Sex and the cyborg

A lot of the recent contact I've had, particularly with The Photographer but also occasionally with others, has been through chatrooms or IM. Cybersex gives us that extra protecting layer of anonymity combined with an imaginary and almost limitless space in which to play. Instead of ourselves and our real bodies, we have online identities born of language: faceless and amorphic, able to change every characteristic of their physical form and surpass it.

The blank field of the text box is our dungeon and we build it brick by brick out of words. In a shared, unspoken dialogue the act of enscribing sex becomes a play of signed and signified with our real bodies only joining metaphorically by fingertips to keyboard. If sex is a physical act of touch, in effect, we are fucking the machine. Perhaps we masturbate in time to the text, at appropriate points and junctures to make the words feel more real. The language stimulates action and we become cyborgs of the word: our bodies turn to textual bodies which are coded and delivered to each other via a technological medium (the laptop growing steadily warmer in my lap).

At the other end, the words are de-coded both by the machine, then by your mind. You translate me first into an image and then, if my words are good enough, into physical sensation as you touch yourself. I'm not touching you, that much is obvious, and yet I am. As sure as your brain processes the feeling of me kissing you, it processes your reading the word "kiss" that I typed and you summon up a memory, of me or of someone else, perhaps and superimpose. I kiss you, textually.

The cyber playspace shifts with every keystroke, allowing us to fuck in an inordinate number of locations and locales that our real bodies, or even anyone's real body, has never been to. Places that do not exist, in the same way that this shared space does not really exist but is in fact code and pixels. The window into it from your desktop and mine is an agreed illusion, just like the images we jointly create and enjoy.