Lecture
Barcelona
2010
Cimuat Women and Thecnology Lecture. University of Valencia, 2010
It’s 3am. I just got home. I’m drunk and tired, but I’m not sleepy. I didn’t pick anyone up tonight and I feel like sex. I get into bed with my computer and rest it between my legs. In the browser, I type chatroulette.com (a chat website that allows you to have online sex with strangers) and a pop-up window warns be that my image could be recorded. I accept.
I don’t care about getting filmed and they can use my image for whatever they want. Because I think that my dignity does not just come down to the image of my body, legs spread open, on the net. Actually, I think that that is my dignity. I work in the field of sexuality, post-pornography and new feminisms, so my body is my battleground. Even if our society sees the act of showing myself as a humiliation. A man won’t have problems unless he shows practices such as homosexuality, transexuality, fetishes or other non-heteronormative practices.
But the old taboos around women’s sexuality persist, and we’re considered sluts if we refuse to keep our legs together in public space.
We defend that sluttiness. Whores, sluts and proud. And when I say “we” I mean the postporn movement. I mean Diana Pornoterrorista, Post Op, Quimera Rosa, Helen la Zorra Suprema, Itziar Ziga, Klau Kinky and many, many more. And I also mean all the men in and out of the movement who show themselves being penetrated by impossible dildos, who renounce a masculinity made up of normative gender roles. Men who choose to adopt a new masculinity in which femininities and feminism become allies.
In faraway, remote societies, a woman displaying her vulva was a show of power and honour. It is called Ana Suromai. Women who expose their genitals to placate the wrath of monsters and dragons, women who show their open cunts to the sea so that it won’t become furious and bring their seafaring husbands safely home. “La mar es posa bona cuan veu el con d´una dona”… “the sea calms down when it sees the cunt of a woman,” an old Catalan saying goes. They seem so distant now, these sayings, these sculptures, these drawings and these statues of women showing themselves. In the society in which I live, women expose extreme close-ups of their vulvas in pornography and on gynaecologist’s couches.
Proudly, I look at my open cunt on the screen of my mac. I’m holding the machine between my legs, firmly, so the web cam films my genitals. On chat roulette you can chat with strangers with a camera. You keep clicking on “next” until you come across somebody who seduces you and who you feel like lingering with. Your encounters are random, your only option is to click on next, and you rarely get the same partner twice. Mostly you find erect penises, and yes, there are few girls. A pity, because it’s great fun. And practical too. You get home late, tired, alone, and you have a world of flesh at your disposal.
I go to work. I click from screen to screen and come across a group of guys. I stay. Hi, hi. I love groups, they’re fun. We play. Do this, try that. Suddenly they ask me whether I’m a man. I find the question disconcerting, the my full-body nakedness is clear and concise. They insist. They ask me if I’ve had an operation. If I got tits put in, got my penis removed and had a cunt reconstruction. My blood starts flowing in the opposite direction. From my genitals to my head. I start thinking and stop masturbating. Why are these guys asking me this? I think I know. Today I’m in an obvious mood, no preliminaries, direct, I want sex and that’s it. I’m not timid or discreet or passive. That’s the kind of behaviour that society links to masculinity, so these little hetero punks can’t accept that a person with a cunt between her legs can step outside of the classic female gender and be online with an active role. It must be a man.
People sometimes tell me that I’m very masculine, but those who say it are only showing their prejudices in terms of what a man should be as compared to a woman. Femininity versus masculinity. As though gender did not flow, drift and change, never remaining static. How tiring it must be to always be dominant aggressive. I’m sure that all those hetero machos can’t stand being trapped in it either, that they’re dying to play with their femininity. If only we all did a bit more of what we felt like, and a bit less of what we think we have to do.
I click on Next and look for a new partner on chat roulette. It’s over, boys. I don’t even say goodbye to the guys who are convinced of my transexuality. Next. Next. Next. I find a guy who seems to be looking for the same thing as me, a two-way wank to release the tension of the night. We turn each other on, chat a bit and start masturbating. The keyboard is sticky. That’s the thing about cyber sex, you inevitably end up messing up your keyboard. Your hands are working away, but interaction takes place through your hardware and you’re hardly going to be wiping your hands in the urgency of desire. Sometimes I feel like I’m fucking my mac, holding it between my legs that are trembling from the imminent orgasm, with the keyboard impregnated by my wetness. And the truth is, I find it erotic. My mac, always there for me, all mine, a door open to an infinite world of desires through the Internet. My work tool, my leisure tool, my pleasure tool. Technology transformed into fetish.
I masturbate as I watch the person on my screen wank. I’m turned on by the real time aspect, by the fact that this is happening somewhere on the planet right now, I don’t have a clue where, the important thing is that two people want sex now, and both are turned on by the fact that the other person also wants it right now. And we don’t care who or what the other is, all that matters is the fact that it turns us on to see each other, to see the flesh of the other, the desire of the other. We’ve barely started, but I see the semen spill. That was quick, I say to myself. I go back to the keyboard to ask him about his quick orgasm, but the guy simply passes me by, that is, he clicks on “next” and cuts the connection, that is, he has left me on my own and half-done.
I get angry.
It’s exactly the same as in non-virtual reality, the typical guy or girl who comes, then gets up and doesn’t care what point you’re at. Some people are rude and have no manners. Sometimes, things are the same everywhere, whether you’re fucking in the bathroom, in your bed on on chat roulette. As for me, if I come and I see that the other person hasn’t got there yet, I keep my legs open a while, so they can finish. I’ve got manners. Chat roulette is another bed we can get into and fuck, and sex is sex no matter where you are.
I finish off my interrupted wank with the first person I find and point the web cam at the wall. I probably shouldn’t go on. It’s 4am but I’m still not sleepy. It’s hard to leave chat roulette. I admit I’m hooked. I connect every day, in the morning, at night and during the day any chance I get. I feel like connecting right now as I write this text. Yesterday I was late to an appointment with my publisher because I had 20 minutes to kill before setting out, and I took the opportunity to log in. And of course, I came across a charming guy from Lisbon and I had to strip naked with him and wank and come and get dressed again and wash my face and get rid of the dumb expression I get after I orgasm and go out on the street and into the real world. Because these worlds are other worlds, and even though these people exist and wank and come like I do, in some sense they belong to my fantasy, they only exist within my desire and once my desire has been satiated and I have gone through the polite rituals I think are appropriate, I turn off my computer and I am alone. Alone.
I find it frightening, this hygienic, safe sex that online sex entails. There are no risks, I can’t get pregnant, I can’t catch an STD, there are no mindfucks. I turn the screen off whenever I want, and that’s it, I’m in the silence of my bedroom, in the solitude of my world, in the other reality, the one this side of the keyboard.
I go on. I go on and I find an older man who I like the look of, so I stay. The man wants a close-up of my cunt and I give it to him, I’m very obliging on chat roulette, I’m a submissive at heart. But suddenly the image shifts, the man´s webcam is moving and I wonder where he is going. “Look, I am touching your pussy”. And I watch his finger stroking the image of my open cunt on his computer screen, because he has turned his web cam around and is aiming it at his own screen. What an overlap of layers of reality, I think to myself. And I laugh.
Next.
The next one is wearing a skull mask. It turns me on to symbolically fuck death. “Nice mask”, I say. “Show me your pussy”, he answers. I come breezily and go to sleep, because it’s 5am and I’m satisfied.
Barcelona, July 6, 2010.