Extreme Metaphors

BARBER: That could apply to sex as well.

BALLARD: Right. I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape, the violent landscape – this sort of Dionysiac landscape of the 1970s. That is why I bring in things like the car crash. A whole new kind of psychopathology, the book of a new Krafft-Ebing, is being written by such things as car crashes, televised violence, the new awareness of our own bodies transmitted by magazine accounts of popular medicine, by reports of the Barnard heart transplants, and so on.

There’s a new textbook of psychopathology being written, and the old perversions are dead. They relate to a bygone age. A fantasy like a man dressing his wife in a gymslip and beating her belongs to the past. What we’re getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We’ve got to recognise that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street. But I don’t mean exclusively television when I talk about the communications landscape: I mean every facet of one’s experience through newspapers, magazines, television. If you take something like travelling by aircraft to Paris, it’s a very fictional experience. One’s actual physical experience of going from London to Paris by air is completely overlaid by advertising and commercial and fashion concepts.

BARBER: Who or what controls this sort of experience?

BALLARD: Well, it’s a democratic world. It’s controlled by the people who design the handrails of airport stairways, who design hostesses’ dresses – the smiles the hostesses give you are themselves a kind of fictionalised smile based on an image of the sort of smile they should give us. Nothing is spontaneous, everything is stylised, including human behaviour. And once you move into this area where everything is stylised, including sexuality, you’re leaving behind any kind of moral or functional relevance. I mean, this is the thing about the pill – not that it gives women freedom, because it doesn’t – but it removes the orientation provided by the reproductive impulse so that, let’s say, there’s no longer any reason why intercourse per vagina should be any more satisfying or any more desirable or any more right, morally or organically, than say intercourse per anus, per navel or armpit or anywhere else you care to dream up. This is serious. In fact, women may not be necessary anyway, just as men may not be necessary to women. With various electronic aids – closed-circuit TV, videotape feedback and so on – one can see sexuality extended into a whole series of new perversions, new unions.

When people travel, have more experiences and meet more people, they tend to have more sexual experience – as they would have more meals. I feel that so-called normal sexuality (if there ever was such a thing), i.e. heterosexual relationships oriented around genital sex of a reproductive character, which sustained people through most of their adult lives in the past, will probably in future be exhausted within a few years. People may well go through a phase of their young lives, say their late teens and early twenties, when their sex lives take place in genital terms and they have children, but that will be the adolescent stage. One’s real puberty will be reached when one moves into the area of, let’s say, conceptualised sex, when sex is between you and a machine, or between you and an idea.

BARBER: When sex becomes so totally detached from any genital procedure, it surely ceases to be sex and just means pleasure. In those terms, food is sex.

BALLARD: Exactly. The analogy is with food. Apart from economic and minor religious obstacles, there’s been unlimited freedom to explore every avenue and byway imaginable, and some of the greatest delicacies world cuisine can offer couldn’t be farther removed from the basic nutritional requirements of the human body. I’m talking about frogs’ legs, bird’s nest soup, etc. Eventually, conventional sex is the first of the new perversions. Just as you would think it odd to meet an intelligent adult who ate tapioca three times a day, though nutritionally it’s perfectly sound (and it’s the staple diet of the Polynesians), so I think in future we’ll regard people who only have conventional sex as odd. People will begin to explore all the side streets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually – there won’t be any kind of compulsion to become, let’s say, a high-heel fetishist – which is a monomaniac impulse. Just as recipes are now given on TV for making a veal escalope, so in twenty years’ time TV will offer nightly new sexual experiments and deviations, and we’ll put them into practice. Sex won’t take place in the bed, necessarily – it’ll take place in the head. And in a sense the head is a much richer place than the bed. Well, it is!

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