The Inspector-General of Misconception (8 page)

We have been urged (but not in the sense of having ‘urgings', as in the sense of ‘groin') to investigate the new forms of sex.

We live in these extraordinary times when truly new things are confronting us. Or trying to confront us, as we try to duck and weave from destiny.

As the Inspector-General of Paradigm Shifts, we are commissioned to confront these; as arduous as this may be, we shoulder the burden with a stern determination. Be warned: let no one stand in our way.

We have been urged, then, to look at the internet and in other places to determine whether we are confronted with what might be truly described as a ‘new' type of sexual experience.

We are told that there are six forms of new sex and perhaps a seventh.

First let us look at the now, more familiar, forms of new sex.

One is now all too sadly familiar –
safe sex
where all effort is made to avoid contact with bodily fluids – and needs no further examination. We argue that it is qualitatively different from sex which simply tries to avoid impregnation by using a condom. It is an attempt to avoid virtually any contact whatsoever with bodily fluids with the exception perhaps of saliva.

We shall see that perhaps the other forms of new sex are a rechannelling of the sexual drive into safe sex routes (no pun intended). Or maybe not.

Because of a conjunction of technology and The AIDS Plague we have now a second type of new sex –
commercialised telephone-sex
.

We have had forms of telephone-sex for as long as there have been telephones (Queen Victoria had one in 1878; a telephone, that is) but commercialised sex is different.

We direct the attention of the Inquiry to the film
Girl 6
which is something of an ethnographic documentation of the telephone-sex industry, with its protocols, training sessions, counselling, professional ethics and industry subculture (and presumably it has an Annual Convention in Hawaii).

The film documents the nature and the extent and sophistication of this form of sex.

Now we turn to sex and the internet. Sex on the internet is called net-sex or cybersex and takes a number of forms.

We shall use the term ‘net-sex'.

The internet may be the only place where some people feel safe about sexual encounters with strangers.

The third type of new sex is where you go to an internet site on your computer and
share erotica
– text or pictures – for use In the Privacy of Your Own Home. It is a sharing with a stranger. Quite often, the photographs are of that person.

The fourth new form of sex is where you
sexually interact
, in text, with another person on the internet to cause sexual excitation in real time.

People tell us that it is surprising how emotionally and physically powerful this interactive version of net-sex is. We would need, however, evidence of the quality of the witness's former sex life (from their partners) and this will be presented when the Inquiry holds its session, ‘Truthtelling About Sex: Some Problems'.

It is reported to us that net-sex has become common among teenage boys.

Our first witness is Sherry Turkle, net theorist, who tells how a sixteen-year-old boy used computer communication for erotic thrills. ‘I used to masturbate with
Playboy
,' the boy told her, ‘now I do net-sex with a woman in another state.'

The boy described how the sexual stimulation of
Playboy
and the internet were different.

‘With net-sex, it is fantasies. My lover doesn't want to meet me in real life. With
Playboy
it was fantasies too but with the net there is also the other person … So I don't think of what I do as masturbation.

‘Although you might say that I'm the only one who's touching me … it's part of sex with two people, not just me in my room.'

We intervene at this point to agree that one cannot conveniently masturbate during a face-to-face conversation. (Thinks: Well, if in a public place, it cannot be flamboyant masturbation.)

Although we, the Inspectorate, rush to say that we acclaim synchronous masturbation between and among people, even in face-to-face situations, preferably though, in private.

The Inspectorate recalls that schoolboys sometimes have a hole in their trouser pocket through which they pleasure themselves.

And we read somewhere that women sometimes rock their crossed legs. And ride horses or motorcycles, to achieve the same result.

On this we admit some evidence from American novelist, Kathy Acker, who says, ‘I am constantly thinking about sex – I think sex when I am on the net … but … flesh and blood is best. Net-sex might be okay, but I doubt it could replace my motorcycle.' She owns two – a Virago 1100 and a 750.

More of that at our Inquiry into Misbehaviour with Horses.

We are reminded too, of a Libertarian Society conference a long time ago where psychologist John Maze, in answer to a question about what the qualitative difference was between masturbation and other sex, replied, in his dry, tentative way, ‘Well, I suppose that, for a start,
non-masturbatory sex involves at least one other person.'

But that was in another world, in more innocent times, when the summers were endless.

While doing sex on the net, people feel that they can pretend to change gender and age.

This is seen, by theorists, as opening transgender possibilities and with it a
transformation of desire itself
.

We are told that something called ‘genderfuck drag' is almost the fashion among those using the net for sex.

We raise our eyebrows and we lick our lips.

We should not forget that in some ‘real' non-computer sex there is, of course, role-playing. And, speaking philosophically, perhaps much ‘real' sex, body-to-body, is
simulation
, not only through fantasy, but because the sexual experience is substituting for some Platonic ideal of sexuality which we can never find.

Just an idea.

Five is
virtual reality,
a clumsy and underdeveloped simulation of sex involving goggles and gloves. This is unlikely to cross our paths for some time and we will say no more about it. The Inspector-General sampled virtual reality at Disney World in Florida and does not relish it as a potential sexual escapade.

Sherry Turkle, with her earnest Californian ‘life enrichment' ethic, argues for a sixth form of new sex which flows from the third.

It is to take from the sexual interaction on the net a type of awareness so as to ‘enrich the
real
and to cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae … for personal transformation.'

So.

We suppose Sherry is saying that we could, if we wished, instead of taking erotica pictures away from the computer, take away a whole new self. And bring a big surprise to our partners. If one wants personal transformation. That is. And if one's partner wants to be surprised.

The legal and ethical questions facing us with new sex are obvious.

Is net-sex or telephone-sex, or indeed, any of the new forms of sex a moral equivalent of adultery?

Is sex with a computer-generated image of a minor tantamount to child sex? The US has banned these images.

We have already ruled earlier on the condom (Ruling #764): that sex with a condom is not ‘real' infidelity on the basis that the only ‘real sex' is an exchange of bodily fluids (call us old-fashioned; mock us as a purist …).

We now rule that net-sex, telephone-sex and virtual reality sex, at least, cannot be seen as threatening a mature and serious relationship between two people in that these are not a form of auditioning for the ‘next' relationship. We therefore classify them not as adultery or cheating but as Harmless Fun. God knows, we need more Harmless Fun in this increasingly acrimonious, moralistic and spiritualistic world. (Excuse us. We foam at the mouth, a little.)

We suppose you should clear this interpretation with your partner. Unless you have a philosophy which embraces the human need for the clandestine.

Good luck. Please report your negotiations back to the Inquiry.

Which brings us to the seventh sexual possibility.

Part of the speculation surrounding the net is that human beings (at least the higher income, better educated and youthful part of the English-speaking world) are increasingly intertwined with technology and with each other via technology, and that distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex.

It is true that the computer is a highly personal technological ‘extension of self'.

Every piece of technology is an extension of the human body. The sewer is an extension of the bowel. The fork is an extension of the fingers. The knife an extension of the teeth and fingernails, and spoon the cupped hand. And so on.

The computer extends the memory, the mind, the voice, the ears, the
personality
and also the alter-personality.

To have a computer stolen is to experience something quite different from having, say, a television set stolen.

And not only because of the potential of losing material but because of the depth of the extensions of self that the computer embodies. Strange as it may sound.

According to the net theorists, it could shift the boundaries of the skin. Technology guru, Sandy Stone, argues that we are already ‘transhuman' in that the boundaries between us and our technology have become both vague and only vaguely understood.

The theorists for the internet see it as the evolution of a new type of person – the cyborg, ‘a transgressive mixture of biology, technology, and code'.

This new sort of person will have a new set of relationships. Perhaps they won't fall into the Tender Trap, for example.

Sandy Stone has tried to establish simstim (simulation stimulation experiences) with a cat.

Yes, a cat.

She had electrodes embedded in a cat's ear and linked it to a FM stereo. She followed the cat out into the field through her headphones, and heard reality the way a cat hears reality (with some serious limitations on range of pitch).

She heard every blade of grass, the field mice, the insects walking.

Which reminds us of George Eliot's words: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar …' (
Middle-march
, 1872).

A Cautionary Ruling:
All that is new is not true and all that is true is not new (thank you, Nanny).

The Serbian film director, Dusan Makaveyev, after making a film in Australia, said derisively that Australia was ‘Switzerland pretending to be Texas'.

For all our swagger, he was struck by how shy and inhibited we are.

He's right. When was the last time Australians went about raping and pillaging each other as the Serbians do so exuberantly? (The more we think about it, we wish it were further back in our history than it is.)

Over the festive season, Our Office surveyed and measured the celebratory and exuberance factor in Australia.

Firstly, we discovered that Australians are still frightened by the idea of amateur public performance. Perhaps the existence of so much media in our lives has given us
the idea that singing and dancing and performance belong to the stars and to highly paid professionals.

As ordinary people, we feel that we should leave it to the professionals. How could we dare to compete?

We do sometimes see rather timid and under-rehearsed imitations of these stars, on Elvis Nights and so on.

But it is the opinion of this Office that it is time for the general public to reclaim the stage. The public performance can be ours!

May the Inspector-General be permitted to reminisce?

Most of our childhood was preoccupied with becoming a nightclub magician and ventriloquist.

Our parents never came to terms with our needs in this direction.

We have always felt that our career as a magician would have advanced more famously had they given us a silk top-hat
which fitted.
Not a hand-me-down which fell over our ears and eyes at critical times during a performance.

To succeed as a ventriloquist, we needed a ventriloquist's dummy. But for the act to be convincing, it had to be
smaller
than we were. For a number of years, the fact that we were the same size as our dummy made our act confusing both for ourselves and for the audience.

By the way, the ventriloquist's silver throat reed imported by mail order from the Magic Center in Los Angeles at the cost of six months' pocket money was not a great success.

To the point. Some emerging sense of the dullness of
Australian social behaviour was already entering our soul because of this failure of the world around us as a child to rise to the glittering occasion.

Our reality was already in conflict with our private hankerings and with our vision of an alluring, sparkling reality into which we hoped to step very soon, as if by magic, through the mirror.

We wander, slightly. Alice in Wanderland.

In Australia, we do have inhibitions about performance and the Flaunting of Self.

People are reluctant to give speeches or to sing solo in public (or even in unison with others).

Bird call imitations are now rarely heard at parties. (Although at Christmas dinner 2001, the Inspector-General heard a table of fourteen people spontaneously perform individual bird calls at the end of the night.)

The paper-and-comb has disappeared.

When was the last time someone did a fine coin trick at the dinner table?

When was the last time anyone recited a poem?

Grimly, we observe that so eventless are our social occasions that the ‘taking of photographs' often seems something of a highlight. Ye gods. This continent will soon sink in a sea of badly composed group photographs!

Australians don't sing much at all. Except for bits of the anthems ‘Advance Australia Fair' and ‘Waltzing Matilda'. Mostly we don't even know the words of these songs. Watch the lips of sports people at events where these songs are played.

In some cultures, there is always an amateur musician
who arrives with his accordion and who sings and encourages others to sing.

Admittedly, they usually wear a swastika armband and sing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me'.

As a nation, we once sang carols and hymns but that seems to have gone. We also sang campfire songs, ‘Fire's burning, fire's burning, draw nearer, draw nearer, in the gloaming, in the gloaming, come sing and be merry.'

At New Year's Eve we used to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne'.

Now no one does. No one even knows the words of this song, let alone what it means.

It is a Scottish lament for times past (lang syne = long since).

Even drunks don't sing much any more.

The saddest part of all this is that when something is sung, it is usually a fragment of a television commercial. What a rich culture!

Australians dance, but not as flamboyantly or creatively as say, people do in Rio.

Line dancing is sweeping the country and some reports indicate that ballroom dancing is back in fashion.

But Our Observers at the new-style dance clubs for the young around the big cities see a very stilted style of shuffling dance. Some people do have a natural fluidity and are creative. But, in general, the movements that the dancers can find in their bodies are constricted and repetitive. It is a mimicking of dancing. Probably dancing seen in movies or of other dancers.

Untrained, we do not really move well to the music.

Our informal dancing seems to be the expression of a
desire to dance,
a genuine desire to find oblivion in the dance, but it is frustrated desire.

So the young use alcohol and drugs to try to find the mood and spirit that uninhibited dancing can induce. Drugs such as ecstasy do help, but even then, a body which has not developed its rhythms will not release a rich spontaneity because it wasn't there in the body in the first place.

What was said about marijuana is also true of ecstasy. A person who is a bore will also be a bore when high on marijuana.

A person who is stilted and without rhythm – untutored in dance – will still not have rhythm when on ecstasy.

There is a loss of inhibition when on drugs, but, paradoxically, losing inhibition without some well-ingrained and practised cultural forms in which to express the loss of inhibition, is fruitless.

Shouting, screaming, vandalism and spewing is not what we have in mind.

We do consume food of ever-increasing sophistication and cultural variety and more people go to wine and food festivals and otherwise learn about the
art of eating
.

We use alcohol in a more sophisticated way. Or do we hear someone shouting, ‘Speak for yourself!' and ‘What about the Office Party?' We draw a veil over the matter of the Office Party.

Oh, worried by the word ‘sophisticated', are we?

By sophisticated, we mean a life-long interest in knowing what the world has to offer and trying to understand
something about how to enjoy what it has to offer.

Election Night is an example of socialising with unexplored potential.

On federal election day especially, many Australians go to an election night party – a ‘Don's Party' – to celebrate victory or weep for the fate of the country over the next three years.

It is a very emotional time for many Australians.

But we don't seem to get better at it. We lack a public exuberance or private ritual.

Have you noticed that in some other countries, say Greece, people take to the streets on election night to rejoice, wave banners and flags from the backs of open cars, wail, sing and shoot a few opponents? Or whatever.

We could do much more with our election night parties.

Our Inspectors note that Australians are becoming more at ease with formal wear and fancy dress.

We see people at sporting events making masks from sunscreen or face paint.

We are not a mask culture. Those cultures which wear masks do so at a specific time and for specific reasons. For example, at Mardi Gras.

At the New Orleans Mardi Gras, our first foray into frenzied masked culture, we first saw sexual intercourse in public places.

However, at the Lord Mayor's party in Sydney on New Year's Eve a few years back, the guests were supplied beforehand with fine eye-masks and asked to either personally decorate these or to wear them as they were.

Only about ten percent of the guests decorated them, and only about another ten percent wore them.

Others ‘carried' their masks on their arms. That doesn't work, folks.

This says something about the fear of masks and the hidden self.

Masks ideally allow for the loss of our commonplace, everyday self and the release of a vital, even sinister, hidden self. Maybe Australians don't have ‘a vital, even sinister, hidden self'?

Don't worry that you will be trapped in your vital, even sinister, hidden self.

The custom of wearing masks at public festivities and balls requires that at a certain time, the more mundane and serviceable public self must return to continue one's dreary life.

We are stumped about how to get Australians to search for their hidden selves. We may work on that this year.

We do see the national costume of the Akubra and R.M. Williams riding boots and other pieces of R.M. Williams gear being worn on occasions when expressions of national identity are required.

Men always let the side down in dress.

The only time men really try is at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney.

It is at this particular occasion that, at least some Australian inhibition is finally broken down, especially at the Sleaze Ball, we are told, in the pig pens at the Sydney Showground.

We still need a tragic amount of liquor to let go.

And we still look for too much in fireworks. Fireworks will always be with us. But can we do more? Should we do less? Fireworks is a very limited form. Colour and bang.

We feel a
Ruling coming on
.

Yes. The financial cost of the fireworks is part of the thrill of it all. It is the burning of money. So the amount spent is always part of the spectacle. More spending is promised next year.

There is no art to fireworks.

Ruling:
We have had enough fireworks.

Again, since the relinquishing of the control of fireworks to professionals, we have made it more a spectator event rather than a participatory event.

In the childhood of the Inspector-General, a child always lost a finger or two.

As we reminisce, we seem to recall that the hunting for the fingers and the siren of the ambulance was more fun than the fireworks.

There is however, we suppose, existential joy and disappointment in the exploding of fireworks.

The fire and the dying of the fire.

The bang and the sad silence at the end of the bang.

But there is more to life than big, colourful bangs.

Isn't there?

Isn't there?