Pornography has found another medium - and it's digital. Sex and violence are on the computer screen - full colour, hi-res, stereo sound. Well, almost.
Since the Apple Mac brought hi-res graphics to the desktop back in 1984, men have been pumping porn in and out of computers. The casual dissemination of computer data is easy, cheap and almost untraceable. Electronic bulletin boards worldwide offer downloads of anything from bitmap graphics of tacky Page Three nudes to animated hardcore. You can join in explicit electronic mail sexchat all over the globe. If you're bored with sex, you can just tap into violence direct - play the arcade game conversion Pitfighter, with digitised screenshots of people pounding each other till the blood flows, or get your hands on racist filth like Pakibash and Konzentration Kamp Manager to practice genocide. And in the future? You can look forward to Interactive CD Porn and virtual Teledildonics - 21st century-lifestyle safe sex.
As with all other media, computer porn is almost exclusively a male preserve. The usual spurious justifications apply: "....it's a harmless diversion.... it's only natural.... it helps defuse "violent male sexuality".... the "wimmin" are over-reacting...." Some would even argue that sex fuels the new technology, like video porn is supposed to have stimulated the video revolution. Most of these justifications boil down to a sub-teenage "Cos we can...." And you sure can't do much else - jacking off in front of a computer? Please. Dried sperm will do nothing good for your keyboard membrane.....
Throughout the 1980's there has been a steady trickle of computer software with an exploitatively sexual angle. Tedious strip-pokers with ghastly lo-res graphics; MacPlaymate, with its ever-so-slightly-animated line art, sampled moans and "Toolbox" of insertables; digitized graphics ripped off via hand scanner from softporn glossies and hardcore meat mags. Most of this stuff is probably the result of teenage years spent learning machine code and trying to hack NatWest Bank - emotional retards who'd rather kick up a grainy meat puppet onscreen than talk to a woman in the real world. The game Teenage Queen strips Japanese-style graphics down to their skin, then peels away the flesh to reveal microcircuitry. For some men, the ideal woman is still a Stepford Wife, a machine. Chalk it up to ignorance and fear. That's not to say that all of this stuff is irredeemable. Author ofMacPlaymate, Michael Saenz's new game Virtual Valerie keeps its player's hands on the keyboard, where they belong. If you don't satisfy Valerie's insatiable tastes, she kicks you out of the game - some players reportedly collapse with irreparable repetitive stress injuries... But Saenz admits that the irony is almost certainly lost on most Valerie admirers - "I see computer users as control freaks who love sex puppets," he says. Meanwhile Virtual Valerie 2 is coming...
Rather more disturbing is the dissemination of porn on the global network of computer communications; a mess of e-mail, info services and on-line conferences shovelling and sharing data 24 hours a day. The ad-hoc, unregulated nature of computer comms has been a driving force in the rapid development of the technology - ideas and data shared without discrimination and with a common aim and purpose. The big commercial systems are hot on self-censorship, mostly to stop the upload/download of viruses - you won't find much nastiness on CompuServe or MacTel. But anyone can set up a computer bulletin board with freebie software and a modem - and that's where the garbage can collect. A SysOp who claims "I didn't know it was there, M'Lud" has a perfect defence in law even if he's lying and put Swedish Erotica disks 1 to 27 there himself.
Most of this stuff is grainy rubbish that wouldn't offend anyone even if they could make sense of the vaguely human outlines of coloured dots. Superintendent Michael Hames of New Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad could only think of one screenshot with animals... Anyway, 256 colour, hi-resolution monitors are expensive, and graphics animations need fast computers with several megabytes of memory, placing quality computer porn outside the province of most kids running half-meg Atari's and Amigas. Digitised porn images often crop up on office hardware though, where powerful Apple Macs and PCs can display them for "the lads", to the veiled disgust of female co-workers. (If this applies to you, for direct action in the workplace, see WORKPLACE REVENGE) But the new technology is changing fast. Five years hence or less, cheap home computers will be capable of real-time video display from compact disc, at a quality that will make PAL TV look and sound like 1940's Hollywood. Sadly, the "lads" will still be snickering around their tame, tacky digital fantasies.
Its even possible to stumble across computer porn by accident. Compact disks can hold an enormous amount of data - enough for a few hardcore image files to get lost in, as happened this summer to a CD datadisk being sold in conjunction with PC Today magazine. Two kids were exploring the hundreds of programs and images on the disk bought by their father, and found "pictures of men and women in explicit poses" (to quote PC Today's press release). To check every file on the disk would have taken weeks.
Out on the vile fringe is the racist stuff. Named after the famous Nazi-hunter, the Simon Weisenthal Centres in France and the U.S.A. keep a close watch on the spread of neo-Nazi activity. Originating in Germany about five years ago and written for the popular Atari ST, there are now up to 140 games circulating, some purporting to be written by "Hitler and Hess". A study by an Austrian newspaper earlier this year revealed that, of a sample of students in one city, 39% knew about these games and over 20% had played them. Aaron Breitbart, Senior Researcher at the Weisenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said that copies were turning up all over Germany, Austria, France, Holland and the UK. Even he hadn't heard of PakiBash, a cracked and re-coded version of Mastertronic's shoot-em-up game Sidewinder - made right here in the good ole' UK.
Still, the computer games industry can hardly call the kettle mucky. Ever since Space Invaders, the bulk of computer games have been based on the "how-many-different-ways-can-you-blow-Them-away" scenario, "Them" being aliens or street punks or goblins or whatever. "Joystick thumb" is a recognized repetitive strain injury.... Then there's the Dungeons and Mythical Beasts simulations, the war games, maze games and flight simulations - mostly involving aerial combat, and all pandering to a perceived market of boys and young men, aged 11 to 25. Hardly surprising that computers offer little fascination to young women. Professor Provenzo from the University of Florida bemoans the moral fate of the Nintendo generation in his book Video Kids. But until the manufacturers wise up to the fact that computer recreations that appeal to more than the lowest common denominator might sell more units, we are stuck with the "scrolling shoot-em-up" for a while longer.
The feminist movement has established a firm line on porn. Andrea Dworkin, Clare Short, Catherine Itzin and others draw a clear division between political censorship and the need to arrest the degradation of the image - heterosexual pornography is a doubtful liberty for men, bought at the expense of women's humanity. Detective Superintendent Hames of the Yard is sympathetic to the feminist cause: "There's some horrible stuff out there and its oppressive - it doesn't exactly enhance the quality of life." In conversation, he is a likeable and pragmatic man, accepting that: "What is now acceptable is very blurred". Neither is he a homophobe, though his department have pressed home some contentious prosecutions against gay porn over the last few years and taken flack for it. He is not optimistic about containing computer porn - "We can't get ahead of the game, we can only follow it." He knew nothing about racist software - when I showed him the screenshots of Konzentration Kamp Manager and Aryan Test faxed through from the Weisenthal Centre in L.A., he was clearly shocked enough to want copies, details and talked about contacting Interpol. What they can do about this kind of racist "sneakerware", where schoolkids hand around floppy disks with the fags and the sniggers, is hard to say. But if anything is designed to deprave and corrupt, this is it. I'd like to think that much of the interest in this drivel is just teenage "gross-out" factor - the same drive to "schadenfreude" that makes splatter movies so attractive. I hope so.
What about the future? Technology is changing so fast, we are seeing full paradigm shifts in concept every few years. Last year's science fiction is this year's fact. William Gibson wrote about the "feelies" in his Neuromancer trilogy nearly ten years ago. The last book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, has the eponymous heroine in a casual sex encounter captured for total recall on a "sim-stim" recorder - a future feelie camcorder. David Cronenberg was wrong about the Videodrome. It's not interactive enough - the battle for the mind of North America - and Japan, Europe, Australasia and the Pacific Rim - will be fought in cyberspace. Virtual Reality is on the way. In his book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold, self-appointed chronicler of this new and almost hypothetical technology, devotes a chapter to "teledildonics" - future telephone sex plus. Mike Saenz says: "A good sex simulation would be much more fun - and a lot more thought-provoking - than a flight simulation." But the exponents of Virtual Reality are not all male, and not all Mondo 2000 wireheads like Mike Saenz. In the U.S.A., there are many women working at the forefront of the new technologies. With luck, they will provide the invention and originality that was missing from the seventies and eighties. Brenda Laurel is founder of the company Telepresence Research in California, and her book Computers as Theatre shows a proselytizing spirit coupled to a scientist's methodology. She wants Virtual Reality to be a place for "Dionysian experiences... of the most intimate and powerful kind". And whether or not she means sex, VR sex is what hooks the imagination hardest. To begin with, virtual worlds will be limited in scope - cartoon 3D-images, stereo sound, limited tactile experience - though the same technology used to make the Spitting Image puppets could be used for primitive teledildonics. Later, things will get more weird, as future technologies like "Smart Skin", low-capacity laser "retinal projectors" and even silicon-chip-to-human-neuron interfaces are made real. Virtual reality could offer a levelling factor to porn. It's an interactive never-never land where anyone can be anyone, or anything - if you can pay the phone bill. As a female friend puts it, "If, in the privacy of my own bedroom, I could conjure up an Anthony Hopkins, then yes please..." She sees no problem in this, likening it to a trip to an adult Disneyland, quite separate from the constant bombardment of trivialised and degraded images of women that surround her now.
There is a popular misconception about sex and technology to be trashed. Was it the lure of private, personal video porn that drove the video revolution? Sure, you could watch it in the privacy of your own home instead of surrounded by other grunting, raincoat-clad perverts in a Brewer or 42nd Street fleapit. Is Telepresence Sex driving the New Technology? This Boy's Own argument is as spurious as any other concerning porn - its a self-justifying male fantasy, perpetuated by men like Mike Saenz - "I think lust motivates technology. Let's face it, the first personal robots are not going to be bought by people to serve drinks." Please, Mike. Sex only sells things to people who have been trained to equate sex with power. And that seems to be at the core of computer porn because, for a lot of men, computing is just another power trip. Truth to tell, there's not as much computer porn around as some might like to believe, especially compared with print or video - but what there is runs the full continuum, from lip-gloss bimbo porn for the emotionally retarded to racist killing games for the morally void. And sadly, they all have one thing in common. Fear.
Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold, pub. Secker & Warburg 1991
Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel, pub. Addison Wesley 1991
Mondo 2000 for the Mike Saenz quotes.
Sex & Censorship by Catherine Itzin (Red Letters, Spring 1982)
Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin, Women's
Press 1981
Video Kids by Prof. Eugene Provenzo, pub. Harvard Press 1991
Supt. Michael Hames at New Scotland Yard.
The Simon Weisenthal Centre, Los Angeles.
The sleaze merchants who donated digital hardcore for research purposes -
you know who you are....
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