On Cyborgian Eroticism and Technosexuality, with Empress Wu
Recently the brilliant Empress Wu reached out to me to talk about technosexuality and cyborg sex. Given my own interests in technology, and cyborgian eroticism as well as the current state of the world under COVID-19, this felt like the perfect time to explore these questions together. Please note that this is only part 2; part 1 can be found on her blog here.
Empress Wu: I have this one client with whom I have these beautiful, elaborate conversations where we’ll talk about different ways to imagine sexuality, and different ways to imagine the construct of a session. There’s such a standard frame for BDSM: a session, or a scene, and there being the boundaries of this very specific container. And there are two people who are ricocheting all around the interior of this boundary. So he and I will often talk about the possibilities that arise out of having a very long-standing dynamic with somebody, and the boundaries, as you increase the length of time of your relationship, also move and expand and increase. For example, I have this long-standing dynamic with my service submissive, Beans, which offers so many possibilities for the cyborgian, or machine or technological sex. I’ve been thinking about this situation with Beans that I have, and wondering what are the different ways I can benefit off what feels like a new extension of myself. That relationship feels very machine -- but not necessarily machine-like in the way that is like the aesthetic, but like they are a very familiar other. They feel like an extension of my own body, essentially, that I as a brain have to redirect commands towards, so it’ll still end up producing results. The dynamic I have with this person is also a queer dynamic and a kink dynamic. And both those things I think have to inherently include some aspects of machine reality or technological reality.
Sybil Fury: Oh fuck, that’s such a hot way of thinking about it. Because sometimes you tell your limb to do something, and it doesn’t necessarily respond exactly how you want, even though most of the time it does.
EW: Right. Every once in a while they fucking spasm, in which case, you figure out which salve to put on that limb so it doesn’t spasm anymore. But it’s a really interesting way to conceptualize service. It’s just like, this is a part of my body. And, I think that it ties the dominant to the submissive in a way that the dominant has stakes as well. So it’s not just as if the dominant is the recipient of service.
SF: And because it’s part of your body; it’s something that you have to care for. It’s something you have to tend to, and if something is going wrong with it, it affects the entire system.
EW: Completely. It affects the entire system. It recalibrates my conception of service with this person. We make this promise to each other, that we’re gonna get our best lives out of this. And if at one point, that doesn’t happen, then both of us are failing. Because both of us are subject to the system of the relationship. But something that I’ve been thinking about is how to better streamline this part of my body. Like, you wake up in the morning and you stretch, and then that wakes up your joints, right? You awaken these different points and areas of contact that you don’t necessarily have a physical, tactile, touch sense of, but you know they exist within you, and you can feel it.
We were also talking about the idea of me making her consume soylent for a month, so that the decision processes there are completely streamlined. She doesn’t decide, she just does. “You just consume this. You don’t have to think about it; you are just a machine that is being fueled right now. There’s no human choice that’s involved in this, you are just a toy, or you’re just something that needs maintenance every once in a while, and then this is how you are doing it and receiving it.” And this is also part of our relational dynamic. It’s very fun, and very interesting.
Photo by Massimo Mirilli
SF: This sounds similar to hacking and reprogramming fantasies, which I play with a lot. They’re fantasies that really get at what it means to live in a world where we're constantly confronted by a barrage of choices that need to be made all the fucking time. We’re not as constrained by our environment and tradition as we once were, and especially for those with privilege, the choices can feel infinite. I think this is why some people fantasize having those choices taken from them. To be in a headspace where there isn’t the option to evaluate or consider, to just empty yourself and do. I mean even the language of this fantasy - “cyborg,” “hacking,” “reprogramming” - reveals the desire to feel like a machine.
EW: Like there is a tiny little person that lives inside of you, that’s controlling all of your different movements.
SF: Or like a tall, hot person who lives elsewhere.
EW: Texting you through the phone! I wonder often what could possibly happen in the time of A.I., and what happens when we fall in love with our technology, and what happens when our technologies start to morph into the human. Do they become superhuman, or do they move backwards?
SF: For me what’s more interesting than when does the robot become human is just how human-powered robots are. Like, so much of the internet is powered by low-income workers in low-income countries doing piecemeal labor. There’s this app, Invisible Boyfriend, that didn’t hit it off but is still around, in which you can construct the profile of your fantasy boyfriend and “he” would text with you. But “he” was an assemblage of pre-teens Kolkata making $.02 for evey text volley. So it felt like you were texting one person, but you were really texting hundreds of low-income workers from around the world.
I think about how this relates to sex work, and platforms like NiteFlirt
EW: -- or OnlyFans --
SF: Yeah where it’s all about using the digital artifice to construct someone’s fantasy just how they want it. So many NiteFlirt customers (especially on the chats) don’t want another person, they just need responses that validate their own desires. A.I. could handle 80% of NiteFlirt chats...
EW: It’s like that sextbot, you know what I’m talking about? That sextbox account on Twitter?
SF: No.
EW: There’s a twitter account called sextbot, that’s literally just A.I.-generated sexts.
SF: And it would be the same! And let’s not pretend like NiteFlirt isn’t piecemeal labor. You make a few cents for every text volley, like the mTurks powering Invisible Boyfriend. It’s the same kind of labor. So yes, there is a question of what will happen to human/robot interactions when A.I. becomes more advanced, but also there’s the more urgent question of human/human interactions that are roboticized.
EW: I see. So there’s kind of a double-edged question of on the one hand, robots becoming more human, and becoming more humanistic in the way they’re interacting with people, and then on the other hand, human interactions themselves are just either becoming more robotic, or obscured by the virtual.
SF: Exactly.
Photo by Kareem Montes
EW: I’m curious about like, are there any scenes you would ever want to do that integrated technosex. Cyborgian eroticism.
SF: Oh god so many...actually, you know what would be really cool?
EW: Tell me.
SF: Okay hear me out: form an assemblage of subs’ bodies all arranged together so that they form a human machine. Part of the appeal of cyborg and techno sex is creating a sensation without actually touching someone. So my subs’ bodies would be the instruments through which I virtually inflicted pain on other subs. And their only task would be to respond to my command. To inflict what I wanted to inflict.
It’s about control, dehumanization, posture, and collaboration. Like, they’d have to balance each other to keep the machine flowing. And I’d stand on the other side of the room, giving instructions for what the components of the machine should do.
EW: And how big is it?
SF: Who knows? 5 bodies? 6? 10?
EW: 20? 1000?
SF: Bring it on.
EW: So like, enacting the violence without getting your hands dirty. Especially in the time of CoronaVirus? Very good!
SF: Oh what do you mean?
EW: Okay, hear this: virus themed session, in which you don’t want to get dirty, so you instruct your submissives, “You all infect each other.” But the infection is not a viral infection, the infection is pain.
SF: Yeah, exactly.
EW: Or the other way, right? Like you have this dichotomy between clean and dirty -- you all have to cleanse each other. Oh, sorry, this is your fantasy, I don’t mean to barge in on the moment!
SF: No go ahead!
EW: I’ve been thinking about the dichotomy between clean vs. dirty after a very long NiteFlirt call with the elaborately creative submissive I mentioned. This would be a very cyborgian twist on that dichotomy, in which you create this distance between you and this group of bodies that forms an entity, and you’re clean, you know that you’re clean, you’re “pure”. Meanwhile, your subs all have to cleanse each other, and the only way they can cleanse each other is through pain. There’s a physical cleansing, and there’s also a moral cleansing, which can take place, for example through pain, or pissing. And there’s a very funny juxtapositioning between the sterilization of piss, but also, it’s “dirty” because it’s waste? But it’s a cleaning mechanism. And then as moral cleansing they have to self-flagellate or flog somebody else. But you’re never gonna touch them. Because since they are all cleaning each other, there will always be this tiny final inch that will not be clean, and you can’t meet with them until they’re clean.
SF: And so it’s just endless.
EW: It’s endless. It’s boundary-less.
SF: That’s an interesting way to think about it. For me, it’s about control and dehumanization. The subs’ identities, desires, minds empty so that they can become my tools. Maybe I’d quadrant and mark their bodies. Like Unit 4 beat Unit 3, Quadrant A. It’s like a fucking factory.
EW: You have like glasses, and a clipboard. You’re like a fucking OSHA inspector. Sybil Fury Warehouse. Oh and there can be an aesthetic there. You, with your fucking clipboard, you’re coloring by the numbers. Or like playing Battleship, but with bodies, essentially. Could you imagine, Sybil Fury’s Factory Warehouse?
SF: YES. That’s my technosex fantasy.
EW: Yeah. In my technovillain fantasies, I also like the possibilities of using technology as a sort of barrier. Kind of like in the same way the City of New York said, “You should probably have online virtual sex so you don’t spread coronavirus,” using technology essentially as a web condom. I had this one session that I really loved with a client that I thought was really hot -- it was an interrogation session, and we only had one safeword, and the safeword was the code to the password on his phone. And the whole goal of the session was for me to get him to safeword. It was one of the hottest sessions I’ve ever had, I’ve gotta say.
SF: Interrogations scenes are so hot.
EW: And they’re so good. They’re so much fun. But it’s also funny that that ended up being the boundary; that was the “everything but” of the session. And then finally, when you surpass that, that’s when the boundary ends, or the wall comes down. It was a really, really amazing time. …
SF: Ugh now I’m just imagining you as a hot dystopian spy kidnapping and interrogating people. What do you think your technovillain aesthetic would be like?
EW: There’s a lot that goes into the materiality and aesthetic of it crafting a peak, technovillain form. I really like the idea of a technofuturistic version of myself looking tucked. Like, slid into place, and something about it that’s very compact and dense. There’s something about it that’s incredibly dense. And then, I love the idea of body itself being really dense, but then everything else around it being very excessive and luxurious, and very naturalistic and organic. So the idea of somebody who’s in pure latex, or confined to a tight container, then having all these external limbs that can be dressed up or dressed down, very floral...yeah, being really excessive in the exterior, but then very dense in the interior.
SF: Hot, I’m into it.
EW: Me too. Do you have any other things you would like to say about technological sex?
SF: Only that I think especially in these times, we should all think of technological sex as an opening and an opportunity, and not fall into a trap in which, you know, genitals, hands, mouth, dildos, and fleshlights, are the extent of how we think of technosex. That technosex is about incorporating all different kinds of objects and erotic zones. Anything around you can be a medium for pleasure and pain. You can go into chat rooms like Bill DeBlasio says, or you can also look around and ask what machines (both virtual and actual) can be inputs and outputs.
EW: I really like that idea, of technosex being about proxies, and in-betweens, and different ways in which you can experience eroticism and sexuality. Thanks, Sybil.
SF: Oh my god, thank you!
Empress Wu is an NYC-based dominatrix and cultural producer interested in exploring alternative modes of kinship available via sex work, queer s/m, digital landscapes, and cultural ancestry.