Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...concept of virtual reality (VR) begs for use in the sexual realm. Nearly anyone who thinks about VR in terms of its depiction in Hollywood (consider "Lawnmower Man" or "Disclosure") can think about it for another five minutes and come up with the idea of virtual sex. Certainly computer developers, fully aware of the double entendre intended in "fingering" someone (cf. Fifteen Minutes last week), are forging ahead in pursuit of the virtual orgasm...
...idea of a virtual grope is appealing for so many reasons, not the least of which is availability. Who wouldn't want to be able to make out on demand with Marilyn Monroe or your upstairs neighbor for that matter? Virtual sex would solve the perpetual problem of who to take home from a party. Who needs to settle for beer goggling when the man of your dreams in available electronically? A virtual man won't steal the covers for one thing...
...Daisy," a Dunster senior, has several concrete theories about the possible directions virtual sex could take. "Once you have the full body suit virtual experience, there will be an enormous potential for living out erotic fantasies in total privacy. But the idea of being plugged into a world designed in the dull, plastic, feathered hair aesthetic of most current pornography is terrifying." For better or for worse, both of these scenarios are still imaginary; the technology is years behind the theory...
...idea of going into the woods with anindividual of indeterminate gender underscores theuncertainty inherent in 'net relationships. Whenhaving 'netsex, the information one "partner"knows about the other is highly selective andoften false. After all, what can they give you?The Michelangelo Virus? There is a certainexcitement for many in this ability to create acharacter, to be an ideal self or someonecompletely different. If you want to be asix-foot platinum blonde transsexual dominatrixone day and a vertically challenged Cyclops fromNew Zealand the next, all it takes is the click ofthe keys. No one will ever know. By the sametoken, though...
Spack explains that the word boredom did not exist until the mid-18th century; thus, far from being the universal condition that we tend to assume, it is a fairly recent social construction. The popular idea (voiced by Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and others) that "all endeavor of every kind takes place in the context of boredom impending or boredom repudiated" presents boredom as a universal like fear or desire; its linguistic history, documented by Spacks, suggests otherwise. Boredom, then, appears as "an explanatory myth of our culture" whose linguistic appearance in the 18th century was linked to an increase...