by Mark Dery
Here, as in SF films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, humans are dispassionate mannequins-crash dummies-while the technology around them is disconcertingly anthropomorphic: The “grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver’s crotch” in an accident conjures a “calibrated act of machine fellatio,” while the “elegant aluminized air-vents” in a hospital “beckon as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice.”27 In the depraved geometry of Crash, semen and engine coolant, crotches and chromium instrument heads are congruent.
“I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible,” said Ballard, in a 1970 interview, “simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape.”28
Published in 1973, Crash refracts McLuhan’s monstrous ménage à trois-sex, technology, and death-through the splintered lens of consumer culture, with its flattened affect, celebrity worship, obsessive documentation of every lived moment, and psychotic confusion of subjective experience and filmic fictions. Improvising on these themes with a gleeful viciousness that is equal parts surrealism, pop art, and punk, Ballard portends their convergence in cyberculture.
Built for Pleasure
Recent years have seen a proliferation of imagery that gives vent to the desire to “possess machines in a sexually gratifying way,” as McLuhan so discreetly put it, supplanting Ballard’s eroticized air-vents and instrument panels with the considerably more compliant electric love doll. Human-machine misce genation-RoboCopulation, by any other name-is the subtext of the future schlock illustrations of Hajime Sorayama and Larry Chambers, collected in glossy paperbacks and sold in science fiction bookshops. Sorayama churns out airbrush cartoons of robot odalisques, their chromium pudenda free of hair and other, all too human unpleasantries; Chambers is known for illustrations like “Steel Madam,” a lovingly rendered drawing of a robotic trollop’s stiletto heel flirtatiously tickling a gartered leg.
Chambers and Sorayama weren’t the first to modernize Pygmalion’s Galatea-the male fantasy of the anatomically accurate automaton. In West-world, a 1973 SF film about an adult theme park in which guests live out their fantasies in ancient Roman, medieval, or frontier settings, humanoid robots of both sexes are programmed for pleasure (typically, we see only female androids in action, since the movie’s main characters are men). The male models, whose “external equipment” is “entirely unrealistic, but effective and stimulating,” are equipped with “internal vibratory mechanisms”; the female models (“a technological triumph”) are outfitted with “suction and torsion mechanisms.” A scene set in the locker room of the technicians who maintain the robots is particularly memorable:
FIRST TECHNICIAN: You ever made it with one of those machines?
SECOND TECHNICIAN: No . . . I’ll take the real thing. If I can ever get home to her.
FIRST TECHNICIAN: I tried it with one of those Rome hookers. One night out on the repair table. Powered her up and really went to town. . . .
THIRD TECHNICIAN: You could get fired for that.29
This exchange, reminiscent of off-color banter between morticians, hints at the necrophilia implicit in the act of making love to synthetic flesh. In Human Robots in Myth and Science, John Cohen makes this connection explicit. The erotic appeal exerted on some men by nude statues and “undraped” mannequins, he maintains,
is allied to necrophilia. The potential necrophilist needs an unresisting accomplice; the corpse is totally helpless and defenseless, and cannot resist an assault.30
This is the source of the creepy pathos of the inflatable sex doll, whose goggle eyes and gaping, obscenely red mouth suggest a strangled prostitute. In K. W. Jeter’s cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder, the protagonist recoils in gut-lurching horror from a roomful of mechanoid whores with “polyethylene cunt[s]”:
Limmit felt his internal organs shift sickeningly at the sight of the high-ceilinged room’s contents. Its entire length, stretching as far as he could see, was filled with duplicates of. . . whores, in various stages of completion. . . . Holy shit, thought Limmit, nauseated. The old science fiction pulp wet-dream: the mechanical cunt.31
Limmit is backstage at a Westworld-style amusement park located in Nixon Country-California’s Orange County. Sending up adolescent fantasies that cross Disney’s Tomorrowland with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, Jeter manages a few savage jabs at the same well-fed living dead satirized by the dadaists. Limmit despairs, a few pages later, at the horrifying thought that he might never leave Orange County, that he will become one more lawn-mowing, barbecuing suburban zombie:
I’ll die right here, only I’ll keep on walking. I’ll be dead, and I’ll settle down in Orange County, marry a girl vague from TV and downers, and we’ll raise anonymous children together, removed from her body like loaves of bread while she’s knocked out.32
Jeter updates the dadaists’ vision of the look-alike, think-alike masses for an age of pill-popping couch potatoes. To Limmit, the suburbanite copulating with a “foam-rubber ersatz whore”–a sick-funny image that perfectly captures the soullessness of a thoroughly commodified existence-is little better than a robot himself.
The equation of the archetypal suburban consumer with a mindless automaton is an all-purpose metaphor, serving opposed ends: the feminism of The Stepford Wives (1974), a black comedy about suburban chauvinists who dispatch their mutinous wives and replace them with brain-dead happy homemakers created in the image of Playboy centerfolds, and the beery misogyny of Charles Bukowski’s short story “The Fuck Machine.”
Bukowski’s robotic love doll Tanya is a cross between Barbie and the Bride of Frankenstein. On the outside, she is “all ass and breast,” but her torso is stuffed full of “wire and tubes-coiled and running things-plus some minor substance that faintly resemble[s] blood,” and her stomach and veins once belonged to a hog and a dog, respectively.33 The fear and loathing of female sexuality bubbling beneath this image oozes out when the scientist who built Tanya declares, “[E]very woman is a fucking machine, can’t you see that? [T]hey play for the highest bidder!”34 Bukowski’s virulent misogyny is inflected with a horror of consumer culture not unlike Jeter’s:
poor Tanya . . . she had had no desire for money or property or large new cars or overexpensive homes. she had never read the evening paper. had no desire for [color] television, new hats, rain boots, backfence conversations with idiot wives.35
In an America where humans have come to resemble mass-produced widgets, where one might pass “half a hundred fuck machines in a 10 minute walk on almost any main sidewalk of America-the only difference being that they pretended that they were human,” Tanya’s saving grace is that she is what she seems to be.36 Ironically, the hollow, materialistic “fuck machine” so reviled by Bukowski is the culturally constructed product of male desires. The “assembly-line love goddess,” to use McLuhan’s phrase, is only as the media gods made her.
But the reality of the living doll-starved to pubescent proportions, douched, depilated, and deodorized–inevitably falls short of the male dream of robotic glamour. The female sex machine serves not only as a shiny surface on which male visions of femininity may be etched but as a mirror whose reflection reinforces the masculine sense of self. The result is a narcissistic closed circuit that resembles what the Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror stage” of psychological development, the phase in early childhood during which the child comes to recognize himself in the mirror and an integrated self-image begins to coalesce. “[W]e arrive at a sense of an ‘I’ by finding that ‘I’ reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world,” Terry Eagleton elaborates, in his discussion of Lacan. “This object is at once somehow part of ourselves-we identify with it-and yet not ourselves, something alien.”37 Intriguingly, Lacan himself draws an analogy between the mirror stage and our relationship with the automaton, “in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world o
f [one’s] own making tends to find completion.”38
Anthropomorphic yet alien, the electric love doll is consonant with male fantasies to a degree that no human female could ever be, but mocking in its forgery of organic life. This uncanniness is what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori pinpoints when he refers, in Frederik Schodt’s Inside the Robot Kingdom, to the “Uncanny Valley,” a dip in the index that graphs our relationship with humanoid dolls and anthropomorphic machines. According to Mori, our affinity for our creations parallels the degree to which they resemble us, up to a point; when they begin to look too much like us, their cuddliness turns to uncanniness. Freud, who wrote a well-known essay on the Uncanny, would say that this is because we are unable to convince ourselves that such disquietingly lifelike creations, inert though they are, do not harbor some spark of life. (Significantly, he devotes a substantial portion of “The ‘Uncanny’” to a consideration of Olympia, the mechanical Galatea in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.”)
The discomfiting effects of humanoid mannequins, statues, waxworks, robots, and the like are also inextricably bound up in the subconscious fear of our own mortality that confronts us in the image of the doppelgänger, the spectral double that haunts its fleshly counterpart. The doppelgänger, in turn, has everything to do with the mirror stage (Freud calls the double a “harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling”) as well as man-made “reflections” of humanity. In a discussion of the automaton, Baudrillard observes that
There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will. . . . Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate.39
The uncanniness of the idealized gyndroid and the patriarchal use of Woman as Narcissus’s mirror are points of departure for L’Eve Future (“The Future Eve”), Jean Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel about an “electro-human machine” modeled on a woman named Alicia. Lord Ewald, a wealthy English gentleman, has fallen out of love with his mistress Alicia (“the absolute feminine ideal for three-quarters of modern humanity”) because she is afflicted, unhappily, with a reasoning intellect.40 And, as Ewald reminds us, “The marble Venus, after all, has nothing to do with reason.”41
Thomas Edison solves Ewald’s dilemma by constructing the robot Hadaly, an idealized vision of Alicia that epitomizes the nineteenth-century concept of a sublime femininity. Hadaly (Persian for “ideal,” according to Villiers) is the very image of languorous gentility, subsisting on pills and gliding through life in a somnambulistic state. Her iron joints are oiled with perfume, and in place of lungs she has two golden phonographs whose sixty-hour “program,” recorded by Alicia, was written by the century’s greatest poets, metaphysicians, and novelists. An aid to philosophical contemplation, the android is, as Edison observes, Ewald’s platonic desire incarnate:
[T]he creature whom you love, and who for you is the sole REALITY, is by no means the one who is momentarily embodied in [Alicia’s] transient human figure, but a creature of your desire. . . . In short, it’s this objectified projection of your own mind that you call on, that you perceive, that you CREATE in your living woman, and which is nothing but your own mind reduplicated in her.42
Fashioned in the image of Ewald’s metaphysical fantasy, Hadaly is a marble goddess, a mechanical bride who will never be stripped bare (she is, in fact, a living stun gun, able to incapacitate would-be mashers with a jolt from her electrified body). Spiritual, inviolate, she is the obverse of the science fiction sex machine, a divine statue who leads men not into physical temptation but toward the life of the mind. Even so, she is like Bukowski’s “fuck machine,” Jeter’s synthetic whores, and McLuhan’s assembly-line love goddesses in that she is a figment of the male imagination-Woman stripped of free will and threatening sexuality. Both paradigms police female desire: In the mechanoid whore, Woman is reduced to a “mechanical cunt,” a Picabia-esque spark plug that goes “FOR EVER” once her ignition is switched on; in the android virgin, female sexuality is etherealized and the female sex erased, reduced to a ridiculous blankness like the vacancy between Barbie’s legs.
Ladies’ Home Companion
As might be expected, science fiction is largely devoid of female mechano-erotica, an inequity the Mondo 2000 editor “St. Jude” (Jude Milhon) has attempted to redress through “technoporn” written from a female perspective. In Steven Levy’s chronicle of the computer revolution, Hackers, Milhon is introduced as a computerphile who “noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.”43 “Woman’s Home Companion,” a piece of SF erotica by Milhon that appeared in Mondo 2000, is a lighthearted rewrite of the Westworld scenario. Lounging in her Jacuzzi, the narrator is serviced by a Personal Robot, “all black rubber and chrome,” whose five, nimble-fingered hands attend to her every erogenous zone. In addition, her handy household helper is fitted with a daunting assortment of protuberances: “Mistress, I am equipped with four copulatory devices. Shall I demonstrate them for you?”44
Milhon’s story inspired “What do humans really want from their CYBORG LOVE SLAVES???” a WELL discussion topic in which several female contributors spun out lickerish fantasies. Tiffany Lee Brown confided that her
idealoid luv slave would be programmed with hundreds of personalities, from which it would select completely at random. I hafta have that element of surprise. I wouldn’t mind having one program switch my borg baby back and forth from Jeff Gold-blum to Geena [Davis] mode, at excellently timed intervals.
Erika Whiteway’s
would be able to read my mind, would always be ON, would do whatever I want and not just sex either but grocery shopping and ministering to my every need, desire, whim . . . and inexplicable craving for HeathBarCrunch ice cream at 3:23 A.M.45
Transporting Lady Chatterley’s lover to the world of Neuromancer, such imaginings are animated by a quirky humor missing, for the most part, from male visions of robo-bimbos. Milhon’s Personal Robot, with its fondlers, diddlers, and dildos, spoofs a long line of futuristic labor-saving devices for the modern housewife epitomized in those preposterous kitchen utensils familiar from TV infomercials (“It slices, it dices, it juliennes . . .”). Heirs to several decades’ rhetoric about the cybernated “House of the Future,” Milhon, Brown, and Whiteway envision Personal Robots and cyborg love slaves that would attend to more than June Cleaver’s housework.
Orgasmatron
The RoboCopulatory fantasies of Milhon and her fellow WELL-dwellers spring in part from what McLuhan called the “hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique.” It is a received truth that mass desire plays a strong role in “willing” technology into being. Where there’s a will, there is often a way, and the craving for something like the Orgasmatron, the orgasm-inducing booth imagined by Woody Allen in Sleeper, lurks beneath the surface of cyberculture. According to the cultural anthropologist Arthur Harkins,
Already there is talk of creation of androids for sexual purposes. I think you are going to see an industry develop in the sexual-appliance area. At first it will be machine appliances, and eventually you will see biological substitutes or surrogates for human sexual organs being employed in stationary and mobile machine systems.46
Harkins’s words may prove prophetic if cultural momentum propels events on their present course. Sex with machines, together with dalliances conducted in virtual worlds, seems a seductive alternative in an age of AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases. In cyberculture, the widespread yearning for untainted love has given rise to the on-line sex play that the technology writer Gareth Branwyn calls “text sex”; interactive, X-rated computer programs; and everyone’s not-ready-for-prime-time fantasy, sex in virtual reality, or “cybersex.”
You’re alone, it’s late, and the lights are low; your face is bathed in th
e phosphor glow of your PC screen. Connected by modem to the information service America Online, you browse through a list of user-initiated group discussions called “rooms.” The topics range over a wide spectrum of interests, from pop culture to politics, but in the BBS’s “People Connection” section, sexual themes predominate. Room names scroll down your screen: “Romance Connection,” “Naughty Negligees,” “Hot Bi Ladies,” “Gay Room,” “Naughty Girls,” “Women Who Obey Women.”
Highlighting one, you click your mouse and “enter” the room. A small square winks into existence in one corner of your screen. The names of the various conversationalists appear at the top of the inset box; their typewritten comments scroll by below. Summoning your courage, you decide to dive in. Typing a brief message in the small text entry window near the bottom of your screen, you select SEND. In the blink of an eye, your note, or “post,” takes its place among the accumulated messages, at the end of the list.
Here as elsewhere on America Online, sexually explicit conversation is conducted warily, since public rooms are policed by “guides” recruited from the membership and paid in free on-line time. Derided as “cybercops” by those who frequent blue rooms, guides are empowered to delete dens of iniquity whose language and subject matter are not in keeping with the system’s guidelines. Repeat offenders run the risk of having their memberships suspended. Like the habitués of conventional singles bars, BBS users tend therefore to scan rooms for potential partners with whom they might slip away to more secluded quarters.
Skimming the posted remarks, you settle on the author whose sentiments, sense of humor, and sexual preference harmonize with yours. Using the PRIVATE MESSAGE command, you send the likely prospect a flirtatious note that pops up on his or her screen alone. Curiosity piqued, your partner responds in kind. Things proceed apace, from the coyly coquettish to the blatantly salacious, in the sort of breathless exchange that one denizen of the Internet termed a “heated sendstorm.”