“The Vulva of the Net” resembles a wish machine. Whatever body you are interested in – you can order it. And so “spits [das Internet] a few out again, I’m sure you can form a lasting bond with at least one of them.” With plenty of sarcasm, these impressions from Elfriede Jelinek’s post-drama “Winterreise”, a swan song to a late modern age characterized by alienation and inhumanity, describe the temple of consumerism, pornography. It is usually a shadowy realm beneath the surface of an open and equal society.
Unexpectedly, this most well-known secret terrain is now in the focus of a broader public, because a new level of simulation has been reached using artificial intelligence. Because now users can also watch their screen heroines Emma Watson, Amber Heard and Anne Hathaway in hard strips doing oral and anal sex and other practices. Of course these are fakes, namely montages of prominent heads with copulating limb machines. But deceptively real.
First of all, this technology, which undermines any dignity of the individual person, can be regarded as an almost expected further development of a genre that has constantly raised disinhibition to its program. From a philosophical point of view, the unscrupulous composition enhances two characteristics that have so far been characteristic of the digital human machine room. First, as cultural critic Byung-Chul Han writes in his seminal essay “Transparency Society,” pornography is “without inwardness, secrecy, or mystery.” Anything that comes into the camera’s field of view is radically illuminated. There is no part of the human organism that is not subject to the requirement of all-encompassing transparency.
Secondly, the theater scholar Gertrud Koch emphasizes in one of her essays that “the pornographic visual language proves to be the basic agent of capitalist society”. Above all, the female body becomes a commodity, which completely undermines all socio-political efforts towards equality and justice between the sexes.
The fact that people become objects prompts Elfriede Jelinek in her drama to create macabre, exaggerated scene images, based on an I originally just looking for love: “Aha, there’s someone who’s just right for me, of course also from the internet, there are other people not for a long time, he has freed himself from the mesh, frees himself immediately […]. What comes from there has never been real.”
Penetrative Logik
As long as the body is paid for this hub, it sees itself, in the words of the post-structuralist media theorist Jean Baudrillard (“Simulacra and Simulation”), as an “ideology factory for the capitalist status quo”. Even more: We are experiencing “the substitution of the real by signs of the real”, as the thinker states in his culturally pessimistic study “Agonie des Realen”. What is meant by this is that artificially created drawing spaces, be they images or 3D films, come so close to real life that they increasingly replace reality (with nuanced changes and displacements).
In the sexualized cyber world, nothing remains closed. Everything has an impact on reality. There’s no need to go with the traditional talk of the distorting effects of hardcore material on the still evolving sexuality of adolescents. The “porn society”, as Byung-Chul Hans calls the Western community, is completely permeated by the prevailing relationship of domination from the cyber-sex universe, which is primarily a phallocentric one.
What both deep fakes and long-established subgenres like the simulated “revenge porn” add to the drastic nature can be described with the equation of sex and weapon. Because the filming of the act with false faces not only serves the dubious amusement of certain users, but is also subject to the purpose of consciously presenting the built-in person and violating their personal integrity and intimacy. This penetrative logic must be described as digital rape, the far-reaching consequences of which have by no means found their way into criminal legislation.
On the contrary. Apart from justified outrage from those affected or feminist activists, the porn industry even integrates such excesses into veiling and distorting narratives. Violence is recoded as a competition between the sexes, sometimes simply sold as a sport. When the head of a celebrity actress in the fake video gets an erect penis heaved in her mouth and starts gagging but doesn’t vomit, the producers sell the scene as an example of a woman showing stamina.
Those reinterpretations appear even more blatant where war settings are explicitly invoked. After the repeated uploading of – mind you: staged – films to freely accessible forums in recent years, in which mainly American soldiers sleep with veiled Arab women, it is to be feared that this arrangement will also extend to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could become. Physical rapes should be put into perspective because the women in the recordings mostly enjoy the soldierly potency, this old, testosterone-heavy masculinity behavior.
The militarization of sexuality is now added to the economization, all of which is controversial but legal. After pornography was once seen as a phalanx in the struggle for a liberal society and helped the slogan “Let’s talk about sex” to become a visual reality, it is now revealing the opposite. Scripted tête-à-têtes between mother and stepson, old people and teens, teachers and students or “interracial” threesomes as well as incest between brother and sister seem as if the producers behind these settings would only explode the classic heteronormative, white constellations want, especially since all the performers always put on a good-humoured expression, although they solidify the traditional binary oppositions.
What is fatal is that, despite some grassroots movements in this segment – think of the developments in feminist porn – there are no longer any signs of overcoming this. Because the digital image montage of deep fakes will be unstoppable and will continue to spread virally. As long as no legislative action is taken against this, only the ethics of enlightenment and dialogue remain. Not an easy task. After all, the unwritten common sense still applies: you don’t talk about porn.