Cyberflesh (Dis)Orders

Just found this strange article on going Cyborg... not really sure what to make of it yet.

Cybernetics reveals an organism cross-cut by inorganic life - bacterial communication, viral infection, and entire ecologies of replicating patters which subvert even the most perverse notions of what it is to be 'having sex'. Reproduction melts into replication and loses its hold on the pleasuredome. Climax distributes itself across the plane and the experience becomes a plateau.

Even in the absense of full simstim, technical cybersex is well advanced: the hardware is fetishized, the software is porn, and vast proportions of the telecommunications system are consumed by erotica. But there are only the most overt - and maybe least interesting - examples of a general degeneraton/disintergration of 'natural' sex. As hard and wetwares collapse onto soft, far stranger mutations rouse the sexual scene. The simulation of sex converges with the deregulation of the entire sexual economy, the corrosion of its links with reproduction, and the collapse of its specificity: sex disperses into drugs, dance/trace; androgyny, hermaphroditism, and transsexualism become increasingly perceptible; paraphilia, body engineering, queer sex, and what foucault calls "the slow motions of pleasure and pain" of S&M - already "high technology sex" (Califia, 1993: 175) - proliferate.

I don't agree with everything the author is getting into, but I do like the meme-ridden writing style. Certainly it makes a good read even if you disagree with it.

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