Avatars at an Orgy: Sexual Representations in Modern Literature

All representations of sex found in the early artefacts were celebrations of fertility. Sex was by gods and for gods, and as such didn't require verbalisation. The façade of Khajuraho is as eloquent as Kama Sutra.

However, words are an extension of our existence. We tend to verbalise every molecule of reality, because narratives are our larders: we preserve life in narratives, and into narratives we reach to find life. The natural place for sex in the constellations of the humankind had to be in words: sex is a narrative and orgasm is just an idea by other means.

In the first tome of his History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault coined the term desexualization of pleasure. Less than two decades later, the Internet has irrevocably changed the public and private sexual space. Pleasure is now primarily the domain of avatars. How has the Internet been embodying and re-defining desexualisation of pleasure? How has it disembodied verbalised sex? Have we reached the point of saturation where porn has become nostrified, while writing about sex is viewed as a malfunction of fiction (i.e. the Bad Sex in Fiction award)?

This paper argues that in the age of post-corporal, disembodied sex, textual pornography has been eliminated as an option, because the element of intentional excitement has evaporated. Writing about sex means not writing about an act, but about a device. As such, it cannot carry the weight of the nave and must be relegated.