Software Vault: The Sapphire Collection/Software Vault (Sapphire Collection) (Digital Impact).ISO/cdr16/wired1_1.zip/CYBERSEX

Text File | 1994-09-18 | 13KB | 240 lines

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"This Is A Naked Lady":
Sex is a virus that infects new technology first

By Gerard Van Der Leun


Back in the dawn of online when a service called The Source was still in
flower, a woman I once knew used to log on as "This is a naked lady."
She wasn't naked of course, except in the minds of hundreds of young and
not-so-young males who also logged on to The Source. Night after night,
they sent her unremitting text streams of detailed wet dreams, hoping to
engage her in online exchanges known as "hot chat" - a way of engaging
in a mutual fantasy typically found only through 1-900 telephone
services. In return, "The Naked Lady" egged on her digital admirers with
leading questions larded with copious amounts of double entendre.

When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to "just
fooling around on the wires."

"It's just a hobby," she said. "Maybe I'll get some dates out of it.
Some of these guys have very creative and interesting fantasy lives."

At the start, The Naked Lady was a rather mousy person - the type who
favored gray clothing of a conservative cut - and was the paragon of shy
and retiring womanhood. Seeing her on the street, you'd never think that
her online persona was one that excited the libidos of dozens of men
every night.

But as her months of online flirtations progressed, a strange
transformation came over her: She became (through the dint of her
blazing typing speed) the kind of person that could keep a dozen or more
online sessions of hot chat going at a time. She got a trendy haircut.
Her clothing tastes went from Peck and Peck to tight skirts slit up the
thigh. She began regaling me with descriptions of her expanding lingerie
collection. Her speech became bawdier, her jokes naughtier. In short,
she was becoming her online personality - lewd, bawdy, sexy, a man-
eater.

The last I saw of her, The Naked Lady was using her online conversations
to cajole dates and favors from those men foolish enough to fall into
her clutches.

The bait she used was an old sort - sex without strings attached, sex
without love, sex as a fantasy pure and simple. It's an ancient
profession whose costs always exceed expectations and whose pleasures
invariably disappoint. However, the "fishing tackle" was new: online
telecommunications.

In the eight years that have passed since The Naked Lady first appeared,
a number of new wrinkles have been added to the text-based fantasy
machine. Groups have formed to represent all sexual persuasions. For a
while, there was a group on the Internet called, in the technobabble
that identifies areas on the net, alt.sex.bondage.golden.show-ers.sheep.
Most people thought it was a joke, and maybe it was.

Online sex stories and erotic conversations consume an unknown and
unknowable portion of the global telecommunications bandwidth. Even more
is swallowed by graphics. Now, digitized sounds are traveling the nets,
and digital deviants are even "netcasting" short movie clips. All are
harbingers of things to come.

It is as if all the incredible advances in computing and networking
technology over the past decades boil down to the ability to ship images
of turgid members and sweating bodies everywhere and anywhere at
anytime.   Looking at this, it is little wonder that whenever this is
discovered (and someone, somewhere, makes the discovery about twice a
month), a vast hue and cry resounds over the nets to root-out the
offending material and burn those who promulgated it. High tech is being
perverted to low ends, they cry. But it was always so.

There is absolutely nothing new about the prurient relationship between
technology and sexuality.

Sex, as we know, is a heat-seeking missile that forever seeks out the
newest medium for its transmission. William Burroughs, a man who
understands the dark side of sexuality better than most, sees it as a
virus that is always on the hunt for a new host - a virus that almost
always infects new technology first. Different genders and psyches have
different tastes, but the overall desire seems about as persistent over
the centuries as the lust for bread and salvation.

We could go back to Neolithic times when sculpture and cave painting
were young. We could pick up the prehistoric sculptures of females with
pendulous breasts and very wide hips - a theme found today in
pornographic magazines that specialize in women of generous endowment.
We could then run our flashlight over cave paintings of males whose
members seem to exceed the length of their legs. We could travel forward
in time to naughty frescos in Pompeii, or across continents to where
large stones resembling humongous erections have for centuries been
major destinations to pilgrims in India, or to the vine-choked couples
of the Black Pagoda at Ankor Wat where a Mardi Gras of erotic activity
carved in stone has been on display for centuries. We could proceed to
eras closer to our time and culture, and remind people that movable type
not only made the Gutenberg Bible possible, but that it also made cheap
broadsheets of what can only be called "real-smut-in Elizabethan-
English" available to the masses for the very first time. You see,
printing not only made it possible to extend the word of God to the
educated classes, it also extended the monsters of the id to them as
well.

Printing also allowed for the cheap reproduction and broad distribution
of erotic images. Soon, along came photography; a new medium, and one
that until recently did more to advance the democratic nature of erotic
images than all previous media combined. When photography joined with
photolithography, the two together created a brand new medium that many
could use. It suddenly became economically feasible and inherently
possible for lots of people to enact and record their sexual fantasies
and then reproduce them for sale to many others. Without putting too
fine a point on it, the Stroke Book was born.

Implicit within these early black-and-white tomes (which featured a lot
of naked people with Lone Ranger masks demonstrating the varied ways
humans can entwine their limbs and conceal large members at the same
time) were the vast nascent publishing empires of Playboy, Penthouse,
and Swedish Erotica.

The point here is that all media, when they are either new enough or
become relatively affordable, are used by outlaws to broadcast unpopular
images or ideas. When a medium is created, the first order of business
seems to be the use of it in advancing religious, political, or sexual
notions and desires. Indeed, all media, if they are to get a jump-start
in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass
drives - those things we hold in common as basic human needs.

But of all these: food, shelter, sex and money; sex is the one drive
that can elicit immediate consumer response. It is also why so many
people obsessed with the idea of eliminating pornography from the earth
have recently fallen back on the saying "I can't define what pornography
is, but I know it when I see it."

They're right. You can't define it; you feel it. Alas, since everyone
feels it in a slightly different way and still can't define it, it
becomes very dangerous to a free society to start proscribing it.

And now we have come to the "digital age" where all information and
images can be digitized; where all bits are equal, but some are hotter
than others. We are now in a land  where late-night cable can make your
average sailor blush. We live in an age of monadic seclusion, where
dialing 1-900 and seven other digits can put you in intimate contact
with pre-op transsexuals in wet suits who will talk to you as long as
the credit limit on your MasterCard stays in the black.

If all this pales, the "adult" channels on the online service CompuServe
can fill your nights at $12.00 an hour with more fantasies behind the
green screen than ever lurked be-hind the green door. And that's just
the beginning. There are hundreds of adult bulletin board systems
offering God Knows What to God Knows Who, and making tidy profits for
plenty of folks.

Sex has come rocketing out of the closet and into the terminals of
anyone smart enough to boot up FreeTerm. As a communications industry,
sex has transmogrified itself from the province of a few large companies
and individuals into a massive cottage industry.

It used to be, at the very least, that you had to drive to the local (or
not-so-local) video shop or "adult" bookstore to refresh your collection
of sexual fantasies. Now, you don't even have to leave home. What's
more, you can create it yourself, if that's your pleasure, and transmit
it to others.

It is a distinct harbinger of things to come that "Needless to say..."
letters now appearing online are better than those published in
Penthouse Forum, or that sexual images in binary form make up one of the
heaviest data streams on the Internet, and that "amateur" erotic home
videos are the hottest new category in the porn shops.

Since digital sex depends on basic stimuli that is widely known and
understood, erotica is the easiest kind of material to produce. Quality
isn't the primary criteria. Quality isn't even the point. Arousal is the
point, pure and simple. Everything else is just wrapping paper. If you
can pick up a Polaroid, run a Camcorder, write a reasonably intelligible
sentence on a word processor or set up a bulletin board system, you can
be in the erotica business. Talent has very, very little to do with it.

The other irritating thing about sex is that like hunger, it is never
permanently satisfied. It recurs in the human psyche with stubborn
regularity. In addition, it is one of the drives most commonly
stimulated by the approved above-ground media (Is that woman in the
Calvin Klein ads coming up from a stint of oral sex, or is she just
surfacing from a swimming pool?) Mature, mainstream corporate media can
only tease. New, outlaw media delivers. Newcomers can't get by on
production values, because they have none.

Author Howard Rheingold has made some waves recently with his vision of
a network that will actually hook some sort of tactile feedback devices
onto our bodies so that the fantasies don't have to be so damned
cerebral. He calls this vision "dildonics," and he has been dining out
on the concept for years. With it, you'll have virtual reality coupled
with the ability to construct your own erotic consort for work, play, or
simple experimentation.

Progress marches on. In time, robotics will deliver household servants
and sex slaves.

I saw The Naked Lady about three months ago. I asked her if she was
still up to the same old games of online sex. "Are you kidding?" she
told me. "I'm a consultant for computer security these days. Besides, I
have a kid now. I don't want that kind of material in my home."  ===



Copyright (c) 1993 Wired Magazine