Pervasive, Perverse, Perennial

I've actually seen the inside of a sex-based text-based MOO. I've a friend, who shall remain nameless, who invited me to take a look, and I was certainly curious. The experience was broadening to say the least. I learned, amongst other things, that 'water sports' does not mean having sex while water skiing.

Water sports were, in fact, on a huge list of pre-determined 'kinks' that you could toggle on your character, that could be accessed by anyone on the game who typed +kinks . It was considering good form to be comprehensive here, and while there was a large and comprehensive list of kinks, ranging from 'size queen' to 'big bodied' to 'knife play' to plain old 'vanilla', there was also the option of writing up your own custom kinks. Very liberating, one might assume.

But I found, from my fascinated investigations, that rather than there being a destruction of hierarchies and discrimination, what ended up happening is that the representations people used in this cyberpornographic space tended to emphasize classically racist/sexist/domination based relations. Black characters always had huge penises, improbably so. Women were generally 'sluts' or 'bimbos' or tight laced librarian types who could be forced into adopting one of the previous two roles. There was a hardwired system of power relations, with masters and slaves, and one's personal position a required characteristic or 'tag' that needed to be chosen and could not be altered without consent from the authorities running the game. In short, freeing up identities and symbols caused these identities and symbols to develop a sort of giganticism, become almost hyper-racist and hyper-sexist.

As such, I think that the optimism of cybersex is questioned rightly by the authors we've read for next class. Certainly these forms of sex are physically 'safe', and it is much better that these fantasies be played out in a consequence-free environment, there is something concerning, in my eyes, about the way that unmoored and unmediated symbols, left to play, in fact tend towards greater expressions of domination. It could be argued, and cogently so, that the fact that one can play, with two different characters, both a master and a slave, but the need to separate to two demands that they be considered mutually exclusive. Separations are maintained and even emphasized, and cyberspace becomes, rather than a frontier of freedom, a reinstantiation of those fantasmatic desires that structure relations of domination.