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Erobotica and Cybornography: Machines in Fetishistic Fantasy
Introduction
As we approach the age of post-humanism, our art and entertainment present us with more and more images of a cyborgian and robotic world populated by Terminators, Seven of Nines, and so on. As these fantasy figures penetrate our collective imagination, their influence draws new offshoots from mainstream of human sexuality. While the traditionally male fantasy of making love to simulacrum of the human body has existed as early as the myth of Pygmalion and continued throughout the centuries in works such Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale , and E.T.A. Hoffman's Der Sandman , only recently has the concept of robotic substitution for sexual partnership become a discernible future And so a new fetish, characterized by attraction to robots and cyborgs, is born: technosexulaity, also known as ASFR. [5] Thanks to the World Wide Web, this relatively esoteric deviation from the norm, like so many others, is able to find collective expression and identity through various online communities. At the same time, the Internet has made it possible for people all over the world to fully delve into Japan's pornographic art tradition commonly known as hentai, whose more obscure and radical sub-genres function as the single most advanced source of post-human erotic fantasy. These images are just as important in reaffirming the technosexual identity as online communications: while the fetishist enjoys meeting others who share the same deviation, only the artist seems to have the power to reach inside of the fetishist's soul and paint his or her most intimate fantasies with such vivid detail. Indeed, Sorayama's “Sexy Robot” paintings from 1979 established the technosexual identity long before any large scale social network could be formed among the fetishists. [1] Why Art Matters, why Japan Matters
In the United States, drawn pornography is most commonly found in a handful of cartoons in magazines such as “Playboy”. These cartoons focus on humor more than arousal, making them incredibly weak examples of pornography. The occasional fantasy-themed erotic art pops up, such as the sword-wielding topless women mounted atop dragons in Julie Bell and Boris Vallejo's paintings, but these are closer to art than pornography. Even the science fiction and fantasy adult comics found in the internationally circulated French magazine “Heavy Metal”, for all their graphic depictions of sex, can't be agreed upon as pornography, as we see in the fact that some newsstands put “Heavy Metal” on the rack next to “Playboy” and “Penthouse”, while others put it with art magazines or science fiction and fantasy magazines. “Heavy Metal” has also been made into two feature length animated films that carry an R rating and have enjoyed mainstream success. Similarly, sexually explicit content found in the United States' underground comic movement, such as in the works of R. Crumb, have also found mainstream success, and often find themselves placed in galleries by curators and commented on by renowned critics such as Robert Hughes [14]. While these works are arousing, the acceptance of their artistic and mainstream entertainment value precludes them from being considered true pornography. True pornography must not only be arousing, but perceived as having no real redeeming artistic qualities by society as a whole, hence this article's adherence to the term "drawn pornography" as opposed to the oxymoronic "pornographic art." For our purposes, pornography without arousal can simply be thought of as trash, while pornography with redeeming artistic qualities can be considered erotica. By this definition, the Western world offers very little in the way non-photographic pornography. But in Japan, things are different. Unlike the rest of the world, Japan's adult entertainment industry produces about as much animation, comics, and illustrations as it does photographic pornography. Furthermore, in Japan, drawn pornography enjoys the same gonzo, amateur, low-budget status as pornographic photos and videos do in the rest of the world. Just as anybody with a video camera can record a few sexual acts and have their work sold in porn shops or distributed on the Internet a while later, anybody in Japan with a few art supplies and moderate talent can draw some sexual acts and men will be buying their amateur comics (known as doujinshi) and reading them on a Tokyo subway shortly thereafter. And should a Japanese artist decide to draw Astro Boy buggering Godzilla, he doesn't have to worry about being sued for it. In his book, Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig ponders why this is: "The most puzzling feature of the doujinshi market, for those trained in the law, at least, is that it is allowed to exist at all. Under Japanese copyright law, which in this respect (on paper) mirrors American copyright law, the doujinshi market is an illegal one"(p. 26). Indeed, although copyright holders technically have legal recourse, Lessig points out that "the norm in Japan mitigates this legal difficulty," resulting in an unspoken amnesty for doujinshi artists (p. 27). Whether this is because there aren't enough lawyers in Japan or because the Japanese comic market recognizes the role doujinshi plays in its success , no one can say. The only other place in the world in which drawn pornography is circulated like this is Mexico's "Tijuana bibles". Even so, the fact remains that Japan's drawn pornography industry is the most prevalent in the world, enjoying such an international success via the internet that the term “hentai” has become somewhat synonymous with all drawn pornography. Meanwhile, amateur artists around the world are drawing pornography in the Japanese anime style and circulating them online in the same manner that Japanese amateur artists do. But what makes Japan of primary importance to the discussion of cyborg fetishism is the same thing that makes drawn pornography so important Ð freedom to re-imagine human anatomy. Only in Japan is the power of drawing used to its fullest extent to perform the impossible or unethical on human bodies, as seen in a variety of hentai's subgenres: there's futanari, which is analogous to “shemale” and “tranny" porn, except instead of androgynous-looking women and ambiguous genitalia, the women are 100% female, save for a massive penis that often magically appears on them, thus casting no doubt on their status as women; there's lolicon and guro, analogous to child pornography and snuff films, in which the most unethical fantasies are safely acted out; there's a great deal of uncategorized deformity hentai, which can feature things as imaginative as women with breasts that have penises instead of nipples, a plethora anuses covering their entire body, or simply bizarre proportions. [8] [9] In short, Japan is the post-human pornography capital of the world, graphically portraying what would be impossible, unlikely, and/or unethical alterations to people's bodies. Cyborgs and Gynoids in Hentai
Now that we've established the proper background and cultural framework, let's look at some specific examples of how cyborgs and androids (or, in this case, gynoids) figure into the post-human hentai equation. In a way it's a completely natural combination: hentai is a derivation of anime, and the very first anime character (Mighty Atom) was a robot. Mark Gilson posits that at the heart of Japanese cartoons there exists what he refers to as “robophilia,” a phenomenon characterized by unquestioning faith in technology's destiny as the redeemer of humanity. [11] The fact that technosexual hentai is relatively uncommon compared to other genres of hentai suggests that this robophilia doesn't translate easily into sexual attraction. However, when it does translate, the results are fascinating, as the examples given below will hopefully demonstrate. “Female Body Cleaning Service”
Let's start with something a bit more unusual and extreme. With this illustration, the artist has taken the body of a generic anime woman and converted it into a self-operating novelty sex toy/cleaning appliance, making the theme of the commodification of women astoundingly clear. Just to make sure we get the message though, the artist has labeled his creation with the words “Female body Cleaning service”, which is perhaps the closest thing we have to a title for this mysterious image that has been passed down through the fetishist community until its original source has been forgotten. This image is more radical than most post-human pornography because it does away with the shape of the female body altogether and rearranges a few of its component parts (breasts, legs, and head) on a decidedly unsexy, utilitarian bulb-shaped frame. The vagina has been extended by a pipe and converted into a nozzle for dispensing some kind of floor wax. The stiff, awkward smile, while probably due to the artist's limited ability in depicting facial expressions, brings to mind the question of whether this cyborg is a living being who genuinely enjoys her existence as a cleaning sex machine a or whether it is an emotionless gynoid blessed with a friendly interface. In many cases, questions of free will and self-awareness in the object of the technosexual fantasy are left to the imagination of the viewer. Furthermore, the unnerving smile is also a reminder of a larger trend in hentai, in which artists present their outlandish sexual imagery as part of an imaginary quotidian existence, that is, an imaginary world in which the most deviant perversions are at home in formal, public situations. Even in guro hentai, women are sometimes shown as reacting to their mutilation and dismemberment with mere annoyance or even pleasure. Similarly, the Female body Cleaning service unit in this image is completely unaware of how shocking we viewers find it, and the fictional society in which it exists probably interacts with it as casually as we would a vacuum cleaner. In addition, the image's background suggests that every office building in town has a whole fleet of these things cleaning their floors. Perhaps this quotidian twist reflects something about metropolitan Japanese society in which men can casually consume images like these in public without shame or castigation. “Mecha” Gynoids and Dissasembly
A hentai parody image featuring the standard gynoid model from the video game “Marionette Company.” The artist is unknown.
A hentai parody image featuring Roll Casket, a character from the Mega Man (a.k.a. Rockman) video game series. The artist is unknown.
Here are two examples of your more typical technosexual hentai. These are what I call “mecha” gynoids, named after the genre of anime featuring robots with similar segmented bodies. These characteristic segments are actually outlines of various panels which detach from the surface of the body to reveal the complex machinery. In technosexual communities, this stripping of the outer layer is a trope commonly known as “disassembly.” One enthusiast refers to disassembly as "a revelation of who [the gynoid] really is," adding that the most crucial aspect of this fantasy for him is the removal of the face, which he refers to as a "mask". [5] Disassembly is therefore like many fetishes in the sense that it generates excitement by expressing freedom from the social performances we must put on as subjects of heteronormative ideology: just as transsexuals are forced to pass as one gender or another, many androids in fiction are forced to pass as humans. Even heteronormative sex has some element of deconstructing social presentation when the clothing is removed.
The Fetishist and his Fantasy: Challenges and Myths
Technosexuality, being an overwhelmingly male phenomenon, is easy to chalk up to misogynistic fantasies of an autoerotic patriarchy: when men have control over the production and distribution of the female body, they have full control over sex. This would explain why gynoids are far more popular than human cyborgs among technosexual fetishists. Fembotcentral.com, the Internet's most popular technosexual community, ran a poll to see whether users would prefer to fantasize about real people transformed into robots (i.e. a human consciousness in a robot body) or built robots (i.e. programmed with artificial intelligence). The built fantasy won three fifths of the total vote. [6] However, we shouldn't make the mistake of associating transformation fantasies with consensual sex and built fantasies with rape. While built robots may be programmed to serve a master and act as a sex slave, this is not always the case. Luis, a twenty-year-old technosexual fetishist from Mexico who agreed to be interviewed for this article, prefers to fantasize about robots with programming complex enough to allow them to experience sexual and emotional gratification and make their own choices regarding relationships. Conversely, transformation fantasies may involve a woman being converted into a machine against her own will, sometimes violently, or having a mind control device implanted in her brain. In these fantasies, there is in fact equal opportunity for free will or lack thereof among organic and artificial intelligences alike. In Luis' opinion, our emotions “are just advanced responses to stimuli” and are therefore theoretically capable of being experienced by a computer. Free will, however, is overdetermined. For example, we don't know to what extent physiology influences thought processes. Even if a robot with a verisimilar consciousness is raised upon activation with the same opportunities and freedoms as a human child, its physiology is still controlled by a human creator under the influence of ideology. Who decides how much digital estrogen should be running through a female robot's system? For that matter, who decides what differences there should be between a female robot brain and a male robot brain? If a robot is unhappy with its assigned sexual identity, can it go to a mechanic in the same way that we go to a surgeon for these issues? And what if a robot is unhappy with the body it has been given? The question of control over the robot's body is especially relevant in the case of the female robot body: even if gynoids with free will were to live among humans as full-fledged citizens rather than products, the fact remains that their bodies would be built according to what men want, assuming that patriarchal society will still be in place a few decades from now. We already see this kind of thing happening in human society as women modify their bodies in all kinds of ways according to the demands of men (and vice versa, although less often). Once again, technosexual fantasy proves that there is theoretically an equal opportunity among organic and artificial beings to choose between the roles of active subject and passive object. Philosophical questions like these, however, are often set aside by fetishists like Luis, who would rather not let such concerns intrude upon their erotic fantasies and distract them from their own pleasure. Nonetheless, the technosexual community is deeply concerned with the explanatory narratives that accompany the physical object of the fantasy, as we see in the passionate divide between fetishists on the subject of “built versus transformation” debate, in which both sides are capable of producing outwardly identical results. The difference between seeming and being must be taken into account in fantasies that revolve around the unseen reality beneath the surface. Why do fetishists like Luis find the concept of a robot with an AI indistinguishable from human consciousness more appealing than a robot with an actual human consciousness magically uploaded into it? They are indistinguishable, aren't they? To answer to this question, consider an analogy that most will consider easier to understand: a good number of straight men wouldn't want to have sex with woman who was born male, even if she were surgically altered to be physically indistinguishable from, say, Scarlett Johansson. This goes to show that what we commonly refer to as physical attraction is just as psychological as anything else. The hegemonic model of sexuality is construed as natural, but in reality everybody is a fetishist in some way or another. If women with unshaven legs gross you out, if you're only attracted to people of certain races, if you think that Pepsi tastes any different than Coke, then you are a fetishist. Conclusions
Technosexuality is a natural human reaction to the increasingly widespread access to sexual simulacrum, but as robots come closer and closer to human beings in appearance and intelligence, the questions raised by technosexual fantasies become less and less easy to dismiss. While loving human couples in the future may share one or more robot lovers in the same way that couples today share sex toys, some individuals may become forever secluded in this ultimate form of masturbation. Because robot lovers will be more or less modeled after common idealizations of the sexes, human beings may actually reject their sexually compatible counterparts for these love dolls, resulting in isolated societies organized around common sexual orientation. In this unlikely but frightening future, the queer community will be humanity's only ray of hope, as they will be responsible for preventing the world from simply dividing into women and their androids on one side and men and their gynoids on the other. However, this hypothetical scenario ignores the fact that technosexuals are mostly men, according members of the community. Perhaps this says something of the objectification of women, but it should also be taken noted that a good portion of the ASFR community consists of men who have been socially handicapped by Asperger Syndrome, including the founder of fembotcentral.com. [4] Socially awkward men have been saddled with the role of sexual aggressor by society's expectations of the male gender, which in the end may be a role they cannot fulfill. For these men, technology is often their only source of companionship and sexual gratification. As Japan leads the world in robotics and post-human masturbatory visual aids, its condom sales are dropping to an all time low: Okamaoto Industries, the largest condom manufacture in Japan, directly blames the Internet for decreasing the nation's sexual activity. [12] In conclusion, it is my personal belief that ASFR is a symptom of an increasingly cyborgian society mediated by electronic communications conducted from isolated spheres rather than through actual physical interaction conducted face to face. Putting a human face on the technology will only exacerbate the problem: although one technosexual fetishist claims that ASFR is “not about the objectification of females, but the feminization of objects,” [5] resemblance is not a one-way process. The more objects look like people, the more people look like objects. If we grow accustomed to treating verisimilar representations of the human body as appliances, how can we turn off that response when we come into contact with real people? If we respect ourselves as humans, we should not build machines in our own image, lest we forget who we are.
Endnotes
1. Pygmalion is a character from ancient Greek myth best known for his depiction in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Pygmalion sculpts a woman from ivory and falls in love with it. Venus then brings the statue to life and Pygmalion marries her. This myth is frequently cited by technosexuals as evidence for the timeless appeal of their fetish. [9]
2. The first three books of Spenser's The Faerie Queene were published in England in 1590. In Book III, Canto VIII, The witch's son falls in love with the character Forimell, who flees from him. The witch tries to ease her son's heartache by using her magic to create Florimell's likeness from various substances such as snow and wax and bring the shape to life.
3. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale first appeared some time around the beginning of the 17th century. The play ends with the character Hermoine being revived by animating a statue carved in her likeness.
4. E.T.A. Hoffman's Der Sandman was published in Germany in 1817. The story features a subplot in which the protagonist Nathanael is seduced by Olimpia, an automaton shaped like a woman.
5. In Free Culture, Lessig quotes an employee from a Japanese law firm who concludes that there simply isn't enough manpower to crack down on doujinshi (p. 27).
6. It is no mystery in Japan that the doujinshi market produces fresh talent to strengthen the market for legitimate comics. In Free Culture, Lessig cites law professor Salil Mehra on his theory that “everyone would be worse off if doujinshi were banned, so the law does not ban doujinshi” (p. 27).
7. “Marrionette Company” is a Japanese video game released for the Sega Dremacast in 1999. In the game, players design, build, and teach their own gynoids. [13] Key Links:
http://www.ifilm.com/video/2408202 = The short film documentary, “ASFR.”
Sources:
1. Hajime Sorayama, Official Website. 25 Apr 2007.
1. Deviant Art. 9 May 2011. Web. |
