Cyborg Sexualities: Haraway, Baudrillard and the Hyperreal Gender Break Down

Clayton Benjamin Writ 5001 December 13, 2009

Clayton Benjamin

Abstract This paper is meant to be an exploratory examination of Donna Haraways 1985 article, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Haraway suggested that cyborgs were postmodern organisms that offered a pathway to the emancipation of modernist hierarchies. Her article introduced Cyborgs as a new field of study. Academics have written a proliferation of articles about their ontology. However, recent studies have proved that instead of negating modernist constructions of race, class, gender and sexuality, the cyborg has reproduced and reinforced those constructions. There is a gap within their research, which relies heavily upon modernist theories. The objective of this paper is create a new framework through Baudrillards ideas of the simulacrum, upon which cyborgs can be freed of social constructions. Personal Narrative The seminal fluid splashed into her, the egg received. The outside world intruded into her belly. I had been conceptualized. My mugshot captured onto the sonogram, my penis gendered. My masculinity transcribed. I rushed out the canal on a sea of amniotic fluid and snip went the scissors to the umbilical chord. The bright fluorescent light creating blue hints upon my white flesh. Wrapped and coddled in blue. A smiley face screen-printed upon the first machine woven cotton that enclothed my body. Then the scissors snipped again, they shed part of my body for me; a Christian aesthetic to be forever tattooed/tabooed. Then came the syringes, sticking and probing my body, creating a being that would outlive any virus, contagious bacteria and death. I was no longer the sperm, the egg, I was no longer me. Id been birthed, transformed, Id become their cyborg, Id become the hyper-human. I am now a binary product to be studied, ethnographed, copied, fit into boxes, scanned and rescanned; a product for iterative design, for market research for mass consumption. A simple line of binary code. A cog in the wheel of the machine. Introduction The idea of the cyborg is a relatively new and interesting concept. Many theorists have used the cyborg as a metaphor for a posthuman being. The metaphor began in 1985 when Donna Haraway published her first draft of A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. The manifesto was meant to give a new framework for social feminism, to break from modern phallogecentrism and reveal a pathway for a new cyborg ontology (Bernardi 155). She weaved the myth of the cyborg preceding the rise of the internet, wireless communications and web based advertising and marketing. Her ground breaking ideas were to collapse individual identities for a new profound being; a cyborg. She defined a cyborg as, a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction, (Haraway 149). She argued, in order to subvert the cross-sectionality of race, gender and class, women must refrain from a unified front

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and understand the flexibility of their status. She states, this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for the responsibility in their construction, (150). To Haraway, identity cannot be determined through the modern term woman. She acknowledges that modern binary body politics, where identity can only be defined through the other (Toffoletti 84), is unsuccessful at creating a united front for opposing patriarchic and racist separations. By example, women of colour are used as an example of cyborg myth. Compared to a white woman, a woman of colour is read as not white. Compared to a black man, a woman of colour is read as not man. The woman of colours identity is consistently two fold, first by gender, then by race. Because the woman of colour can no longer embody one defined identity, she has transgressed the boundaries of identity, and is subject to both misogyny and racism. By exemplifying women of colour, Haraway argues the modern term woman is no longer applicable to create a socialist feminist movement [G]ender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in essential unity, (155). In modernist thought, an identity can only be understood through its opposition. There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women, (155). She advances this argurment through the myth of the cyborg. The cyborg denies phallogocentrism of the modern era by divorcing itself completely from the ideology that created it. Cyborgsare the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential, (151). Two key concepts emerge from this statement; that in order to create a new framework for feminism, past structural perspectives do not translate onto the new role of the cyborg, and the cyborg will not reproduce the same structured environments that preceded it. In this statement Haraway is encouraging a separation from past feminism which relied on a Freudian, Marxist and capitalist ideology and lead to definitions of the other in regards to sex, class, gender and sexuality. Furthermore, Haraway compares and contrasts the old hierarchical constraints of science with what she calls a new network, informatics of domination, (161). The informatics of domination consists of thirty-three different suggestions ranging from the political sciences to the biological sciences. It is her intention here to suggest the new networked world the cyborg inhabits. In modernity, the sciences held ties to the natural. Sex was for reproduction and eugenics was the breeding of humans for advanced gene pools. In Haraways postmodern world, the sciences are no longer interested in the natural, but instead in the network of existences. Therefore, in postmodernity, sex and eugenics is instead labeled population control and genetic engineering. The informatics of domination is intended to bring out the irony in the old hierarchy and demonstrate that, no natural architectures constrain system design, (162). The first item on Haraways list is representation, which according to Jean Baudrillard is the second order of simulacra. For Haraways informatics of domination representation has become simulation, Baudrillards third and final order of the simulacra. Simulation, according to Jean Baudrillard, is the removal of the origin from representation into a new realm of simulacrum:

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Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (Baudrillard 1). Baudrillard defines three different stages of the image. First the image is a reflection of reality, second the image is a representation of the reality, and lastly the image is a simulation of the reality (Sawchuck 103). The concept of simulation is that the sign has surpassed the actual reality. The sign is an exact replica of the original and therefore carries all the information of the actual original. If the original is multiplied, then the reality of the original is lost. Because we live in a high-tech, heavily mediated (by television, internet, newspaper, etc.) society, Baudrillard argues that we live in an era of simulation, that we can no longer find a natural reality. Baudrillard describes an advanced state of abstraction where the object is absorbed altogether into the image and dematerializes in closed cycles of semiotic exchange. (Best 51). All reality is lost in the signs of communication and commodification (Poster 81). The transition of reality into simulation is carefully examined by Kim Sawchuck in her article, Semiotics, Cybernetics, and the Ecstasy of Marketing Communications. In this article she gives an example of the commodification of chicken in the United States. Her example is this: A chicken advertised in a local paper is depicted to inform the consumer that it is on sale. This reproduction of the chicken as image occurs at the level of representation: the photographic image or drawing of a chicken, the chickens referent, is supposedly the chicken in the store. One knows the image is not unique, but cheaply reproduced and circulated to the entire region But can this bird be understood as the final referential ground upon which the advertising photo is based? Chickens, agriculturally mass-produced on poultry farms, are genetically altered to create a breed of bird that grows rapidly and efficiently But their alteration does not end here. After they are killed, they are injected with water to make them appear plumper. They thus visually fulfill the consumers desire for a luscious, juicy fowl. The chicken is not real or natural but a culturally manipulated foodstuff. It is a simulated bird, a hyperreal chicken, an extension of the producers marketing strategy, (104). From this example, we can see the cycle of Baudrillards first, second and third states of simulacra. The first state is the drawing of the chicken, a realistic reflection of the chicken. The second state is the mass production of the drawing. The drawing no longer refers to the actual chicken, but instead to the sale of the chicken, where to buy that chicken, and the exchange value of the chicken. The third state is the chicken-like product found in the supermarket. Because consumers simply acknowledge the processed supermarket chicken foodstuff as chicken, the reality for manufacturing that chicken has been erased. The chicken in the supermarket no longer a natural chicken; it has been transformed and manipulated. The reality of that chicken is that it isnt at all a chicken, but a mutation/copy/imitation of a chicken. Therefore, consumers are substituting the simulation (the chicken in the store) for a natural chicken. Here the sign has become the

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reality, which creates no reality at all, but instead a simulation of reality the simulacrum. From Baudrillards theory of simulacrum, we can begin to draw comparisons to Haraways cyborg. The cyborg exists in an era of simulacrum. Since, according to Baudrillard, there exists no reality but instead only the simulacrum, [c]ritical theory faces the formidable task of unveiling structures of domination when no one is dominating, nothing is being dominated, and no ground exists for a principle of liberation from domination, (Poster 82). This analysis is congruent with Haraways concept of divorcing the parent. If the cyborg exists in a world of simulacrum, the past perspectives of modernity on ideas of class, race, gender and sexuality can have no forbearance on the cyborg self. Likewise, the cyborg cannot reconstruct past structural dominations such as race, class, gender and sexuality. If we do in fact live in the postmodern era of simulacrum, then Haraways cyborgs must be who we are. Cyborgs are Baudrillards human in simulacra today; we are living hyper-reality now, (Bernardi, email corresponsdence). If we are in fact, the embodiment of the cyborg, then why have we not purged ourselves of the sins of the father? It is my assertion to prove that cyborgs have not created non-gendered, nonsexist, non-racist, non-sexually-phobic spaces. Instead, the cyborg has reproduced the genealogy of repression into the hub of cyberspace through online pornography, and a hyper-masculinized military. I will review in this article past literature on online pornography studies, and our postmodern military. It is my intention to not only examine flaws in past research of Haraways metaphor of cyborgs, but also to represent a new framework upon which cyborgs can be understood as reflexive, libertarian beings: hybrid human-machine sexuality, which does act as simulation, negates the reproduction of race, gender, class and sexuality, and liberates us from outdated, modernist definitions of identity and which will lead to a fluidity of embodiments and ideological identities. Cyborg Sex Slaves and the Hyperreal Woman Online pornography is abundant, easy to access, and has a high usage amongst netizens (Doring 1092). Because of its abundance and popularity, it is necessary to examine its social impact; which is far from the freedom Haraways cyborg envisions. Pornography consistently ratifies patriarchic heirarchies and subjects women to sexism, violence and oppression. Catharine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin began criticizing pornography and the negative consequences it had on women during the 1970s. Other feminists and Laura Mulvey who coined the male gaze have also furthered their work. Mackinnon and Dworkin drafted legislation in 1983. MacKinnons definition of pornography is: the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words, that also includes one or more of the following: (a) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or (b) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy humiliation and pain; or (c) women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest, or other sexual assault; or (d) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (e) women are presented in postures or

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positions of sexual submission, servility or display; or (f) womens body parts including but not limited to vaginas, breast or buttocks are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (g) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (h) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, humiliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual. The use of men, children or transsexuals in the place of women shall also be deemed to be pornography for purposes of this definition. (Mackinnon, 1993). This definition is far reaching and was ultimately abandoned by the City of Minneapolis due to its unconstitutionality in regards to freedom of speech. However, courts do have their own definition of pornography, which was defined in Miller vs. California by the Supreme Court with a three-prong standard. According to United States Federal Law, images and text can be deemed obscene if: (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or described, in patently offensive way, sexual conduct defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value, (Miller v. California 413 U.S. 15). Though both definitions were created before online pornography, they are still applicable to studying the representation of women in online pornography. By combining these two definitions, pornography can be understood to be (a) degradable towards women, (b) depicting women as willing participants for male pleasure, (c) objectifies women, and (d) is created solely for the signification of sexual arousal. Through this definition, it is clear that online pornography is reproducing and sexualizing hierarchies, as it had done so in modernity. Two studies, one by Don Heider and Dustin Harp entitled New Hope or Old Power: Democracy, Pornography and the Internet, and another by Daniel Berndardi entitled White Pride, Pedophilic Pornography, and Donna Haraways Manifesto explore pornographys role in recreating male dominance. The authors of the studies examined a wide selection of pornographic websites and came to the conclusion that online pornography does reproduce patriarchic hierarchies which reconstitute sex, class, and gender, portrays women as willing and eager sex objects, standardizes race by labeling non-white women, legitimizes pedophilia and eroticizes violent sexual assault. The basis of their research relies upon Mackinnons and the Supreme Courts definitions of pornography and upon Laura Mulveys theory of the male gaze. The male gaze is rooted in Freuds ideas on scopophilia and voyeurism. Scopophilia is the erotic objectification of the other to create a source of pleasure for the others to-be-look-atness, (Mulvey 1999). Mulvey argues that in film, the other is always the woman and that patriarchic hierarchies are constantly present. She states, In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female, (837). The male is always doing the looking and the woman is always the object to be looked at. She makes this argument due to the duality of to the male gaze, that of the male director and that of the male protagonist. Because of male voyeurism women on

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screen can only be viewed through a male gaze; their bodies are persistently filmed by sectionalizing them. Often, films focus close-ups on womens legs, breasts, buttocks and fingers, or simply offers silhouettes of her female form while negating her face leading to objectification. By Mackinnons definition, most films could be labeled pornographic via clause (e) and (f). Mulveys theory can transfer onto pornography. Like film, pornography is a male dominated medium and is directed primarily toward a male audience. Online pornography, as the rest of the internet, is entirely linked. Often, porn is assembled into online libraries or what are called picture posts. Heider and Harp, and Bernardi found pornography not only objectified women through the visual male gaze of photos and video, but also through male narration of text. On these sites a line of text often accompanies photos of women in various sexual positions. Almost all the text Heider and Harp found was degrading toward women and exemplified male domination. One text example Heider and Harp found was, A horny slut riding a guys cock, another was, Nice body on this girl and she loves to get fucked, (Heider and Harp 294). Words like slut, bitch, and whore are traditionally used to degrade women and are frequently found in online porn. From the text, it can be presumed that this is a male virtual society for male gratification, which is male narrated and male dominated. The way to secure this male domination is via the degradation of the other; women. Additionally, the two text samples offer another male presumption of women, their need to serve men and be used for male pleasure. Horny slut, and loves to get fucked, insists on the womens wants and desires to be dominated by men. In the world of heterosexual male pornography, women have never ending sexual appetites, are willing to service men by doing whatever the man would like, and in the end is pleased by providing service to her master. In this virtual world, women are pure sex objects, to be looked at, to be used, and to never be rewarded. Of course, in the male dominated world of online pornography, everyone is presumed white, unless otherwise noted. Racism is another social taboo that runs rampant in online pornography; another sexualized hierarchy. Heider and Harps and Bernardis studies lead them to conclude white-on-white sex was normalized, and all non-white sex was another form of otherness. For example they found text like these accompanying graphic photos, white cock in black pussy, (Heider and Harp 296) and Huge Black studs pumping horny white wives, amateurs and teens, (Berndardi 176). Noticeably, race becomes an issue when a person of one race is fucking another. Additionally, the studies found that black women were often noted as dirty animals in need of taming, (175). Black men were constantly generalized as beasts with enlarged phalluses, (176). Furthermore, the studies found that Latina and Asian women also carried separate racist stereotypes. Latina women were often equated to dogs, and oriental women were offered as innocent, teen-like sex slaves, often used for torture and bondage (176). Through race, we cannot only define the male gaze as male, but also as the white male gaze, (Heider and Harp 296). Asian women are not the only race to be portrayed in the teen porn circuit. The studies found that almost all races could be found in pornography which sexualized age. Many sites offered barely legal pornography, which invited older voyeuristic adults to, cum see my little sister spreading open her fuckhole, (Heider and Harp 295), amongst other things. Other teen porn websites included; Baby Teen Pussy Galore, Just Teens,

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Teen Steam, and Slick Beaver (172). This pornography genre is clearly presenting and legitimizing pedophilic desires. Often girls are dressed in cheerleading outfits, Catholic school girl uniforms, and in pigtails to accentuate their non-woman, girl like features. However, teen is not the only evidence of the sexualizing of a womans age. Many styles of this porn exist, Granny, MILF (mom Id like to fuck) and Cougar. The womans age is constantly being sexualized and labeled. By studying online pornography, we can see how women are objectified and subjected to the dominance of men. The women in pornography have no agency. They cannot control the representations of their vaginas, their face, their breasts, nor can they control the fucking, the position, the scene, nor can they control the editing process, nor the text written to describe them. This lack of control consequently means the loss of personal ownership to their bodys representation and their embodiment. The total lack of control over representation creates a hyperreal masculine world where women are used exclusively to play submissive roles. The online female pornstar is simply part of a new class of online cyborg sex slaves. No matter how old, how young, how Asian, how Black, how Latina, or how White this bitch is, she loves to fuck in any position, roped up, beaten and bloodied, nice and soft, orally, anally or vaginally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and she never tires, never cries after sex, and has no emotional baggage! She is the hyperreal woman, designed for a hyperreal, male dominated world the simulated world of sex. Man Minus: The Cyborg Soldier If online pornography leads to the hyperreal woman, then where can we find the hyperreal man? He exists in the manufacturing of war. Traditionally war has been a masculine pursuit, fought and waged by men for male consumption. In America, the new soldier is the cyborg soldier. No longer is his body trained and recruited and put through the harshest conditions, but his mind is warped onto and through technology and simulation to remove his human emotion and to create a specific cyborg soldier that no longer combats in the fields, but instead through the mediation of technology (Masters 123). Like online pornography, the sciences are no longer interested in transcribing machines upon bodies, but bodies upon machines. The very processes of transferring human reasoning and thinking from human subjects onto technology, wherein technology is infused with the ability to think without being interrupted by emotions such as guilt or bodily limitations such as fatigue, and that the human body is no longer the subject that can produce and project desired representations of the American self, (114). It is the removal of the male soldier from the battlefields that has reconstituted a new hypermasculinity where bombs become phallic symbols, enemies are otherized, and the human body becomes an imperfection needing solution (114.) Curiously, the cyborg soldier has no embodiment, but is instead a cybernetic organism linked through satellites, computers and GPS guided missiles (Gray 281). The adaptation of the cyborg soldier has lead to a new masculine ontology. Military cyborgs, on the other hand, are still pretty masculine in our cultural coding, but since soldiers are also techs, the new masculine identity of soldiers is around mechanization, fixing machines and working with machines, instead of the traditionally masculine identity of physical force, easy access to violence, and the direct subjugation of other men and all women, (283). No longer is the white male body necessary to fight wars but now

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includes women, homosexuals and people of color. However, war is still a male dominated mechanism, created through the techno-masculinized (Masters 115) cyborg soldier. The cyborg soldier has been masculinized, while human soldiers, apart from technology, have been feminized and reconstituted within the realm of those needing protection, (115). Masters argues in her article, Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinities, there exist a history of masculine domination in the regards to soldiers. She quotes Foucault, out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed. Army recruits are simply malleable minds and bodies that can be reprogrammed into masculine fighting machines. Historically, these machines fought face to face. Now the reprogramming is in the training of technological pursuits and protecting the mechanized soldier behind monitors while attacking. Because of the cyborg soldiers removal from the battlefield, and his constant mediation through technology, his emotions are effectively removed. He no longer has to see bodies in streets, crying mothers or raped women, he simply needs to aim targets at dots on screens, take his coffee break and listen to command control through his headset. He has become the perfect part of the machine; one that is infallible, techno-masculinized and emotionally void. In essence he is the perfect hypermasculine soldier, a deadly cyborg. Queering Command Control: Liberating the Cyborg Exemplified through online pornography and through cyborg soldiers the dichotomies of the father have been reconstituted by the cyborg. The cyborg has not lived up to Haraways technophilic dream of emancipation. The hierarchical dualisms which have traditionally distinguished between masculinity and femininity culture/nature, mind/body, superior/inferior, subject/object, objectivity/subjectivity, disembodied/embodied, strength/weakness, active/passive, rational/irrational [which] have come to represent the distinction between cyborg and humanoid, (Masters 115) has not usurped modernist constructions of race, gender, class and sexuality. Cyborgs, in fact have regenerated these norms into the hyperreal. Instead of negating and adding to the fluidity of embodiments, the cyborg has become engendered with the hyperperformance of misogyny, racism, and post industrialist colonialism. However, much of the work done in recognizing, analyzing and researching Haraways Manifesto has been done so through a modernist framework. In order to understand Haraways emancipatory cyborg, we cannot simply look at the results of hyperfeminity and hypermasculinity, but must understand the processes involved in their creation, the real-time interaction of their use, and the sexualized relationships generated between human/machine interactions. The cyborg may access online pornography to consume simulations of hyperreal women and hyperreal sex, however, this is not a form of male domination. Since we live in a simulacrum, the bodies having sex on the screen are not real bodies, they are merely simulations simulating simulated sex. Furthermore, it is generally believed that many of the women in pornography have had plastic surgery, use dietary aides and are now in fact simulations of women: cyborg women. Likewise many men participating in porns creation have had enlargements, use male enhancement drugs, and sculpt their bodies by using machinery, which evolves them into cyborg men. Mulvey noted, the male-gaze inhabits film, but what she does not note, is that the film is produced out of the

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simulacrum. The film itself creates an illusion that what was filmed was actually real. Therefore, filmed human-sexual relationships are never actual or apparent records of sex. The pornography is simply a simulation of a simulation of sex. Furthermore, if we are cyborgs consuming sex via technology, there is a level of intimacy between humans and machines. Humans and machines work synergistically and this relationship deserves a higher level of scrutiny. We must question the dichotomy between human and machine relationships and the ways in which human behavior challenges that dichotomy (Lupton 58). Callon argues, machines can order humans around by playing with their bodies, their feelings or their moral reflexes artefacts are not enigmatic and remote objects to which they are often reduced (1991: 137), (Lupton 59). Machines are prescribed sexuality, behavior and social meaning. Sex toys are a clear example of this relationship. At http://www.mypleasure.com/pocket-rockets.asp, the online sex store provides a description of their vibrator, MyPleasure Pocket Rocket as, MyPleasure's own powerful, purple pocket rocket provides penetrating vibration on all your sweet spots for an out-of-this world experience! The sexuality in this device is two fold. First it performs a masculine sex role by penetrating, but then is reduced to a feminine sex role by providing servitude. With all technology, there is a level of domination and servitude. The human is dominated by the demands of the technology (the way to use it) and is then rewarded by the services it provides (the technologies servitude). Therefore, technologies are not freed of masculine nor feminine roles, but do confuse the boundaries of those sex roles. Because machines are sexualized, and because we warp our minds onto technology, as exemplified through the discussion on cyborg soldiers, machines in themselves are also cybernetic beings. They are a mixture of human emotion, thought and speech and are themselves cyborgs. Therefore, masturbating or using sex toys while viewing online pornography is a new form of sexual relations, cyborg sex. If we are in fact having sex with machines, then our sexuality is no longer heterosexual, nor homosexual, nor bisexual, nor humansexual. We have now become cyborgsexual, which transcends our roles as males and females and reconstitutes us all as queer cybernetic beings. Additionally, being that we are all cyborgs, we have no relation to our human relation to our ancestory, we are a new evolved specie, free to have sex with both machinery and other human/cyborg blends. Sex in the simulacrum we live in is emancipatory, fluid and free of definition. This fluidity is happening through online pornography, online chatrooms via cybersex, and through online dating services via personal profiles and offline meetings. Nicola Dorings article, The Internets Impact on Sexuality: A Critical Review of 15 Years of Research, examines research done on sexuality and internet use. She concludes that the internet has impacted human sexuality positively. The positives of the use of pornography included; increased pleasure, a broadening of gender roles and sexual scipts, improved communication between sexual partners, and the inclusion of handicapped persons and persons of traditionally excluded sexual practices (such as sado-masichism, homosexuality and transexuality) (1094). Therefore, pornography does not simply regenerate modernist norms, but instead has broadened our ideas of sex, sexuality, and sexual norms. Additionally, online sex, defined as either sex exclusively through mediated exchanges, or mediated contact leading to sex offline, is beneficial for human cyborgs as well (1095). Initiating in pure human-computer-human cyborg sex leads to

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reduced numbers of STDs and reduced pregnancies while offering sexual and emotional intimacy. Furthermore, the anonymity of the internet: allows participants to present themselves in a much more favorable light than otherwise possible in face-to-face encounters. By projecting a specific persona in an online setting, individuals who are otherwise unexceptional in real-world settings can experience the lust and desire of others: Any physical handicap can be made disappear; senior citizens can become young lovers; adolescents can be taken more seriously by portraying themselves as older, (Dorring 1095). The representation of ones cyborg self is liberating and does create Haraways rejection of identity. On one site, a cyborg may be male, black, homosexual and in his 60s. On another site, that same cyborg may be transgendered, white, heterosexual and her 20s. The internet allows for users to try on different personas and also gives them the control to present images to the masses on their own terms. No longer must a woman be seen through the male gaze, because she can create and be the sole controller of whichever gaze she would like to attract. Through pornography and cybersex, we can begin to see a proliferation of sexual practices and identities, which are not concrete, but instead are adaptable to a cyborgs preference. Conclusion We live in an uncertain era. Have we ever known reality? Would we know it if we saw it? The proliferation of images and the propensity to manifest meanings has lead to a hyperreality, where we substitute the abnormal for the normal. Our natural world has gone and we must understand the hypocrisy behind the veil. However, let us not mourn the death of modernity, but celebrate the birth of postmodernity. No longer are we stuck in our sex, class, and race structures, our bodies, our minds, nor our reality. We must embrace ourselves as cyborgs and learn to live in the simulacrum. Turning a blind eye and substituting the simulacrum for the real is a dangerous mistake and is where modernist social constructions threaten the hyperreals endless possibilities for identity transcendence. Haraways Cyborg Manifesto envisioned a future free from gender, class, race and sexual identity. She dreamt of a being that would free humankind from man/womans construction of modernity and lead to a world of fluid identities. That being was her version of the cyborg. However, it appears the cyborg has repeated the sins of his/her divorced father. Perhaps if he/she had stayed home longer, he/she would have learned the mistakes of his/her genealogy. Through standard definitions of pornography and militarization the cyborgs in the simulacrum appear to have simply recreated masculinity and femininity into the hyperreal. Online pornography has been created into a hypermasculine space where hyperfeminine cyborgs work as sex slaves and are subjected to misogyny, objectification and violence. Additionally, our flexed military muscle consists of deadly, dangerous and emotionally void hypermasculine soldiers. Soldiers plugged into machines, who have no ethical reasoning and no emotional appeal for that ethical reasoning have become a weapon of mass destruction; perfect obedient soldiers. Haraways cyborgs have appeared to fail.

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Researchers claim online pornography and hypermasculine soldiers reproduce modernist dichotomies. However, these examples are not reproductions of the modern, they are the simulation of the modern. Their construction absolves them of their fathers sins. Simulations of sex practices with varied degrees of interest, which are monitored and manipulated through machines, sciences and drugs, morph our sexual practices into hypersexual cyborgsex. We can no longer understand ourselves through modernist and Freudian definitions of sexuality. Likewise, our cyborg militarized brother and sisters are only waging simulated wars. The reality of their actions cannot be obtained. It is time to confirm that reality does not exist. Our reality is the simulacrum and our bodies and minds are cyborgs. If we embrace ourselves as cyborgs, we can no longer use the ideas of Laura Mulvey, nor Katherine MacKinnon, nor any theorist that exists in the modern. Modernity has tainted their literature. It is the relationships we create with one another and our machines that liberate us from our fathers transgressions. We must strive for new avenues, new theories, new ways to escape our embodied limitations, new ways to deconstruct the modern, new ways to proceed in our futures to create new endless possibilities. Our modern ancestry has laid the yellow brick paths to deconstructed and fluid identities. Dont click your ruby red heels Dorothy and utter the words, Theres no place like home. There is no home, there is only the simulacrum.

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Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, February 1995. Benjamin, Clayton. Re: Are the you the Professor Daniel Bernardi? Email to Daniel Bernardi. 18 Nov. 2009. Bernardi, Daniel. Cyborgs in Cyberspace: White Pride, Pedophilic Pornography, and Donna Haraways Manifesto. Reality Squared: Televised Discourse on the Real edited by James Friedman. Rutgers University Press: 2002. Best, Steven. The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodicfication: Baudrillard, Debord, and Postmodern Theory. Baudrillard : A Critical Reader / Edited by Douglas Kellner. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass.: 1994. Doring, Nicola M. The Internets Impact on Sexuality: A Critical Review of 15 Years of Research. Computers in Human Behavior 25.5 (2009):1089. Gray, Chris Hables. "MAN PLUS: Enhanced Cyborgs and the Construction of the Future Masculine." Science as Culture 9.3 (2000):277. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, March 1991. Harp, Dustin and Heider, Don. New Hope or Old Power: Democracy, Pornography and the Internet. The Howard Journal of Communications 13.4 (2002):285. Lupton, Deborah. "Monsters in Metal Cocoons: 'Road Rage' and Cyborg Bodies." Body & Society 5.1 (1999):57. MacKinnon, Katherine. Only Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Masters, Christina. "Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinity." Conference Papers - International Studies Association (2006):1. Miller v. California. 413 U.S. 15. Supreme Ct. of the US. 21 June 1973. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Film Theory and Criticism : Introduction Readings. Eds. Leo Bruady and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. My Pleasure. 13 December, 2009. http://www.mypleasure.com/pocket-rockets.asp.

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Poster, Mark. Critical Theory and Technoculture: Habermas and Baudrillard. Baudrillard : A Critical Reader / Edited by Douglas Kellner. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass.: 1994. Sawchuck, Kim. Semiotics, Cyberneticcs, and the Ecstacy of Marketing Communications. Baudrillard : A Critical Reader / Edited by Douglas Kellner. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass.: 1994. Toffoleti, Kim. Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture, and the Posthuman Body. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

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