Fucking Machines: High-Tech Bodies in Pornography

Abstract

In discourses on pornography, critics often draw quick conclusions from the generic imagery as to the “inhumane” styles of production in the adult film industry. What is criticized about the “sausage factory approach” (Pettman 2006, 112) of the industry’s low-budget mainstream is the portrayal of the performers’ bodies as standardized machines working on each other for the purpose of the spectator’s sexual arousal (Sontag 1967, 52; Žižek 2004, 172). This chapter asks what fears about pornography nurture such an argument, and why pornography is in turn so obviously fascinated with depicting the body as a machine.¹ I argue that the critical perception of pornography cannot be separated from a deep skepticism about the commodification and technologization of the human body that becomes visible, among other places, in images of sexual action. At the heart of this skepticism is a rather strict conceptualization of “cold” and “dead” machines as opposed to “lively” human bodies—an opposition that the machinelike sex presented in pornography conceivably calls into question. By discussing several short videos from FuckingMachines, a website that stages sexual encounters between women and gigantic dildo machines, I will suggest that the pleasure presented in and received by pornography cannot be understood outside the modern framework of market rationality and efficiency. After taking a look at the “problem” of sexual commercialization, I will close-read FuckingMachines as a place where the relationship between technology and sexuality becomes renegotiated.

It is like doing drag, like transsexuality, the way we are interfacing with technology and extending our identity into it.

—Shu Lea Cheang