Computer Blue

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What sex will look like in 1999.

Prince is the ideal “new flesh.”

Hold up a moment! Wait. I have a quasi-defensible point here. You can run back to your four cherished Michael Jackson .mp3s in a moment, he’s not getting any deader. Prince though… if we’re going to talk about sex and technology, what better pop cultural point of entry is there? In the mid-80s the grimy wetware-modded cyberpunk futurism of Neuromancer and Videodrome was at its height. Contemporaneously, Prince was in the midst of gutting the organic body of classic post-James Brown funk and soul, replacing the aerobic horn sections of yore with banks of computerized synths, booting live drummers and bassists and granting the genre’s hip-swiveling rhythmic foundation to programmed keyboards. Prince wasn’t anywhere near the first to experiment with electronic instruments, but where Kraftwerk backspaced emotion and New Order begged for companionship contra coitus, the unnatural gleam of Prince’s revolutionary (pun) cyberfunk dripped with sex. Those synths may have been sterile, but they certainly weren’t impotent.

Sure, the lyrics to songs like Darling Nikki and Little Red Corvette were blatantly salacious, but the lyrics to Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express could’ve been about nailing Olivia Newton-John and it still wouldn’t be sexy the way the wholly synthetic Kiss is. Prince’s entire public image, prior to his bizarre symbol period, was about transgression: masculine/feminine, black/white, queer/straight, the sexual/the divine… it was about collapsing binaries, forcing them into a controversial synthesis. I would add the division of man and machine to his collection of folded binaries. There’s a holistic serenity to Prince’s most forward-thinking work, an acceptance of technological integration that jumps from the same zeitgeist as the cyberpunks but emerges with less of the nicotine-stain soot that they wore with such snide pride.

It’s a rule of, uh, “thumb” that human beings can turn any technological advance into something useful for sex. It’s in our wiring, our need for the basic thrust-thrust-twitch of orgasm and the endorphin-drowse closeness afterward, and only the most dogmatic techno-purists (read: enforced-celibate programmers) seem optimistic (let alone enthusiastic) about shedding this primitive urge. The ruggedly pragmatic approach of the cyberpunk movement (and those movements with which it is associated) meant they were unlikely to sidestep the ickier aspects of technologically mediated boot-knocking; Blade Runner‘s pleasurebots and Videodrome‘s cassette-deck womb stem from the same bitterly post-Puritan worldview. Sex will always be present in a cybernetic world, but there’s no guarantee it will be anything but as consumptive and disposable as anything else blowing around the streets.

Lia Hotchkiss is right to identify the “ambivalence” to cybertransformations in cyberfunk-derived fiction. Part of it is a cynical acceptance of the belief that we will always be subject to the dominance of rich men and corporations. Sex is commodified within moments of becoming technologized; if, as the Bad Brains once sung, “we all must pay to cum” then we can be assured the rich man will cum first and everyone else’s pleasure agency declines with their tax bracket. Hence why, quoting Hotchkiss again, one man’s “transcendence of the body” so often forces a “restabilization of the real” for someone else. In the 2009 b-movie Gamer we see an expansion upon William Gibson’s concept of “meta puppet” proxy prostitutes. In the most obvious example, we are treated to an image of an almost baroquely grotesque man, obese and photographed as if he’d recently bathed in crude oil and chicken grease, who pays a monthly fee to remotely manipulate an attractive woman into feeding his fantasies. The woman’s experience is to be trapped within one’s body and experience, while the man is able to transcend his own gender and gruesome appearance to achieve satisfaction. All of Gamer‘s unfortunate puppets correspond to Baudrillard’s concept of the New Schizophrenic, defined as follows:

“[One who is] open to everything in spite of himself,” who experiences “too great a proximity of everything, the unclear promiscuity of everything which touches, invests, and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.’” (Tania Modleski qtd. in Hotchkiss)

The optimistic reading of Cronenberg’s films like Videodrome and eXistenZ suggests that leaving one’s body map to become New Flesh is sufficient to sidestep the corporate hierarchy, to slay the sinister Videodrome in other words; “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” as Prince would have it. Gamer and its ilk posit that you must pay for your technology, and when technology becomes intermingled with something as essential as sex you are subject to complete control. Prince by comparison represents a fantasy of liberation from all bondage, save of the consensual variety; sex as route to revelation, to permanence, to immanence. It’s that attitude, the sense that through cybertransformation we might become something greater than machine or man which prevents even the grimmest cyberpunks from moving past ambivalence into outright despair; we might lose to the corporate machines, but we’ll still look okay bathing in the purple rain.

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Everything beautiful and terrible about robot sex in one pic.