Lonely Screens – 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 self-stimulation that put an end to frustrated fingering? An attempt at meaningful fingering?” 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 give 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, one’s love, and to lead one’s revolution?
I will address these questions here using the widely praised website OMGYes ,which sees its educational mission as bringing “women’s sexual pleasure into the open.” There, 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 emphatically 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 with several thousand American women, whose specific vulvar stimulation methods were identified, clustered, and categorized into touch techniques such as“orbiting,” “layering,”and“hinting.”[2] These can—and this is the special gimmick!—be interactively tested on photorealistic vulvas: by tapping and stroking on a smartphone or clicking and tracing with the mouse on the screen. Users receive feedback through acoustic cues—light sighs and praise, or pedagogically patient encouragement to try something different.
What peculiar understanding of sexuality does this touchscreen practice convey? The focus on haptics initially seems to do justice to a literal grasping of intimate, sensual dimensions, yet it raises questions about the differences between mechanical 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 in spheres 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 erogeneity 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 per se 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… Making female pleasure comprehensible through diagrams, infographics, and percentages, on the other hand, seems incredibly mathematical. It appears that anyone willing to pay the 45-euro fee and engage in a few evidence-based finger exercises will soon belong to an eliteof better, much smarter, much more professional lovers. A new intellectual class that“enhances”the sexual and frees it from the unpredictable, the lawless, the frightening, and the subversive—from everything thatmoves us.
OMGYes is driven by an urgent mission 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 orientation, given that proclaiming a paradigm shift through the demystification of female sexuality is by no means reinventing the wheel. This was already a concern ofthe Women’s Health Movement of the1960s through the 1980s—though more comprehensive and radical, because the educational formats ofthe so-calledconsciousness-raising groups encompassed not only techniques of 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 with a borrowed speculum in a safe women’s circle.[4] In contrast, the OMGYes dry exercises 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 the erotic. To be as revolutionary as the website presents itself rhetorically, it would have to incorporate where“second-wave feminism” beganin its search for the causes of sexual oppression: not so much in the individual as in the patriarchal and capitalist conditions that needed to be challenged in tandem—the bridging ofthe orgasm gapwithinthe pay gap.
Sexuality represents a unique and promising way of being in the world—a concentrated swirl of fantasies, inclinations, confusions, desires, questions, and lived experiences. Sex education materials offer guidance in navigating this landscape. In doing so, they do not rely on some 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 us to learn something about ourselves and our circumstances through engaging with sexuality? How can the joys of sensual pleasure be conveyed as something that makes a claim: to engage with both the other and the unfamiliar without appropriating them, while also taking one’s own peculiarities, needs, and boundaries seriously and, beyond that, making political demands? How can the sovereignty gained through this allow for spheres of uncertainty and vulnerability? Can sex education also conceive of desire as a rebellion, 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), Critical 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/
