Lonely surfaces - sexual enhancement on the touchscreen
This article first appeared in the print edition of the institute's magazine 'IFKnow', Spring 2020
"It's the usual problem of boundaries. When was the first time you satisfied yourself? The first successful autoerotic stimulation that put an end to frustrated fingering? The attempt at meaningful finger play?" asks the protagonist of the film "Jung & Wild"[1] in her blog of the same name, in which she philosophizes about her erotic endeavours. Yes, how do we actually learn to give ourselves and others pleasure? Do we follow intuitions, do we find out by trial and error, or do we look for tips and tricks to guide us?
With the advent of so-called sex technologies, there are new ways to increase our arousal skills. But what does it do to pleasure and desire if they are seen as "skills" that can be mastered and improved? Isn't the potential in dealing with something as transgressive as lust/desire that it shows completely different ways of living one's life, one's love and leading one's revolution?
I will address these questions here using the euphorically discussed website OMGYes which sees its educational mission as bringing "women's sexual pleasure to light". There, in blunt but never vulgar videos, sympathetic-looking women demonstrate their preferences for intimate touching. The detailed and precise explanations are empowering in their openness and the advice on how to de-stress: "The journey is the reward."
The design is emphatically serious and seems to counter any comparison of pornography with its scientific approach when it emphasizes exploring "new paths to more pleasure based on current research". This is based on online surveys conducted by the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Kinsey Institute with several thousand US women, whose specific vulva stimulation methods were determined, clustered and categorized into touch techniques such as "orbiting","layering" and "hinting".[2] These can - and this is the special gimmick! - can be tested interactively on photorealistic vulvas: by tapping and swiping on the smartphone or clicking and tracing with the mouse on the screen. Users receive feedback via acoustic cues - through light sighs and praise or pedagogically patient encouragement to try something else.
What peculiar understanding of sexuality does this touchscreen usage convey? The focus on haptics initially seems to do justice to a literal grasping of intimate, sensual dimensions, but raises questions about the differences between machine sensory technology and organic sensitivity. Bodies are capable of amazing things. Unimagined forces act on them and dwell within them, especially when they desire and move in spheres such as passion and ecstasy - elusive realms somewhere between stimulus and risk, which the exploration of "female pleasure" is nevertheless aimed at. However, swiping across the smooth surface of a screen, which in its image detail reduces erogeneity to a so-called primary sexual organ and pleasure to the execution of clear touch sequences, does nothing to keep the promise of moving possibilities of experience. The technical medium fails per se in the representation of corporeality as something to be explored, which is also relief-like, porous, hairy, warm, smelling, moist - and thus potentially resistant and "polymorphously perverse"[3]. Rather, the program almost parodically exposes the libidinous occupation of our smart devices, which we fondle by swiping, carry close to our bodies (often close to our crotch), to which we entrust our most intimate secrets, take them to bed with us and into whose openings we whisper while talking on the phone ... Making female lust understandable by means of diagrams, infographics and percentages, on the other hand, seems incredibly mathematical. It seems that anyone willing to pay the 45 euro fee and engage in some evidence-based finger exercises will soon belong to an elite of better, very clever, very professional lovers. A new intellectual class that "enhances " the sexual and liberates it from the unpredictable, the irregular, the frightening and the subversive - from everything that touches.
OMGYes follows an urgent concern to remove taboos from female pleasure, but its view of sex positivity threatens to tip over into sex positivism. This could also be due to the ahistorical orientation of the project, if the proclamation of a paradigm shift through the demystification of female sexuality is by no means reinventing the wheel. This was already the concern of the Women's Health Movement of the 1960s to 1980s - but more comprehensive and radical, because the educational formats of the so-called consciousness-raising groups encompassed not only satisfaction techniques, but an entire field of sexual health and rights and relied on inventive and courageous approaches to collective exchange. In addition to discussion groups and counselling opportunities, they were characterized above all by their practical experiential spaces, such as the truly spectacular vaginal self-examination with the appropriated speculum in a protected women's circle.[4] In contrast, the OMGYes drying exercises in front of the screen seem mechanical, isolated and limited to private pleasure. As the cultural scientist Laura Frost recognized, the term "feminism" is conspicuously absent from OMGYes.[5] This means that the political nature of the erotic is misjudged, crossed out, forgotten. In order to be as revolutionary as the website presents itself rhetorically, it would have to include where "second-wave feminism " began in order to search for the causes of sexual inequalities: less in the individual than in the patriarchal and capitalist circumstances that had to be contested in alliance - the opening up of the orgasm gap in the pay gap.
Sexuality represents a unique and promising mode of being-in-the-world, a concentrated hodgepodge of fantasies, inclinations, confusions, desires, questions and experiences. Educational media offer navigational aids for this. They do not fall back on a natural essence of sexuality, but rather help to constitute how we want to understand intimacy. How can formats of sexual education become resonance spaces that invite us to learn something about ourselves and our sexuality by engaging with it? How can the joys of pleasure be conveyed as something that makes a claim: to engage with the other and the strange without appropriating it, as well as taking idiosyncrasies, needs and boundaries seriously and making political demands? How can the resulting sovereignty allow for spheres of uncertainty and vulnerability? Can sexual education also grasp desire as rebellion, as a transformative force that can initiate changes that promise a life of love not only for oneself, but collectively?
[1] Joven y Alocada, Director: Marialy Rivas, Chile 2012, 96 min.
[2] Debby Herbenick, Tsung-Chieh (Jane) Fu, Jennifer Arter, Stephanie A. Sanders, Brian Dodge (2018): Women's Experiences With Genital Touching, Sexual Pleasure, and Orgasm: Results From a U.S. Probability Sample of Women Ages 18 to 94, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 44:2, 201-212, DOI: 10.1080/0092623X.2017.1346530
[3] Cf.: Sigmund Freud: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, (1905), Studienausgabe, Bd. V, Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer 2008.
[4] Cf. e.g. Wendy Kline: Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave, University of Chicago Press 2010.
[5] Laura Frost: Cracking the Clit, in: Logic Magazine, Issue 2: Sex, California 2017, https://logicmag.io/sex/cracking-the-clit/
