Cybersex Amongst Multiple-Selves and Cyborgs in the Narrow-Bandwidth Space of America Online Chat Rooms
MA Dissertation by Robin B. Hamman
~From a footnote: Four Other Forms of Cybersex
There are several kinds of cybersex which are different from the two forms of cybersex seen in AOL chat rooms. I identify software based cybersex, Virtual Reality cybersex, electronic pornography, email cybersex, and MUD based cybersex below. There may be other forms of cybersex still, but these appear to be the main ones.
In "Cybersex: Empire of the Senseless", Kevin Rafferty discusses the growing popularity in Japan of software which allows users to create their own virtual girlfriend. Over one million computer users have purchased one such programme. The caption beneath the picture which accompanies the article claims that, "Japanese women may be under threat from the booming market in computer girlfriends." Rafferty asserts that this programme reinforces the "traditional" Japanese male view of women as powerless without men. (Rafferty, 1996) This article portrays Japanese male computer users as sexual deviants because they have turned away from real women in favour of virtual ones. In this form of cybersex, the men are not turning away from reality in favour of the virtual. They are using virtually simulated women in an attempt to feel what it is like to be loved by a woman. It is not the simulation they desire, it is a real girlfriend and the accompanying feelings of love.
Outfitted with the latest in High-Tech goggles and movement sensitive body suits, a person can now have sex in virtual reality. Examples of this second form of cybersex are most often found in Science Fiction such as in the movie Lawnmower Man . Jobe, the main character in Lawnmower Man , is shown having VR cybersex with his girlfriend. Virtual Reality cybersex, like the video game type of cybersex shown above, is based on reality. I do not feel that virtual reality cybersex will ever completely simulate real sex. Its purpose appears to be to test the imagination of programmers and the capabilities of computers, not to replace real life sex.
There is another form of cybersex which, unlike software and VR based cybersex, is available on AOL. Pornography. One day as I was researching, I came across a chat room with the letters "XXX" at the end of the name. Upon entering, I noticed that no one was speaking to each other. Then my computer alerted me that I had received email. Lot's of it. I opened the first email to find that it was blank with a .pic file attached. I opened the file and was confronted with what appears to be a home photograph of a naked woman in a nurses cap standing over a toilet and using kitchen items to masturbate. I opened several of the other files just to make sure I had not been sent this file on accident. Some of these images were even more shocking. However, I have never seen , been offered, or heard of (other than in the media), any nude pictures of children while using AOL. The existence of paedophilia on the internet and online services is shocking and has warranted the headlines it has brought, but I do not feel that there is a large number of people, if any, actively trading child pornography on AOL.
In the popular fiction of Blackwell's book store in Liverpool, I came across a pile of small yellow books entitled e-mail://a.love.story.//. This novel is the fictionalised account of Stephanie Fletcher who becomes part of an online community that trades sexually explicit tales by e-mail. (Fletcher, 1996) Trading sexual stories by email is the electronic equivalent of sending them by post, and is the fourth form of cybersex identified in this appendix. People who engage in this form of cybersex are not trying to escape from reality, they are trying to tell others about it using a method of communication which allows them to write their thoughts and deliver them to their recipient in seconds.
What all the above forms of cybersex have in common is that the imagination of the user is very important if the user is to gain sexual pleasure from them. Multiple user domains (MUDs) often play host to cybersex, but I do not identify this form of cybersex as being significantly different than cybersex in online chat rooms. MUDs are virtual places where characters, objects, rooms, and actions are all created in text. MUD users often have cybersex in much the same way as IRC and chat room users do. They tell each other sexual stories or interactively masturbate. This form of cybersex is not discussed any further here because it is essentially the same as cybersex in online chat rooms only the rooms are not graphically based. Further research into the differences and similarities between MUD cybersex and AOL chat room cybersex is needed before any findings from this paper can be generalised to MUD cybersex.
~Have 'cyborgasms' changed much in the past eight years? Has the use of web cams and the proliferation of professional sex workers on-line made cyber-sex chat-rooms obsolete? Have literate wankers succumb to web-cam porn? Or are there still hard-liners who need text to get off? (I recently found that dissertations about sex can do the trick.)