted not in cartoon colours and textured with fur, but depicted in the dark
techno-organicism of H. R. Giger and texted with all the danger and poetry of
Pauline Reage.
The cyborgs on MUDs do not, as Donna Haraway suggests in
her Cyborg Manifesto, have "no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal
symbiosis... or other seductions to organic wholeness".[22]
Although, in partial confirmation of Haraway's comments, they are literally the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism--of the US
Department of Defence and the bastions of higher education--MUD cyborgs do not
reject the labels of the father culture. There is no escape from labelling for
these cyborgs--they are constructed entirely from the most evident of labels.
Their commitment to "particularity, irony, intimacy and perversity" is expressed
through the flaunting of cultural symbols and the literal inscription upon their
virtual bodies of the signs of who they want to be.[23]
Transsexual, transvestite, bisexual, superhuman and anthropomorphic--MUD bodies
can embrace and be embraced by each of these richly coded definitions.
At the heart of this play with identity is always the question of how
dichotomous cyborg and actual identities are. Where are the lines drawn between
representation, simulation and actualisation? How far do genuine feelings draw
virtual actions into the realm of the actual? These are questions for the
legislators and philosophers of our new computerised world, and not questions
that will be answered easily, for the one constant of cyberspatial existence is
that it is different for everyone. Current political and legal trends, with talk
of `hostile environments' and `hate speech', may lead to the notion that
biotechnological politics move beyond the regulation of actions upon the body
and into actions upon the spirit. The ultimate reduction of the physical--the
microelectronic--may become the realm of the disembodied spirit. If criminality,
or even immorality, can be discovered in cyberspace it will entail a greater
recognition of amorphic harm. The most intimate of MUD interactions already
involve that recognition. Negotiation, and behind-the-scenes direction, almost
always ride in tandem with expression. In the mechanics of the act, cyborg
lovers whisper messages between their players, directing what is acceptable and
what is not, defining and creating the virtual experience with determination and
consent. The most highly practised inhabitants of MUD spaces make their
intentions and desires clear. Flirtation is more highly specified than it is in
the pubs and parties of the `real world'. Raised eyebrows and tilted cigarettes
are replaced by direct requests. This is cyberspatial intimacy at its best.
These cyborgs do not exist in a "post-gender world.[24]
They are only quasi-disembodied. They do not attempt to posit their identities
as amorphous, but instead revel in the possibilities of body-hopping. Play is
not with escape from the claims of the flesh, but with the cultural meanings
attached to different bodies. The adoption of masculinity, femininity,
androgyny, animality or the more fantastical meanings attributed to fictional
races or genders, is as easily accomplished as might be the donning of a new set
of clothes. Thus clothed in the borrowed trappings of other's cultural
expectations and imaginings, cyborg selves interact in fashions that are based
both on superficial appearances and on an acceptance of whatever the individual
wants to be. They do not reject gender, or any other signs of identity, but play
a game with them, freeing symbols from their organic referents and grafting the
meanings of those symbols onto their virtual descriptors.