Postmodernism and Cybersex

Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate". The sexual power of the pagan goddess was sublimated in the symbol of the virgin, and now, says Adams, the procreative power and spiritual sensuality of the Virgin has been transfigured in the form of the dynamo. This isn't about mating or the passing on of genetic information but the satisfaction of screwing somebody who looks like the icon that terrorised your pants when you were a hormone hungry pubescent or the image that haunts your dreams when your eyes are wide shut.

In modernist art, the idolatrous expressed by Adams shaded, by degrees, from religious devotion into mechano-eroticism; paeans to the machine by Italian futurists, English vorticists, and Russian supremacists often verged on soft-core porn. It is as subversive of "linear," "logocentric," "essentialist" thinking, as committed to the "aporia," "indeterminacy," "fluidity," "intertextuality," and "contextuality" of discourse, as deconstruction itself. All of the examples documented so far support this breakdown of yet another modernist dichotomy. With this development the distinctions between the biological and the mechanical, the natural and artificial, the human and the mechanical have become unreliable.

Baudrillard observes that "There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. This of course is subject to whether or not one views physicality as the only constituent of reality. ' This recommendation may seem antithetical to the scientific enterprise but consciously or not, even scientists have started to harness simulation to their ends. Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is "privileged" over any other. Generations of human beings whose psyches are composed entirely of media images, seek and provide fantasy sexual experiences.

For the most part, the actual physical bodies of participants are invisible unless revealed, and thus the subtle social cues, which we might have been programmed to exhibit in deference to unexamined assumptions regarding, for example, gender roles, are nonexistent in a virtual community. our world is far too complex to be understood in terms of first principles. Diana of the Ephesians was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund".