by Mark Dery
In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, McLuhan uncovers the logic of Henry Ford’s assembly line in a lingerie ad. Nature’s Rival “four-in-one proportioned girdles” accomplish what nature cannot, he observes, turning out copies of Hollywood starlets with mechanical precision. In like fashion, the fetishizing of number sequences (36-24-36)-a statistician’s idea of erotica-transforms women into “hot numbers,” their measurements “plotted as an abstract curve.”5 Musicals reduce tapping, kicking chorus line beauties to interlocked machine parts, a truism borne out in Busby Berkeley’s 1933 movie, Footlight Parade, where skimpily attired dancing girls, legs spread, are arranged in a giant rosette suggestive of a Curtis radial aircraft engine.
Inverting the advertising logic that invests consumer goods with sex appeal, “feminine glamour ads and the modern beauty chorus insist on their relation to the machine.”6 Contemplating the unhappy results of human sexuality yoked, through advertising, to the demands of the marketplace, McLuhan sees women alienated from their own bodies. Made to submit to the techniques of industrial production, female anatomy is disassembled into replaceable parts: “[H]er legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill-work on a car.”7
On a deeper level, McLuhan perceives the debilitating effect of incessant titillation by Madison Avenue: a sexual burnout that demands greater and greater jolts of voltage to bring the libido twitchingly alive. The end product of this condition, he argues, is the Dr. Strangelove-ian elevation of annihilation to the status of an orgasm:
Sensation and sadism are near twins. And for those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.8
Now, forty-plus years after McLuhan’s prescient observations about “the widely occurring cluster image of sex, technology, and death,” the intertwisted themes of eroticized machinery, technologically mediated sex, sex with technology, and the rerouting of carnal desires into high-tech orgies of destruction are woven through cyberculture.
Issue number ten of the “neurozine” bOING-bOING is given over to “SEX CANDY FOR HAPPY MUTANTS”; the cover portrays a young woman wired for pleasure, a computer cable plugged into her crotch and B-movie contraptions clamped onto each breast. Articles include “Virtual Sex: Fucking Around with Machines” and “Confessions of a PC Porn Fanatic.” The February 1992 Elle titillated its readers with a cover line heralding “THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF COMPUTER SEX,” and, in the following year, the premiere issue of Wired featured an article on “Digital Sex,” the April U.K. edition of Marie Claire promised “Hi-Tech Sex: Orgasm by Computer,” and the November Self bruited “High-Tech Sex: New Ways to Push Your Buttons.”
The now-defunct Future Sex hitched the advertising industry’s latest synonym for “new and improved” to history’s oldest come-on. Described in a WELL blurb posted by its editors as “the only magazine that explores how high technology is changing the way we think about sex,” Future Sex promised multicultural erotica “wrapped up [in] hypermodern design.” The cover of the magazine’s second issue is a guaranteed attention-getter. Male and female infonauts float in cyberspace, both scantily clad in photorealistic computer renderings of virtual reality gear. The man sports a computerized strap-on. The woman wears a bra fitted with robotic hands that are poised to fondle her breasts and a G-string equipped with what looks like a high-tech vibrator. “CYBERSEX,” announces the cover line, “STRAP IN, TWEAK OUT, TURN ON.” The editor and self-styled “queen of high-tech porn” Lisa Palac looks forward, in her opening essay, to the arrival of “erototronics”—“smart” garb that immerses the wearer in computer-generated, fully interactive wet dreams.
Disappointingly, there was nothing terribly futuristic about the sex in Future Sex, which consisted of the usual beautiful people feigning masturbation or fornication for the camera lens. The “futuristic” content in issue three, for example, is limited to a cyber-porn story about “tele-sex” between a virtual blonde and a virtual zebra, reviews of soft-core CD-ROMs, and ads for the decidedly low-tech medium of telephone sex, masquerading as dangerous liaisons in cyberspace, “GET PLUGGED INTO EROTIC EXPRESSION,” urges one, while another (“THE ORIGINAL CYBERSEX”) prepares the customer for his or her quantum leap into a science fiction future: “HARDWARE: YOUR TELEPHONE,” “SOFTWARE: YOUR EROTIC FANTASY.” Wait a minute; couldn’t the nineteenth-century owner of one of Alexander Graham Bell’s “speaking telephones” have done this?
Palac, an antipornography activist-turned–“sex-positive feminist,” has produced a spoken word CD called Cyborgasm, a “virtual reality sex experience” that exploits 3-D effects created with Virtual Audio, a technology used in virtual reality sound tracks.9 The sticker affixed to the CD’s mailing envelope (“THE FUTURE OF SEX IS INSIDE THIS PACKAGE”) suggests that sex involving high-tech interfaces capable of transmitting otherworldly sensations to hot-wired users is no longer science fiction.
Tearing open the padded envelope, one finds a CD, poster, “eco-goggles,” and “cyberubber.” On closer inspection, this last item appears to be an ordinary lubricated condom; the cybernetic quality that distinguishes it from garden-variety rubbers lies, apparently, in the “CYBORGASM” logo emblazoned on its wrapper. The eco-goggles, which are intended to block out visual distractions, turn out to be black spectacles printed on a sheet of cardboard. In order to have what the directions call “the best Cyborgasmic experience,” the user is instructed to sit alone, in the dark, wearing nothing but headphones, condom, and cardboard goggles. Presumably, he or she has taken the precaution of concocting a plausible explanation in case housemates barge in unannounced.
The CD consists for the most part of narrated fantasies in the Penthouse Forum mold, accompanied by heavy breathing and obscene squelchings; it is decidedly uncybernetic, although a vibrator puts in a brief turn for the grand finale. As the CD plays, the grunting, grinding, and heavy breathing of simulated coupling begins to sound mechanical and, finally, comical. Cyborgasm brings to mind the arch-punk Johnny Rotten’s supremely snide observation, “What is sex, anyway? Just thirty seconds of squelching noises.”10
Palac’s CD makes use of the oldest virtual realities known to humankind: playacting and storytelling. Unfortunately, listening to simulated sex or hearing about sexual fantasies is nothing like having sex. Furthermore, where’s the cyber? Cyborgasm’s narrative content is utterly unrelated to technology and the interface itself-a CD player, a pair of cardboard goggles, and a condom-is not exactly the cortex-to-computer hookup that fans of Neuromancer have been clamoring for. As Chris Hudak notes in his blistering Mondo 2000 review of the CD, “[T]he failure here is a conceptual one, and it’s right down there with the ones and zeroes- there is nothing remotely ‘cyber’ about any of this. It’s a fucking CD. Literally.”11
The problem with Cyborgasm, as with Future Sex, is that sex seems to have changed little since the first naked ape stood erect. Sex that is itself futuristic, as opposed to more of the same conducted against a futuristic backdrop, would require the revision of existing notions of human sexuality and embodied consciousness, perhaps even the engineering of radically modified bodies. But how can the sex act be detached from the gestalt that results from long residence in this bag of water we call the body? In a science fiction future where consciousness is not confined to its traditional container but may take up residence in computer memories or robot bodies, it seems at least conceivable that human sexuality could be abstracted from any reference to embodiment, perhaps even from a recognizably human consciousness altogether. Nevertheless, current speculation regarding post-human sexuality is bounded by the inescapable fact that it is conducted from the vantage point of human beings, for whom the very notion of sexuality is defined in terms of embodiment and humanit
y. As the SF writer Rudy Rucker memorably observed, “I can’t stand on top of my own head.”12
Mechanical Reproduction
As Marcel Jean, writing in 1959, makes clear, the current interest in sex machines and machine sex is not a postmodern phenomenon. Freudian readings of the psychosexual symbolism of overheated machinery are hardly a recent development; the sight of camshafts thrusting ceaselessly, of hydraulic fluids squealing through small orifices under high pressure, quickened pulses early in this century.
Henry Adams’s landmark essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in which he equates the forty-foot dynamos at the Great Exposition of 1900 with the Mother of God, is nuanced with a subtle eroticism. Standing in the Gallery of Machines, gazing awestruck at the enormous, spinning “symbol of infinity,” Adams finds himself in the presence of an “occult mechanism” animated by an unmistakably female sexual energy–“female” because the force harnessed by the dynamo, electricity, is mysterious, almost supernatural. “In any previous age,” he writes, “sex was strength. . . . Diana of the Ephesians . . . was Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction-the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.”13 The sexual power of the pagan goddess was sublimated in the symbol of the Virgin, and now, says Adams, the procreative power and spiritual sensuality of the Virgin has been transfigured in the form of the dynamo.
Twenty-nine years later, the modernist poet MacKnight Black writes, in Machinery,
Dynamos are bosoms,
Round with the sweet first-filling of a
new
Mother’s milk.14
In modernist art, the idolatrous tendencies expressed by Adams shaded, by degrees, from religious devotion into mechano-eroticism; paeans to the machine by Italian futurists, English vorticists, and Russian suprema-tists often verged on soft-core porn.
Emerging from the rubble of World War I, the dadaists lampooned bourgeois ideals, excoriating the industrial culture that had brought the world to the eve of Armageddon. Putting an absurdist spin on the clockwork world of Cartesian mechanism, they reconstructed humankind as a race of automata run amok. Robert Short sums it up neatly when he writes that the dadaists “exploited the man/machine analogy to empty life of its spiritual content.”15 But they did so with devilish wit. In images of mechanized coitus and seduction machines, they spoofed the objectification of sex in advertising and the refunctioning of the female body to accommodate mass-produced, mass-marketed fashions. The French dadaist Francis Picabia painted a tongue-in-cheek, draftsmanlike Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity (1915): a spark plug accompanied by the legend “FOR EVER.”
Mechanomorphic images were useful, too, in expressing bohemian contempt for a clock-punching, conspicuously consuming middle class that fornicated and Fletcherized with unblinking imbecility. (“Fletcherizing,” a digestion-promoting regimen developed by a Dr. Fletcher in the early part of this century, consisted of chewing each bite forty times before swallowing.) The German dadaist Max Ernst produced a deceptively innocent-looking, almost childish drawing of a fanciful gadget. An inscription reads: “[A] SMALL MACHINE . . . CONSTRUCTED FOR FEARLESS POLLINATION”–a marital aid, perhaps, for petite bourgeoisie who find the thought of gooey fluids distasteful.
It is profoundly significant that the French dadaist Marcel Du-champ’s seminal painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) is, to put it bluntly, a Rube Goldbergian fucking machine. Robert Lebel called it an exercise in “onanism for two”: The Bride Motor, an internal combustion engine that runs on “love gasoline” hangs stripped yet maddeningly unravishable in the picture’s upper half, forever out of reach of the Bachelor Machine below, which grinds ceaselessly in frustration.16 The Bride-at once the apotheosis of virgin and whore, the object of male adoration and the source of an inscrutable, vaguely malicious female desire-hangs poised between desire and possession for all time.17
Duchamp’s close friend Picabia employed mechanomorphic imagery in the service of auto eroticism, in the literal sense. A passionate collector and skilled driver of powerful cars, Picabia celebrated the intoxicating effects of the open throttle and the smell of gasoline even as he satirized human sexuality in the age of mechanical reproduction. Stephen Bayley sees a riot of sexual imagery in Flamenca, Picabia’s 1917 rendering of an internal combustion valve and its guide. “[T]he reciprocating valve resembles in its action the rhythms of sex,” writes Bayley, “the valve itself the penis, the guide the female sheath.”18 To Bayley, the Italian sportscar designer Enzo Ferrari’s conjecture that “between man and machine there exists a perfect equation: fifty per cent machine and fifty per cent man” suggests that “the idea of mechanical intercourse, that parody of the act of love, lies only a little beneath the surface of people who are fascinated with fast cars.”19
The very notion of “auto eroticism,” in the punning sense, has been so exhausted by pop psychologists that all who treat it run the risk of producing unintentional kitsch. The linkage of the pneumatic contours of the pinup goddess with the morphological oddities that characterized automobile design in its golden age, the 1950s-a veritable fantasia of protrusions and orifices, of bumpers shaped like bulging crotches or jutting breasts-is well documented.
Even so, auto eroticism is sufficiently rich that it resists flip dismissal. The car, second only to the gun, is the quintessential piece of American hardware, fraught with notions of rugged individualism, endless frontiers, eternal youth, phallic power through extension, intrauterine comfort via enclosure, and the Utopian promise of American know-how and can-do. For the American teenager, getting a license and, ultimately, a car constitutes a rite of passage intimately associated with adolescent sexuality; backseats are the upholstered altars on which virginity is ritually sacrificed to adulthood. Often, the vehicle itself is a sexual surrogate, as in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Baby Driver” (“I wonder how your engines feel”) or the Rolling Stones’ “Brand New Car” (“Jack her up, baby, go on, open the hood /1 want to check if her oil smells good”). Stephen King’s Christine is a retelling of the medieval myth of the succubus in hot rod vernacular: a pimply teenager falls in love with a bloodred 1957 Plymouth Fury possessed by a jealous, murderous female spirit who runs down three boys who once mistreated her. Driving, throughout Christine, is equated with sexual conquest, as it is in the 1926 poem “she being Brand” by e. e. cummings, in which a temperamental car becomes a female virgin:
she being Brand
-new; and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and(having
thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.
K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up. . .20
Futurist auto eroticism carries mechano-eroticism to its inevitable, cyborgian conclusion: the marriage of meat and mechanism. “[W]e will conquer the seemingly unconquerable hostility that separates our human flesh from the metal of motors,” declares the poet F. T. Marinetti in a futurist manifesto.21 The tension generated by this seemingly unresolvable situation seeks release in the pornographic crash, a fiery ecstasy in which car and driver are conjoined, once and for all. In his 1914 poem “Fornication of Automobiles,” Mario de Leon choreographs a car crash as the (vaguely homoerotic) copulation of gladiatorial machines:
Involuntary collision,
furious fornication
of two automobiles–energy,
embrace of two warriors
bold of movement
syncopation of two “heart motors,”
spilling of “blood-gas.”22
The notion of auto erotic collisions reaches its zenith in J. G. Ballard’s proto-cyberpunk novel Crash. In the detached, exact language of the forensic pathologist or the engineer, Ballard adumbrates “a new sexuality born from a perverse technology”:
In h
is vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts-by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on . . . by the compact fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.23
Violent and passionless, beyond ego psychology or social mores, it is a posthuman sexuality “without referentiality and without limits,” as the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard puts it.24 Alienated from a body that seems, more and more, like a preindustrial artifact, this new sexuality fetishizes urban desolation, televised disasters, celebrities, and commodities-above all, the automobile.
In Crash, sex happens almost entirely in cars; removed from that context, it loses its appeal. The body is erotic only when it intersects with technology or the built environment, either literally (punctured by door handles, impaled on steering columns) or figuratively (“[t]he untouched, rectilinear volumes of this building fused in my mind with the contours of her calves and thighs pressed against the vinyl seating”).25 A young woman’s body bears testimony to a severe automobile accident; to the narrator, who was himself injured in an accident that imprinted his car’s instrumentation on his knees and shins, she has been reborn:
The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities.26