Escape Velocity (30 page)

206 Mark Dery

Julian Dibbell is more sanguine about on-line orgasms than most. "Netsex," to Dibbell, is

possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs has to offer Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described caresses, sighs, and penetrations, the glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they would in a real-life assignation-sometimes even more so, given the combined power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to unshackle deep-seated fantasies. ^^

Visual Aids

A burgeoning subculture of netsex enthusiasts is unsatisfied with the purely literary medium of text sex. Using electronic devices called scanners, they convert pornographic images into digital data that can then be stored in their computer memories and traded, on-line, for other digitized images. Adult BBSs often feature photo libraries, the entries in which can be saved, with a few commands, in the memory of the user's computer. More mainstream BBSs permit the public posting of soft-core material only; subscribers interested in steamier fare must contact individual users, who trade X-rated files privately, via E-mail. By storing images as digitally encoded graphics files called .GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) files, users are able to transmit them: One user sends, and as the computer on the receiving end decodes the file, bit by digital bit, a more or less photo-quality image blooms slowly on the screen of the willing recipient. Users claiming to be professional photographers sometimes list their libraries of digitized photos, and Nixpix, a free BBS that claims to have more than ten thousand subscribers, provides global access to pornographic photos, ranging in professionalism from Peeping Tom to studio quality.

Not all .GIF transmissions are as laughably banal as the digitized Playboy photos one WELL user claims have been ubiquitous "for years," circulated by "horny nerds."^^ On March 4,1993, federal agents raided forty locations in fifteen states in a search for evidence against subscribers who paid eighty dollars a year to receive explicit photos of five-to-twelve-year-old children from an on-line child pornography ring based in Denmark.

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Dubbed Operation Longarm, the coordinated effort sprang from the federal Customs Servicers assertion that the "computerized transmission of illegal pornography among pedophiles is rapidly becoming more popular than smutty magazines."^' The raids have yielded two indictments; an investigation into w^hat officials believe is a worldw^ide child pornography network continues. In July 1995, a self-appointed vigilante and the FBI joined forces in an Internet sting that resulted in the indictment of a forty-five-year-old male Prodigy user on the charge of crossing state lines with the intention of having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl.

Given the uninformed demagoguery that passes for political debate on this subject, it must be noted that the perception of the Internet as an electronic Sodom awash in hard-core porn and overrun by predatory pedophiles is unfounded. During a July 21,1995, debate on NPR's Talk of the Nation, Bruce Taylor, the president of the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Virginia, asserted that the Internet is "full" of "hardcore porn pictures" involving "violence and animals and torture and body functions." Larry Magid, the author of a booklet called Child Safety on the Itiformation Highway, countered, "If I knew nothing about the Internet and I were listening to this broadcast, I would think . . . that you turn on the Internet and all of a sudden you encounter pictures of naked people having sex with animals. ... I really resent the word TulP; despite some infamous studies, pornography represents a very, very small percentage of the total [Internet traffic]."

Magid was referring to the widely criticized (and utterly discredited) Carnegie-Mellon study of on-line pornography that Philip Elmer-Dewitt used as the factual foundation of his June 26, 1995, Time feature on pornography on the Internet. According to the New York Times, the study, which claimed that 83.5 percent of all images on UseNet are pornographic, has been criticized as "a poorly designed survey whose main conclusion . . . could not be supported by the research methods employed."^^ In fact, as the journalist Brock Meeks has pointed out, the study's own figures show that "so-called 'pornographic' images comprise merely one-half of one percent (.5) of all Internet traffic."^^

But whether or not pornography, pedophilic or otherwise, is rampant on the Internet, the exchange of nonpedophilic nude photos between consenting adults as a prelude to text sex is both legal and popular. "You

208 Mark Dery

contact somebody, exchange images that are allegedly of the two of you, and then, once you have the image viewable, you're ready to 'talk things over,' " explained Branwyn, in an E-mail note. On-line demand is growing for amateur (or at least ostensibly amateur) porn that parallels the off-line market in so-called "amateur" adult videos (many of which are professionally produced). "Tau Zero (tauzero)" assured a user who wondered if "people are exchanging still or video clip files of themselves"

It happens, alright. On CompuServe the user interface includes direct support for displaying, uploading, downloading, and e-mailing color images. In the CB community there, a fair amount of images are exchanged-and while [many of them are] scanned from magazines and digitized from videos, there is an increasing amount of. . . -quite- explicit self-portraiture. In addition to near real-time digital exchange[s], people also send polaroids and such by conventional physical mail once they have found intimacy via "narrow ascii" and by voice. There is [an] interesting stew of mixed media used in the service of sexuality by those who inhabit cyberspace!^''

The "CB community" to which Tau Zero refers is a group of users who communicate via CompuServe's real-time chat feature; they are an online version of the CB (citizens band) radio subculture that flourished in the seventies. ASCII-pronounced "askee"-is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the generic text format required by most BBSs; it is deemed "narrow" because the absence of italics, underlining, boldface, and other print options inhibit dramatic emphasis.

More and more, Tau Zero's "stew of mixed media" is served up on CD-ROMs-shiny silver wafers whose grooves can store text, photos and illustrations, film footage, animated graphics, and sounds. A user whose computer is equipped with a CD-ROM drive can interact with the onscreen world-a world enhanced by the music, speech, and sound effects seeping out of the speaker on the back of his computer-by pointing and clicking a mouse or pecking out keyboard commands.

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Compilations of nude stills and adult films have become staples of the CD-ROM genre. Space Coast Software's groaningly titled Bare Assets ("See the models dance on the beach, splash in the pool, and . . . strip") utilizes QuickTime software to bring video clips to life. Romulus Entertainment's House of Dreams enjoyed the distinction of being the first full-length digital movie, albeit a rather unsatisfying one: The image appears in a claustrophobic window on the user's screen, and the action is noninteractive.

It is widely held that interactivity will spur the growth of new media. "At the moment," says Bruce Sterling, "it's still a fascinating idea that you can actually put a dirty picture on your computer screen. But by itself, it won't be amazing for very long."^^ Sexually explicit CD-ROMs and software that enable the user to select characters, peel away layers of clothing, and rewrite story lines as they unfold realize, in a manner few would have predicted and some would have reviled, the dream of interactivity chased by the Czech Pavilion's Kino-Automat at Expo '67 in Montreal. Fairgoers watched One Man and His World, a movie with alternate climaxes whose final outcome was determined by audience vote: Should the wife or the blond neighbor commit suicide? Should the male protagonist go to jail or go free?

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.^^

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 Bcjre-"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.^''

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.^^

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.^^

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."^^