Artificial orgasms: Pleasure in the age of porn, the Satisfyer and turbo-charged desire

He leaves work aroused and breathing heavily... It’s been a full week of fantasizing about his wife and son’s trip to visit his mother-in-law. He’s alone in the house, he has the entire space to himself. After undressing and opening a well-deserved beer, he takes off towards his office, where his brand new Apple iMac I7 awaits. He trusts that he will remember the password to get around the parental controls. For what he’s going to do, they won’t be necessary. Operating system, missiles disarmed! Now, to dive into one of the more than 24 million porn pages in existence on the web. Although he, a man as conservative as G. K. Chesterton, could see himself with a suit and bowtie every day, he prefers to stick to the old favorites. For those who feel old, leaving their comfort zone is a trap. Pornhub welcomes him with the same tenderness as the other 130 million daily users who open the doors to this Eden. Ten minutes later, after a brief but intense dash to find the images most to his taste, he climaxes.

Some 60 miles away, his wife has put their son to bed and said goodnight to her mother. After this round of tenderness, she relaxes in the room that witnessed the first time she slid her fingers into the unknown realm between her legs. Now, 30 years later, with experience on the rise and girlfriends who host sessions of tuppersex (like a Tupperware party but for sex toys) she takes a discreet bag from her luggage. Her loyal companion. A controller of soft silicone with a little penguin’s beak that lets her taste ecstasy in a question of three minutes. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. The Satisfyer. Her husband, God bless the good man, can’t do this even in an hour-long session of vaginal spelunking. At last, all are relaxed and satisfied, serene and in harmony, with the exception of the child who, not being able to sleep, has heard his mother making the same sounds she does when Daddy tickles her. The poor thing doesn’t understand at all... Could she be tickling herself?

Pulleys allowed man to erect vertiginously tall churches. The steam engine allowed him to put trains and boats in motion. The grid circuit allowed him to light the world. Satellites allowed him to globalize and accelerate communication. Online pornography allowed him to multiply his possible choices. The Satisfyer allowed him to accelerate the culmination of the orgasm. The path of technology shines brightly on toward human wellbeing! From the voracious Pasiphae entrusted by the creativity of Daedalus to fornicate with the white bull, Homo Sapiens’ brain has done what it can to see its impulses satisfied efficiently. If adapting oneself to the limits of a medium has been beyond human ability, it’s never been too difficult to adapt the medium to one’s own limitations. The evolution of human societies has been, and will increasingly continue to be, in the hands of technological evolution. Scientific development has conditioned our vital structures. Sex... well, it’s nothing more than another collateral objective in the religion of progress.

Once sexuality has been separated from procreation, it evolves beyond pleasure to stand like a narcissistic display case. Pure competition. A territory that modern science has kicked to the reading desks of vanity and desire. Oh, and let’s not forget, desire isn’t a synonym of pleasure, rather of hate borne of ambition and comparison. Here we have psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who came up with the idea that man’s desire is the desire of the Other, and it’s not for nothing that the tradition of the majority of religions and philosophies has been to study the forms of reducing it to a minimum. But if, as writer Michel Houellebecq says, we live in societies of erotic capital, desire must be doped by whatever means. It’s the horse that must be shot up with every possible substance to make sure it wins the race. After that, the best and most efficient medium is precisely the tool to which civilizations have entrusted their development: technology.

The artificial orgasm is a magic wand that moves with the ease of something that’s prepaid, and it competes on unfair grounds with human ability. How could someone be at the level of the sculpted bodies to which one has access through online porn, or possess the mouth skills necessary to launch sonic waves to the rhythm of sustained microsuctions? Who would not abandon themself to such an efficient satisfaction of their stimulant-injected, frenetic and everyday desires?

Of course, there’s nothing sinful about expressing one’s frustrations through a hot hands-on session in the comfort of one’s home! To be able to investigate new formulas of sexual contact through quality audiovisual material is, at minimum, a right. Just as it’s a right to be conscious that inside women’s mons pubis there are waves that want to howl, splash and not stutter lamely.... sequestered in the middle ground.

When we reduce sexuality to a mechanical ritual that lasts three, five or seven minutes and then go back to our regular tasks, we forget that there’s much more than the obvious

Author Esperanza Ruiz

But, let’s talk about the bad because the good sells itself. As philosopher Paracelsus said: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” A quote which Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado uses to illustrate the false presupposition that pharmakon, in Greek, implies only toxicity, when in reality it also refers to the remedy. Duality is intrinsic to consciousness. Contradiction, the opposites that the alchemists of the Renaissance represented as a hermaphrodite angel with two faces, are part and parcel of interaction with others. A self-love session motivated by the fantasy of pornography doesn’t condemn the spectator to a military obsession with watermelon butts, or well-hung men. Nor will a casual flirtation with that lithium battery-powered gold beak turn the clitoris into a junkie, who can be pleased by nothing but an electric pump. Moved by societal claims of the purest autonomy, faced with centuries of unequal ejaculations, who doesn’t see a triumph in the democratization of female ecstasy? But let’s focus on the target.

In the era of turbo-charged capitalism, as described by author Edward Luttwak, where the avarice of big capitalists to earn a lot of money, with very little effort, has disastrous implications for society, the pleasure investors create a society turbo-charged with desire. Thanks to advertising stimuli and technology, turbo-charged desire infects individuals, impeding their ability to control the dosage, meaning they inevitably abandon themselves to the venom. Not only does technology invent new pleasures; it also accelerates them to the point of impeding new desires. This can be seen as an irremediably unsatisfied leitmotif, in which people can no longer manage their frustration. The solution of course has to do with calming the monkey mind, dosing oneself ever more regularly with this technological pharmakon, which doesn’t question you, get tired or get wrinkles. If it did, anyway, it could be easily replaced.

Sociologist Eva Illouz affirms that “capitalism has created big bags of sentimental misery.” Instead of contradicting her, and following the human impulse to adapt the medium to their needs through technology, it seems logical that the system of turbo-charged desire files its nails to take a cut. And if, as British journalist Jenny Kleeman says, “we use technology to resolve problems that we could solve by changing our attitudes, behavior and laws,” little more can be added. Commercializing pleasure is as old as offering sex in exchange for protection in the cave. It’s something hominid, primate, that has mutated due to the efficiency of science. Unfortunately, the tracks of progress have been carved with knives of avarice. This has turned the commercialization of pleasure into a self-serving fight to benefit from dissatisfaction, one which is taking place in a system obsessed with fattening that desire. It’s like inventing a steel firewall but letting loose a virus capable of knocking it out of combat just as soon as it’s sold.

There’s nothing more beneficial to business than dependence. A communal, gregarious dependence. Say it to those who pretend to be Luddites with jobs that force them to have internet, email, WhatsApp and even social media. Impossible, you see it everywhere. The same thing happens with desire. The programmed obsolescence of desire happens by making us want the best gratification at the lowest possible cost. Next thing you know, the memory of libidinal pleasure flowing through our veins turns regular sex into homework that is too difficult, with too-uncertain benefits, to be worth the trouble. Esperanza Ruiz, author of Whiskas, satisfyer y lexatin (or, Whiskas, the Satisfyer and Benzos) put it well: “We run the risk of renouncing, or of overly limiting, our contact with others. The victory of achieving this pleasure is unearned, I would even say cowardly. When we reduce sexuality to a mechanical ritual that lasts three, five or seven minutes and then go back to our regular tasks, we forget that there’s much more than the obvious there. Everything that precedes that moment, that would take place during the time the person sets aside, can be almost more interesting than the climax itself. Choosing, seducing, winning over the other person, is priceless. For everything, as the ads say, there’s MasterCard.”

We use technology to resolve problems that we could solve by changing our attitudes, behavior and laws

Journalist Jenny Kleeman

Alas, eroticism is a high that one wins with effort, work and some talent. It’s an art of love, as the cheesy Erich Fromm would say, a role that technology doesn’t aspire to fill. At least, not all technology. We return to the same example, that of poison. It’s often said that guns don’t kill people, people kill people and well, there’s some truth to that. The problem comes when a certain collective imagination, constructed by private interests, is actively promoting us to lower our ethics so that the use of these arms becomes normalized. Mindgeek, the company behind Pornhub, and a good handful of porn websites, has a very vested interest in the creation of a society that’s afflicted, weak before the power of seduction and primed to satisfy its never-ending desire without reflection. This helps explain why the company has been extremely lax in its tolerance of sexual videos of child pornography and rape, both of which have been a buoyant source of cash for its coffers. That’s what journalist Nicholas Kristof uncovered in his article The Children of Pornhub, which brings to light all the illegalities that have been ignored by porn companies. No one has had a pistol held to their scrotum and been forced to delight in the scenes of Ukrainian girls with little clothes on, nor the muffled screams from a woman being raped, nor a Black man being anally raped in a basement, but this technology has opened the door for the constant dissatisfaction of the erotic-driven society to be quenched by these and similar perversions and, what’s more, people are getting rich off it.

Be that as it may, it’s difficult to deny that a collective system that entrusts its libidinal drive to mechanical solutions could have a future as a socially harmonious flowchart. Not because that mechanization could open pathways to the loss of morals, but rather because, as Esperanza Ruiz says: “The sensitivity to certain stimuli is annihilated due to overexposure to them. Tolerance is developed for what’s subtle, erotic, to gestures. The imagination is disconnected and the role of post-orgasm hormones that normally drive attachment, frustrated. Finally, one loses the vocation for communication and becomes sad and sordid.” Artificial orgasms are the key to a turbo-charged desire that’s committed to benefitting from our search for gratification. It could be that the inability to feel oneself in harmony is a chimera that goes beyond the human and flirts with the metaphysical, but what’s undeniable is that technology is going to continue to condition our sexuality and it’s up to the individual to take a firm stance on the matter.

And, speaking of firm stances... it goes without saying that the size of this topic means there’s much more to discuss. Unfortunately, with regard to myself, for a while I’ve been promising myself a date with an audiovisual product of tremendous quality. After the efforts spent dissecting turbo-charged desire, what’s better that a self-love session financed by a long investigation? I can anticipate, surely, in the video I choose, that there will be someone using a Satisfyer.