Talk on “Sex and Science Fiction”

What this episode covers

On Friday, Sept 26, 2008, I was part of a group reading of sex-related SF stories at the Center for Sex & Culture, 1519 Mission Street near 11th, San Francisco…it was good stuff. I read from The Sex Sphere. Richard Kadrey read a story about spacers with hollowed out bodies and aliens living inside them, Steven Schwartz read three linked short-shorts relating to future soldiers and sex, Charlie Anders read a kind of after-school special story about a low-caste person whose “harnt” gets wet when a pilot falls for him/her on a generation starship, and Thomas Roche read a nasty freakshow tale about a woman having sex with spiders. A stronger lineup than one often hears at group readings. On Saturday, Sept 27, 2008, at CELLspace / 2050 Bryant Street, San Francisco, I gave a keynote talk on “Sex and Science Fiction.” Both events were for Arse Elektronika , oganized by the monochrom art group of Vienna. We had a pretty good audience, and they streamed it live onto the Intenet. I had a cold, and I ached all over, so I didn’t stick around for the rest of the talks. CELLSpace has great graffittiesque murals. Organizer Johnannes gave me a cool advance copy of a book of the talks of last year’s monchrom conference organized—the book title is pr0nnovation? Pornography and Technological Innovation , and it is appearing under the hallowed RE/Search imprint. You can directly access an audio of my half-hour talk as delivered, which monocrom put online as an MP3 file. I think the fileincludes about half an hour of Q&A as well. Just click on the icon below to access a link to the podcast. The rest of this post is the written draft for my talk that I typed up in advance. Here we go. “Sex and Science Fiction” Science fiction is a mountain of metaphors, a funhouse of crooked mirrors that give us new views of our actual world. From our genes’ point of view, we’re meat-based landcrawlers to ride around in. Imagine little double helices lounging in the hammocks of your cells. What makes us especially useful is that, now and then, we spawn off new landcrawlers with copies of the passenger genes, carrying them ever forward through time. Putting the same point differently, if living organisms weren’t obsessed with sex, none of would be here. We’re each a link in a chain of generations, we’re dangling dollies on a slimy macramé of a trillion umbilical cords. Of course we enjoy sex for more immediate reasons than reproduction: erotic pleasure, the orgasm, and partnership bonding. The last one is important. That’s why we talk about making love. We’re wired so that loves readily grows from the sex act. Certainly, if reproduction were the only reason for sex, you wouldn’t be having so many orgasms. How many? Math time! Suppose you live to your eighties, and that you have seventy years of sexual activity, which makes for about 3,500 weeks. If you’re energetic enough to average three pops a week for seventy years, you’re talking about something on the order of ten thousand orgasms. All that brain-flashing to bring forth at most a couple of kids! “Oooo Mommy, you mean you and Daddy did that twice?” So how about science fiction and sex? Where have we been, where are we headed, and how much further can we go? One sex story I always think of is Samuel Delany’s, “Aye and Gomorrah,” about a cadre of spacers who’ve been surgically altered so that their crotches are as featureless as those of a plastic Barbie doll’s. Why?

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