This is the first of a three-part series adapted from my talk at Arse Elektronika: "Sex and Computation in a Material World"

This was difficult for me to write, for a few reasons.

As I was researching this piece, reading various sources about porn, and feminist film criticism, and internet spectatorships, and philosophical phenomenological approaches to embodiment and lived experience, it all felt terribly relevant to my everyday life, but taken out of context it also felt really dry, and abstract and, well, lame. I live in academia right now, which means that I do a lot of sitting around, thinking, and writing. Sometimes, if I'm really lucky, I get to build something. Ultimately, sitting in an armchair and thinking about sex really gets to be an exercise in futility (and, let's be honest, a certain amount of frustration).

So I struggled a lot with the decision of how personal to make this. I've always had a hard time with the boundary between personal and professional passions, and I've always tried to be reflective and forthright about where I'm coming from when I make things or write things. I suspect that, when discussing and designing for sex, it's especially difficult to draw those lines, because our own relationship with sex, our specific turn-ons and fascinations, can seem so very particular, and yet so important to how we think about, design, make and market sexual technologies.

It probably is relevant that this is coming from someone who fell in love for the first time, at 16, over email. I had a Pavlovian response - seriously, I think I really did salivate - when I logged on to AOL and heard the "you've got mail" audio icon. I still remember how simple words on a screen could make my mouth go dry, my face cold, could make my fingertips tingle. In no way do I feel that technological mediation stunts the emotional intimacy of human relationships, including sexual ones.

So it's really easy, of course, to find web sites displaying porn or 24 hour webcams, selling a social network of teledildonics users, and facilitating dating and casual hookups; it's easy and fun to check out 2nd Life and all the kink there that is being replicated and reinvented, and there's plenty of news articles floating around online about Real Dolls. There's a ton of technologically mediated sex out there for public viewing. At the same time I can also imagine all the dirty IMs, phone sex, and nefarious uses that people are putting their webcams to that are just going on between two people, or a few people, and not being publicly shared or publicized.

OK. I can do more than imagine.

And this actually brings me to the second reason that I had such a hard time writing about porn. I'm just not that interested, personally, in porn, and I am honestly kind of afraid to admit that here. I'm a lot more interested in intimacy and sensuality. I think it's the dark matter of the sex and technology universe. To get an idea of what I mean, here are a few questions to ask yourself?

1. Do you enjoy sharing orgasms with other people? (this one's pretty much a freebie.)
2. Have you have ever shared naughty pictures with a sexual partner?
3. Have you have ever been in porn? (Yes, it's really hard to define porn, and feel free to go with your ow perception here. For my purposes here, I'm thinking of distributing or allowed someone else to distribute naughty pictures of yourself beyond just a few people. On purpose.)

If you answered "yes" to #2 and "no" to #3 then you are part of the dark matter I'm talking about. Publicly consumed porn is kind of just the tip of the iceberg.

So I'm really more interested in the negative space around pornography, all the interesting erotics in life that aren't really pornographic. Porn is something I'd consider a subset of a wider variety of sexual and erotic things we do, but the line between porn and not-porn is awfully blurry and I think becoming more so.

In this feature I'm focusing on what happened when I got a Sinulator. How commercially available teledildonics platforms seem to be operating on more of a porn-viewing model than an interactive sex-between-two-people model. I want to discuss some of the less-than-appealing aspects of bringing a really visually-based erotic model into the bedroom, at least for me and I think a lot of women.

In Part 2, I'm going to talk about webcams, my own experience with fooling around on camera, and how I think people's uses this technology is reconfiguring some of the erotics of the visual. In Part 3, I want to start bringing in other senses, particularly touch, and speculate about what it might mean to design for a kind of holistic, unified sensual erotic experience.

Teledildonics as porn ++

A few years ago I was given a Sinulator as a gift, by my then-boyfriend, of course. We had intended to use it in the context of a long-distance relationship. While I was a little disappointed that the vibrator didn't have any normal controls (that is, it could only be controlled over the internet, not directly) I was sort of excited by the prospect of experimenting with long-distance, technologically mediated intimacy. And besides, I totally dug the name.

So I went to the web site to sign up for an account, and I got the feeling that I might be considered a fringe user of this device. The website tells me that I can "do more than just watch", which makes me feel like a peeping tom, and asserts that "The Sinulator lets anyone control your sex toy over the Internet!" - anyone? Do I want just anyone controlling it? Ew. I'm invited to "search girls who want you to control their toy." And then I slapped myself on the forehead. Duh! This is porn++. (And predictably, sinulatorcams.com is registered to the same company.) Here I'd been thinking of it as an accessory for intimate, we're so in loooove, partner-type sex. I felt, honestly, pretty silly and naïve. Like I was the last person in the room to get the dirty joke and everyone but me is laughing at it.

[Here is a screen grab of the Sinulator website, but you really should feel free to visit them and explore for yourself.]

Of course, you can still use the Sinulator just with your partner. There's no reason it can't be used for porny things and for intimate things. The thing that jarred me was the cultural construction, not the physical possibilities of the device. Though the physicality of the input leaves much to be desired:

The sinulator controls are wrong in so many ways. I mean, a COCKpit? Are we 13? Is that cheesy pink penis-shaped shifter and bad punning supposed to turn people on? Let's gloss over, at least until Part 3, the fact that clicking on-screen controls is perhaps not the most pleasurable use ever of your body. Is this metaphor of the moving vehicle really just trying to turn the messy and uncertain act of bringing a woman to orgasm into the more comfortable and predictable act of operating of a machine? Lately I've seen promises on the Sinulator website of an "interactive fleshlight" that will let men control another person's sex toy with their "in-and-out activity" (not the sexiest phrasing ever, but probably sexier than a clickable cockpit).

[Ridiculous animated gif courtesy of Sinulator.com]

So far this thing seems to be a phantom product, because though other toys were available I couldn't order it. The interactive fleshlight may be vapor so far, but they're not even proposing "The Interactive jackrabbit: the harder you squeeze, the more his toy vibrates". So for the purposes of critique, built right into this technology is a heternormative model of sex in which active men do things to (but not so much with) passive women, whose role is to be acted upon and to be watched.

The Sinulator that I have but don't use has, however, helped me explore this gray area where porn and sexual interaction blur together. It's all just data sent over wires, but when data can trigger mechanical action at a distance, then there is a real blurring between interactive viewing and active sexual activity, especially when, on the spectator's (or, the way the technology is contructed, the fucker's) side at least, either or both can be accomplished with the exact same motion - a few mouse clicks. It made my brain hurt to think about it - if I telefuck my partner it's sex, but if I telefuck a stranger it's porn++? Though sex toys are very tactile devices, the Sinulator struck me as being far more oriented towards visual experience than towards tactile. It is framed as something that adds interactivity to the sexual experience of watching someone, possibly a stranger; it is not framed as a device to fill in some of the void of missing your partner's physical, tangible, presence.

This strikes me as a bit problematic, because acts of watching and being watched are really really culturally loaded, in terms of power and gender.

Leaving aside some of the fun aspects of power exchange in the bedroom, I'm sure we can all agree that that exchange is something best thought-out and negotiated between partners rather than just implicitly reproducing some often-ugly, power-laden cultural scripts. It's these larger cultural structures that I'm interested in addressing for the moment.

Especially as the world fills up with closed circuit TV cameras, camera-phones, satellite photography, and various means of widely distributing images over the internet - visibility, sight and power are intertwined. Foucault addresses this quite a lot, and his discussion of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon design for a prison has become a potent illustration. The centrally located prison guard can see anyone and everyone, at any time, whereas prisoners can't see the guard, can't tell whether or not they are being watched at any time, and can't even see each other. The ability to see is a marker of power, but so is the ability to act invisibly. Visible exposure, especially if you have no control over it, can be really disempowering.

Feminist film critique then, examines the intersection of power and visibility with gender. Laura Mulvey, in her influential article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", discusses the pleasure and the power of looking. Her theoretical work is heavily based on Freud, and I admit, I haven't drunk the psychoanalytic kool-aid, but some of her assertions ring true. She points out that mainstream narrative cinema typically intersperses the action of a male protagonist with opportunities to gaze at female bodies on display.

In a sort of reversal of the panopticon, spectators are constructed as voyeurs, sitting in the dark, unacknowledged by the characters that they are watching. This interspersal of an active male protagonist and passive female eye candy is thought also to construct spectators, and the spectator's gaze, as masculine, though film audiences may in reality be male or female. Now, this article was written in the 70's so these days there are certainly variations on that theme -- think female superheros, who act and yet are to-be-looked-at at the same time! Fast Times at Ridgemont High did this sort of voyeurism with a delicious note of self-awareness and actually tweaked many of the conventions of cinematic gaze as Mulvey explains it. But Mulvey's original claim of an "active/passive heterosexual division of labor" is echoed quite clearly in the ways that sinulator.com envisions the use of internet-enabled sex toys.

The cultural construction of women as things-to-be-looked-at extends well beyond pornography and even mainstream movies into advertisement and everyday life in public - it's a fairly common experience for us women to get looked at when we're out in public, sometimes with the blatant up-down, and sometimes with more subtlety - that awareness of gaze is a background awareness for many of us, enough that we even internalize that gaze and go through the day aware of ourselves as visible objects as well as active subjects. Walter Benjamin once commented on Paris as a 'city of mirrors', stating that 'Women see themselves here more than elsewhere, thus arises the specific beauty of Parisian women. Before a man looks at them they have already seen themselves reflected ten times." Feminist scholars like Susan Buck-Morss and Iris Marion Young have argued that "viewing oneself as constantly being viewed inhibits freedom" [buck morss] and affects everyday, embodied, lived experience, even when no one is looking.

Often, gaze seems awfully distancing, taking you outside of yourself, and preventing closeness between two people looking at one another. Physically, think of the experience of trying to kiss someone and look at them at the same time, you can't really focus your eyes, can you?

Te be clear, here's what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that all porn is bad all the time. Nor am I claiming anything essentialist along the lines of "men look and women don't".

What I am trying to argue is that some acts are culturally coded as masculine and feminine, we're usually aware of those cultural codings, and yes, to varying extents they affect our lived experience of movies, porn, being looked at, looking at people, and having sex with people. The choice to design sexual technologies specifically for visual experience, rather than other or all senses, is not politically or culturally neutral. And if I'm looking for a way to feel intimate with a faraway partner, the Sinulator does not convince me that it's gonna do the job.

I just picked up Audacia Ray's new book, Naked on the Internet, and she points out in her chapter on cyberdildonics, that other than sex workers, women are not exactly, um, jumping on the remote-controlled sex bandwagon, and it's probably worth asking ourselves why this is. I can only tell you why I'm not excited about it, and I'm the kind of girl that really really should be excited about using teledildonics. Because I am excited about it, conceptually. I already have vibrators, I often spend time far away from whoever it is I most want to be having sex with, and far from being a technophobe, I sleep with my laptop and like most machines better than I like most people. But here's the thing, the designer's intent matters. Cultural context matters. It gets communicated to me, in this case all too effectively by the sinulator website. And now, whatever I could do with that device, that intent, that context, still clings to it like a sticky residue, raising suspicions that whatever fabulous orgasm the thing gives me I may feel less than healthy about it later.

Coming soon in Part 2, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (via) my Webcam": how are people using the internet to reconfigure these gender-scripts and make that gaze less icky, more equitable, and more intimately erotic?