Trojan, Woody Allen and the Orgasmatron

Trojan has a commercial for a ‘personal massager’ that is getting a lot of airplay on TV networks due to the fact that the commercial is not sexually explicit and never uses the word ‘vibrator’. The commercial is similar in marketing style to other pharmaceutical, medical or personal products advertising targeted at women. Take a look (it’s safe–there’s nothing sexually explicit in it).

In the Trojan commercial they try to tone down the narcissistic and anti-social aspect of their ‘massager’ by inviting women to ‘share’ their experience with a partner. But it’s not that simple.

Pleasure and Perversion

It still doesn’t escape the curse of Narcissus. There’s nothing inherently social about pleasure. One person is just as good as two or more people. There’s nothing essentially relational about it. Pleasure can only be experienced by oneself, it can not be shared. Strictly speaking, it can’t be given to someone either, since you can’t share a subjective experience. The best you can do is cause someone to experience their own pleasure. But there’s a difference between giving and causing.

I know our culture doesn’t much believe in concepts like ‘perversion’ these days, especially in the sexual sphere. Nevertheless, isn’t the attempt to isolate pleasure as an object in itself part of the essence of perversion? Sexual or not, could the pursuit of pleasure purely for its own sake and cut off from the context in which it exists lead to anything good? I don’t think so. Not unless you think addiction is a good thing.

Aristotle was very wise when he observed that pleasure is a good, but not the good. Pleasure in itself, therefore, can not make us happy. Furthermore, Aristotle noted that pleasure was something that accompanied actions and in a way it completed them. In other words, the nature of pleasure is not to be an object of action, but accompanies actions which have other things as their object.  In a way it reinforces positive actions just like pain tends to warn us of negative or unhealthy actions. It always exists in a context. But when we seek pleasure in itself, we are ripping away the context that was meant to be reinforced by pleasure and focusing all our attention on the pleasure itself. But nature has her own way of punishing those that mess with her.

The Orgasmatron

Watching this commercial recalled a Woody Allen movie I had seen a long time ago called Sleepers. It’s a sci-fi comedy where Allen is stuck in the future in a totalitarian state where everyone is pacified by big screens, pleasure-inducing orbs and something called the orgasmatron.

The orgasmatron looked like a narrow tube with a door and was tall enough that one or two people could stand inside it. The person went inside and it created the experience of orgasm. As you can imagine, this device plays a comic role in the movie. But the questions such a technology raises are more serious.

The idea of an orgasmatron is useful though for one reason. It does make for a great thought experiment. Imagine if something like an orgasmatron really existed. It could stimulate every erogenous zone at the same time, maximizing the sexual pleasure that is physically possible by a human being. It would give the most perfect physical experience possible. So what then? I think this scenario helps highlight some pertinent questions. Questions like:

Are we liberated from the opposite sex completely? Why should we even bother with the opposite sex?

Is the orientation of the sexes to each other merely functional, so that if we can ‘liberate’ sexual pleasure and reproduction from that orientation, there is nothing left?

Is there nothing more that we desire from the opposite sex than sexual pleasure or the satisfaction of a purely physical desire?

Is sexual pleasure the end-all-be-all of sex? Is there nothing more to sex for us than the physical?

Is the possibility of sexual pleasure exhausted by the purely physiological experience of pleasure?

What Happened to Love?

I think the reduction of sex to physical pleasure that is presupposed by Trojan and many people in our society today is leaving out a lot. It’s leaving out things that have been demonstrated to be extremely important to human beings; things like meaning and love.

Sex requires a context that is more than animal satisfaction to be meaningful. And what about love?

No device, no technology, no machine will ever be able to replicate love. Only a human person can give the gift of love. We will make orgasmatrons and test-tube babies and artificial wombs, but robots will never love, computers will never make sacrifices, and motherboards will never make gifts of themselves. We can and will use technology to perversely produce orgasms and babies, but only a real human being can transform sex into making love and bring into being children that are not products but fruit.