Lonely Surfaces – Sexual Enhancement via Touchscreen
This article first appeared in the print edition of the institute's journal, "IFKnow," Spring 2020
“It’s the usual problem of boundaries. When did you first masturbate? The first successful act of autoerotic stimulation that put an end to frustrating fingering? An attempt at a meaningful fingering session?” asks the protagonist of the film “Jung & Wild”[1] in her blog of the same name, where she reflects on her erotic endeavors. Yes, how do we actually learn to bring pleasure to ourselves and others? Do we follow our intuitions, figure things out on our own through trial and error, or do we seek out helpful tips and tricks?
With the advent of so-called “sex technologies,” new possibilities for enhancing our ability to experience arousal have become available. But what happens to pleasure and desire when they are viewed as “skills” that can be mastered and improved? Doesn’t the potential in engaging with something as transgressive as lust lie in the fact that it reveals entirely different ways to live one’s life, to love, and to lead one’s revolution?
I'll address these questions here using the widely acclaimed website OMGYes ,which sees its educational mission as “bringing women’s sexual pleasure into the open.” In candid yet never vulgar videos, likable women demonstrate their preferences for intimate touch. The detailed and precise explanationsare empoweringin their openness and their tips for reducing stress: “The journey is the destination.”
The design presents itself as decidedly serious and seems to counter any comparison to pornography with its scientific approach, emphasizing the exploration of “new paths to greater pleasure based on current research.” This is based on online surveys conducted by the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Kinsey Institute involving several thousand American women, whose specific methods of vulvar stimulation were identified, clustered, and categorized into touch techniques such as“orbiting,” “layering,”and“hinting.”[2] These techniques—and here’s the special twist!—can be interactively tested on photorealistic vulvas: by tapping and swiping on a smartphone or clicking and tracing with the mouse on the screen. Users receive feedback through audio cues—such as soft sighs and praise, or patient, educational encouragement to try a different approach.
What peculiar understanding of sexuality does this touchscreen usage convey? The focus on haptics seems, at first glance, to do justice to a literal “grasping” of intimate, sensual dimensions, yet it raises questions about the differences between machine-based sensors and organic sensitivity. Bodies are capable of astonishing things. Unimagined forces act upon them and dwell within them, especially when they desire and move through realms such as passion and ecstasy—elusive realms somewhere between stimulation and risk, which the exploration of “femalepleasure” ultimatelyaims to address. Swiping across the smooth surface of a screen—which, in its frame, reduces eroticism to a so-called primary sexual organ and pleasure to the execution of clear sequences of touch—holds none of the promise of moving experiential possibilities. The technical medium fails, by its very nature, to represent corporeality as something to be explored—something that is also textured, porous, hairy, warm, fragrant, moist—and thus potentially resistant and “polymorph-perverse.”[3] Rather, the program almost parodically exposes the libidinal appropriation of oursmartdevices—which we fondle byswiping, carry close to our bodies (often near our crotches), entrust with our most intimate secrets, take to bed with us, and into whose openings we whisper while on the phone… Explaining female pleasure through diagrams, infographics, and percentages, on the other hand, comes across as incredibly mathematical. It seems as though anyone willing to pay the 45-euro fee and commit to practicing a few evidence-based finger exercises will soon belong to an elite group ofbetter, very clever, very professional lovers. A new intellectual class thathas “enhanced”sexuality and freed it from the unpredictable, the unregulated, the frightening, and the subversive—from everything thatmoves us.
OMGYes is driven by an urgent desire to break the taboo surrounding female pleasure, yet its conception of sex positivity risks veering into sex positivism. This may also stem from the project’s ahistorical approach, given that proclaiming a paradigm shift through the demystification of female sexuality is by no means reinventing the wheel. This was already a central concern ofthe Women’s Health Movement of the1960s through the 1980s—though in a more comprehensive and radical way, because the educational formats ofthe so-called“consciousness-raising” groups encompassed not only techniques for sexual satisfaction 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 counseling opportunities, they were distinguished above all by their hands-on experiential spaces, such as the truly spectacular vaginal self-examination using a speculum they had learned to use within a safe women’s circle.[4] In contrast, the OMGYes dry runs in front of the screen seem mechanical, isolating, and limited to private pleasure. As cultural studies scholar Laura Frost noted, the term “feminism” is conspicuously absent from OMGYes.[5] This misrepresents, erases, and obscures the political dimension of eroticism. To be as revolutionary as the website presents itself to be, it would have to incorporate theapproach of “second-wave feminism”in seeking the causes of sexual oppression: not so much in the individual as in the patriarchal and capitalist circumstances that needed to be challenged in tandem—the exploration ofthe orgasm gapwithinthe pay gap.
Sexuality represents a unique and promising way of being in the world—a concentrated whirlwind of fantasies, inclinations, confusions, desires, questions, and lived experiences. Sex education resources offer guidance in navigating this landscape. In doing so, they do not rely on a “natural essence” of sexuality, but rather help shape how we wish to understand intimacy. How can sexual education formats become spaces of resonance that invite people to learn about themselves and their circumstances through an exploration of sexuality? How can the joys of sensual pleasure be conveyed as something that demands both an openness to others and to the unfamiliar—without appropriating them—and a serious consideration of one’s own idiosyncrasies, needs, and boundaries, while also making political demands? How can the autonomy gained through this process allow for spheres of uncertainty and vulnerability? Can sex education also conceive of desire as a form of resistance—as a transformative force capable of initiating changes that promise a life of love not only for oneself but collectively?
[1] *Joven y Alocada*, directed by 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] See: Sigmund Freud, *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality*(1905), Study Edition, Vol. V, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2008.
[4] See, among others, 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/
