"I had a farm in Africa" --- and from that opening line, from Out of Africa, you know that Isak Dinesen will lose that farm, tragedy will ensue, but a good story would unfold. So when I say "I had a gig writing a companion book to a TV series", it is both an  homage to and echo of Dinesen  --- and it's also like that moment in Maus where Art Spiegelman's father-stand-in  says, "then my troubles really began".

Perhaps the most confusing episode was something about Japan --- where "shopping, electronics, and sex, which characterize this society, are clearly where our future is heading".

My takeaway was that the producer of the segment was enamoured of how the Japanese women (as depicted) giggled good-naturedly when being sexually humiliated, and were light-hearted about sex-motels and extra-marital affairs --- and so the producer was making a  futurist social trend out of his particular kink.

All I could think of was the throwback line to my life in the 80s, when I was the lowest possible editorial unit at a McGraw-Hill technical trade publication.

People would pitch the editorial staff story ideas on all matter of hardware, software, and services --- and we were trained to say "but what does this have to do with 'Data Communications' "? So what did any of what I saw on that TV show have to do with sex and technology?

So with the go-ahead from my editor, I decided to do my own explicit but non-pornographic coffee-table book on sex and technology.

The most important editorial choice  in service of this book was the decision to not try to write an entire history of sex and technology .

I am not a historian like Rachel Mannes, who wrote that groundbreaking feminist technology-history of the vibrator; and putting together such a comprehensive project would require years. The idea, after all, was to come up with a coffee-table book and not the equivalent of the Physicians’ Desk Reference.

And in publishinglandia, a coffee-table book means around 30,000 words and around 200 images. Snapshots, verbal and pictorial, rather than an encyclopedia; sex and technology as filtered through the way we live today --- today being roughly the last five to 10 years.

What would go into the book would be what I found interesting, not what I thought might be tittilating to a hypothetical someone.

Viagra  had to be in there, because I consider it a true triumph of technology in service of sex --- for the first time ever, there exists a real-life aphrodisiac. And in delving into this topic, there turned out to be many, many interesting bits: everything from how the Church of England made a tidy $5 million from a timely investment in Pfizer to Viagra-use being strongly correlated with STDs and methedrine use (according to public-health clinics in San Francisco) to how it has led to the breakup of longterm marriages: the wife may have resigned herself to doing without sex because her husband couldn't engage any more --- but how does she feel when he discovers Viagra and turns to others for his affectional needs? Humiliated, that's how.

Then there  was a lot to write about on the subject of hardware, variously defined. Talking to manufacturers of vibrators and dildoes led to the delightful discovery that that there were a multiplicity of issues that, well, were like consumer-products creation and engineering challenges present in most lines of business.

The idea for it came from a single Japanese engineer, and was a triumph of consumer-oriented product-creation. Prototypes were tested  iteratively on Japanese housewife-volunteers until the much-beloved vibrator reached its final form. Photographs were taken of the celebration of the engineer's achievement.

And in practice, there’s little good that can be said about Monprene, the nasty compound that composes Cyberskin, a trendily-soft material (used most notably  in the Fleshlight, a butch, industrial-looking sex-toy for men that features an aperture shaped with your choice of anus or vulva, molded in beautiful, periwinkle Cyberskin) that melts when exposed to heat, gets tacky easily and can't easily be cleaned --- and caused fires at one point in the plant where it was manufactured.

It rapidly became apparent though that If I weren’t careful, the book could devolve into My Big Book of Vibrators, or a Whole Earth Catalogue equivalent for such. Boring! And not my charter. So in my attempt to diversify potential sources of useful art, I was initially drawn to the Flash Gordony four-color reproductions of CAT scans and fMRIs of brains and genitalia as these body parts go through their cycles of excitation and deflation.

Finding out this stuff made it possible to drop into dinner-party conversations, where appropriate, authoritative-sounding mini-rants that began "let me explain why Pfizer pulled the plug on its researches to find a female version of Viagra".

But from my reaction against the necessity of associating a propagandist mindset with a sexually-informed mindset, came still more unanswered questions.

Clearly humans have always been engineers (the hanging gardens of Babylon! the Great Wall of China! the waterwheels of  medieval England!). So, no surprise, I found at the Bancroft Library photos of ivory dildoes made for the wives of merchants in 17th-century Japan and pedal-powered dildoes from the Weimar Republic. And humans have (in spite of occasional cultural fictions to the contrary) always been in favor of sex. In fact, humans are pretty much like the rest of their pals in the animal kingdom:  as Susan McCarthy, author of When Elephants Weep: the emotional lives  of animals and  Becoming a Tiger: how baby animals learn to live in the wild says, "apes have been spotted crafting sex toys on occasion and I have a vague notion that a porcupine in the throes of longing may get improper with a branch".

It's damned peculiar, because it's a truism in the history of technology that sex has so often driven innovation; it’s well-known that  sex-industry players fostered the use of VHS as opposed to Beta as the standard for home-video, and online-porn purveyors fostered the development of e-commerce and broadband to the home. But sex-hardware has at best trailed along behind existing technologies.

A more-troubling unanswered question was really about the depth and breadth of this intersection of instrumentality and sex. That this intersection has become so mainstream that Cosmo can have as one of its cover-lines a feature on "your most embarrassing vibrator moments" --- is this a function of the technology finally having caught up with basic human experience --- analogous to how modern dentistry is finally good enough to save most people's teeth, mostly painlessly ? Or is it because we live in such a technology-saturated society, one of endlessly-mediated experience, that the complexities of human sexuality are thought to be resolved simply by throwing some technology at the problem? Do we as sexual beings want to model ourselves on how automation in all its modes has diminished headcounts --- and human interaction --- in too many areas of human endeavour to count?

Intimacy is hard; unearned intimacy

* as with the multiple-choice-question/database-matching aspects of online dating;

* as with the Excel spreadsheets downloadable into a PDA of ranked attributes and skills of sex-workers;

*as with the Fucking Machines porn website, where guys watch machines having intercourse with women, so the male voyeur not only doesn't have to acquire a female partner, he doesn't even have to do the work of identifying with a human male bringing the phallic extension to the act; is, at first glance, a superior heuristic.

Emotional scaredy-catness I guess has become a la mode. Technology  here, there, and everywhere is held out as the cure for incommunicativeness with or incompatibility with a partner; laziness with a partner; lack of a partner; bed-death; and a million other psychosexual trickynesses. Lumping together Real Dolls and Fucking Machines and the Thrillhammer (guys pay money to use a joy-stick to remotely manipulate a dildo being thrust into a model/sex-worker) with On Our Backs-type approved vibrators and dildoes, they all have in common a bias that the technological and repeatable is preferable to the eccentric, erratic, error-bound --- and human. Our culture at large deviates towards the whizzy, the gameboxey, microprocessor-embedded, and the synthetic --- so should our sex-lives be any different?

Evidence along these lines came in the unexpected responses I got when I asked folks  (friends and professional contacts) I talked to during the course of the project to send me any images or photos they came across that might work in the book. More than 90 percent of what my friendly helpers and acquaintances sent me were BDSM domintrixy-looking leather-vinyl fetish girls. I would look at these images, and  unbidden what  would come to mind would be was something along the lines of  "yes, but what does this have to do with 'Data Communications'?" So after thanking the people who pointed me at these images I'd ask them: “What does this have to do with sex and technology?” Where's the technology in this picture?”

True, there is the well-known spike of BDSM role-playing hoohah in the geek community --- but most folks outside of high-tech don't know of that correlation. Is it that our feelings about sexuality and our feelings about technology have gotten so mashed up that they have unnaturally merged in the unconscious to a single gestalt of domination? It simply didn't make any sense --- and not to mention, it once again made the tired default assumption that the viewer/reader was a het male (or perhaps a lesbian) into power games --- thus excluding, oh, 60 percent or more of the population from the gaze. And the offerers of these useless but well-intentioned gift-images would be sheepish and speechless and not really be able to tell me why they sent me those pictures, or why they thought they were apt.

Another troubling question arose, one that assaulted what I would call my aging Berkeley feminist orientation, and at times would make me feel that I was linking arms with sister-spirits Andrea Dworkin, Camile Paglia, or Catherine Mckinnon --- a sorority I have never wanted to join. And what I mean by aging Berkeley feminist orientation, it's a mindset that says

* men and women are more alike than not;

* men are people too (along certain axes that tend to be ignored often), just as women are, too (again, along certain other axes often ignored);

* there is a spectrum of gendered behaviors with both men and women showing up at every point and certainly the intersex and transgender communities have informed our understandings of what's male and what's female and what's cultural and what's innate and how they all mysteriously intertwine.

And oh, this mindset of mine is fiercely free-speech. Fine.

But as I kept on doing my research, I kept on having the nagging feeling that what might be considered the worst of guy-like behavior in the stereotypical sense (an emphasis on tools and rules and things that can be regularized and an avoidance of the psychological and interpersonal --- so technosexuality, a paraphilia of folks fantasizing about sex with androids/robots/Stepford wives is, according the fellow who runs the master Technosexuality website, a pre-occupation that attracts a population more than 90 percent male...) was being potentiated.

 "I don't see that any man who loves porn can think that actual sex is better, at least if it involves the crap that goes along with having a real live female in your life". Men who belong to the Real Dolls users group say similar things.

Depersonalization and the removal of unsettling human complication are the default orders of the day --- and it makes one uneasy to consider how both advances in technology --- and technophilia --- aren't exactly pro-woman. I can't buy that engaging in sexual competition with a screen-fantasy, or turning yourself into an object (unless doing so is of particular erotic interest to you), or holding up as a beau ideal the vaunted endless variety but ultimately repetition-compulsion monotony of porn --- is a feminist ideal, however you define feminist.

But looking beyond porn, particularly with paradoxical civil-liberties issues it raise for a hardcore free-speech nut like myself, and musing on just what was bugging me in the world-view I was being exposed to day after day in my researches, I conducted what my homie Wittgenstein might call a thought-experiment.

These male-avatars would make a kazillion dollars per year but would always be home for all possible familial-demands, ranging from middle-school piano recitals to playing gardes-manger at their mate’s in-home fundraising teas.   And oh, they would never dream of taking vacations without the kids and their mothers-in-law, preferably to locales where one of their mates’ siblings live. These figments of the female emotion-porn imagination would have no say in the rearing of the kids but would be expected to contribute to 1/2 of the domestic duties after having written all the checks for the household.

In others words, imagine if technology were dictating that men should  nothing more than part-ambulatory sperm-banks, part-ATM machines, and part male-mommies, and as lacking in individuality, three-dimensional human character, and  the impulse towards personal gratification as any porn-bunny.

Scary, eh?

So with the Thrillhammer coming ever closer to the dream of teledildonics and soccer-moms buying vibrators for their college-bound daughters --- it appears that traditional guy-values have colonized sex, the values that say sex isn't about the personal but the mechanical. The bar is lowered, the zeitgeist is coarsened --- and it's hard to believe the volume of authentic human joy has gone up for either men or woman because of it.

Sociologist Philip Slater prophetically talked about the depersonalizing addiction to technology in his classic 1970 The Pursuit of Loneliness, and  so did E.M.Forster (yes, that E.M. Forster) in his 1909 sci-fi short story "The Machine Stops" --- "men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul". There is really little new in this critique of technology --- that it can lead to atomization and balkanization, that it kind of caters to a fear of the intricacy of human inter-relationship  --- but it was kind of stunning to observe how readily it had penetrated a broader cultural sensibility about sex . Which  in my strictly myopic bigoted opinion is exactly yummy, rich, and creamy precisely because it is multivalent, undefinable, and so deeply unalgorhythmic. And personal.

To me, the technik-uber-alles attitude towards sexuality gives off  vibes as upsetting, toxic, and crypto anti-woman as say, the left-over Freudian attitudes of another decade, where, where in speech-acts worthy of homicidal attack by Kate Millet, the esteemed psychoanalytically-oriented culture critic Ernest Becker could write his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (featured to comic effect in a 1970s Woody Allen movie) about how a male fears the power of his mother  and by extension all women because he never gets over thinking what a witch she is after seeing his first toilet-bowl of menstrual blood, and of course women have penis envy because all they can create is a dead inert stool in contrast to a vibrant, life-affirming erection. I don't know what kind of homelife Becker had as a child, and I probably don't want to know --- but to me, his early 60s-feminist-backlash fantasy rationalizations were just that: bunkum in defense of social-structures that were female-unfriendly.

I am always wary of justifications for what  appears to be attacks on our finer feelings and are trumpeted as the way things really are and/or statements of progress that are so often so curiously anti-woman in the traditional sense. It's just dismaying how in each new generation, there's an au-courant cultural iteration bent on  diminishing women, as in the 80s, it was aerobics that was the new corset.

There were many days after working on the project I felt a) I never wanted to have sex again; b) if I did have sex again, it couldn't be with a guy, because they were, as a group, frightening and Other not in a good way; and c) I'll never find anyone to have sex with because clearly my fuddy-duddy humanistic model of sex --- that it's about intimacy --- marked me as a six-sigma freak out of tune with the larger culture.

I also knew that the troubling questions the research was raising could NOT be put in the book --- it was, after all, to be a fun coffee-table book, and unlike my previous book, was not intended to throw me once again smack into argument-culture and provoke debate and name-calling. Controversy doesn't necessarily sell books, in spite of what you hear, and is exhausting for the unintentional creator of it. I did have folks tell me they did want to read what in a sense would have been the outtakes/director's cut of the book; that is, they were interested in what conclusions I had really come to through the researches.

And that’s what this Chautaqua lecture tonight is for.

But, as I kept on telling these friends and acquaintances who did seem interested in the “Behind the Music”/the making of  the coffeetable book “Wired For Sex: Sex, Technology, and the Way We Live Today”, there is no market for such writing and I am NOT a blogger and after having been the loyal opposition/house-critic for technology culture in the 1990s, I wasn't interested in recapping that role.

That the ethos  of "throw a vibrator at it"  seems to me not the best solution for sexual dysfunction --- it's a quick fix, and potentially elides/avoids foundational problems --- puts me in a minority position . And taking on the whole sex-positive establishment (who were so generous with their time and resources as I was working on the book) wasn't something I wanted to do. Besides, arguing with people's feelings doesn't usually get you anywhere.

The paradox I couldn’t resolve --- and that I still can’t as I stand here today --- is how to reconcile the exuberant animal nature that leads to homo faber and homo ludens --- which always likes to make stuff, and damned straight also likes sex --- with the sense that there is something  currently going on that is out of whack, extreme, and pushing us to accommodate ourselves to machine epistemologies --- what elsewhere I termed “the software way of knowledge”.

So what are my net-net/bottom-line/end-of-the-day conclusions about what I learned from the project? They are

* there is a lot of money to be made if someone brought good sense and good art to the sex industry, because there is so little of either

* there is a lot of interesting stuff going on at the intersection of sex and technology, but no one is really documenting this in a comprehensive but neutral fashion

* what we can learn from machines and software isn't maybe stuff that should be applied to sexuality

Any questions?