XXVIII. Essay by…Thor Tao Hansen

Thor Tao Hansen is a Copenhagen based artist working in text, painting, film and installation. While these praxes are disparate, the concept of legibility is usually relevant in the work. In painting, he is interested in attempting to subvert the paradigms of sight by producing works that resist immediate visual perception, while his film work addresses contemporary image culture. These themes and lines of flight coalesce in Tao’s meditations on the interpassivity, hapticity, gesturality, and intensity in  the mediation of eros. 

Website: https://thortaohansen.com/

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Towards a New Haptics: Notes on Eros and Gesturality in SFM Porn 

When I first encountered Overwatch porn, I was surprised by its formal quality. But there was also another pull, an undercurrent of something uncanny…

In this essay, I will present some thoughts about SFM pornography, with a focus on characters from the game Overwatch.

Throughout this paper, I will be referring to the producers and consumers of this type of pornography, largely by male pronouns and parts. I do so to convey the nominal maleness and phallogocentric nature of the spaces we are about to enter. My hope is that this gesture, this emphasis on maleness, a gaze which I will here also inhabit myself (perhaps indulgently so), will serve as a dialectical tool to approach our topic from a specific angle, rather than as a gender-excluding or -homogenizing linguistic stricture.

Introduction to SFM porn

SFM stands for Source Film Maker - a toolset that allows users to create content using 3d assets, such as character models. At its onset, it was widely used to make comedic and parodic content. But as time passed, SFM content began to be synonymous with porn. That said, 3d animation porn is not typically produced in Source Film Maker anymore, but rather in Blender. The term SFM is therefore somewhat of a misnomer, and one that is sometimes construed as insulting by creators of this type of content because it implies that their works were created with a much less sophisticated set of techniques. Alternate terms for what I am referring to could include: 3d cg porn, or 3d r34 (whose alphabetization by gamer logic would be Edrea-> Edreanic porn, which although phonologically pleasing is probably too much of a leap). Both of those terms, although perhaps more accurate, are also less precise, less specific. After weighing these considerations against common usage, I have decided that throughout this text I will be using the term SFM to refer to 3d animated porn with characters from video games.

Most SFM consists of rather short gifs or videos, often around 15 seconds in length, and only the most polished of productions have bespoke voice acting. By far, the most common audio is that of generic moans and the squelching sounds of penetration awkwardly superimposed. SFM porn, as a genre, is striated by the different game-worlds from which it draws its cast. We can thus speak of sub-genres - Minecraft porn, Fortnite-porn (although these are not confined to SFM productions, but also exist as lewd drawings, comics, fanfics etc). Since the animation of SFM largely draws on the animation style of its subject matter, each subgenre is engendered with its own stylization to some degree. 

My specific focus has been on Overwatch-pornography. Beginning my inquiry into Overwatch porn, what I found was a media landscape of novel sender-receiver relations. Since all of the authors (meaning the creators of such animation work) are creating content with the same characters, the same techniques, the works of different authors can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Except for smaller connoisseur communities on patreon, reddit, and rhizomes of discord channels, the main route of dissemination is on the major porn aggregation sites. Here, users bundle the content into compilations, such as “best widowmaker SFM” or “Overwatch SFM may 2022”. Although some works do contain watermarks bearing the authors name, this compilation still effects an erasure of authorship. This fact, coupled with the production internal fluidity of authorship that arises when the character, who already exists in the official media is used without license or sanction, situates the genre uniquely in regards to the positionality of the author.

Soldier 76 and Mercy

Lewd authors

In SFM, I discovered a number of authors whose works were of significant quality. I propose to use (somewhat humorously) the term Master to describe these authors. By my estimation, a non-exhaustive list of the masters of Overwatch porn would include the following: Yeero, Arhoangel, Ellowas, Nordehartet, Kreamu, HydraFXX. These masters of the genre are mostly full time authors of this type of material. Although some do hold other animation jobs, it seems that with the amount of support they are receiving on patreon (Some have upwards of 4000 subscribers), most are able to live comfortably with SFM as their sole income stream.

The animations of these creators are of incredible quality, and to me represents the acme of the sub-genre. It is also all so similar that it is legitimately difficult, even for me, to distinguish between the works of the different authors. Most of the authors I interviewed answered that although they try to emulate the body proportions of the characters as accurately as possible, they do not refrain from amending morphologies slightly to make the character more sexually appealing. [1]

Apart from its carnal appeal, what initially piqued my interest in the genre was the discovery of moments of gesturalization, that, although still existing within a hardcore pornographic context, were strangely human, and somehow wholesome; that is, rendered with affects that engendered the whole assemblage with an uncanny vivacity. That, between all the smashing together of animated flesh, the infinite iterations on the basic premises and mechanics of penetration, the supple and oversoft, oversmooth flesh spreading around the penetrating member, certain authors seemed to have found a shining and wondrous expressiveness. A topical agent perhaps, against the way in which pornography, hardcore pornography in particular, can make the masturbator feel distant, disembodied from the vigorous action taking place inside the screen. Could the plenitude of gesturality be the anthropomorphising affective propellant that accomplishes escape velocity up the steep bank of the uncanny valley?  

This was my initial supposition. However, after further research and consideration, I am no longer sure I can cogently claim a prevalence of emphasis on gesturality within SFM as a whole. As such a claim would rest squarely and perhaps solely on the works of the author which also served as my holotype: Nordehartet. His works are marvelously expressive. His silicone skinned characters are hyperreal paragons of lust, their skin is soft, pliable, unpored, unblemished. It is the skin of high quality sex dolls. He speaks limpidly and creatively within a modern vernacular of animation. Some substances - semen, skin -  are treated with a kind of textural hyperbole, where certain attributes are exaggerated for effect. This exaggeration is particularly pronounced in the work Brigitte 4K audio, a 4 minute pornographic short, wherein Brigitte, who is depicted with a near inhuman waist to breast ratio, performs a wide variety of sexual acts with a nondescript male. This particular piece is Nordehartets absolute magnum opus, and represents the archon of the genre as a whole in terms of formal qualities. There are three specific moments of substantial artistry, which all stem not from the gesturation - not from the haptic specificities of the orchestrated body, but rather, from the animation of surface as substance. 

Brigitte is a mechanic, and so the piece represents a somewhat subversive synthesis of the characteristics of the video game character and her pornographic counterpart when her female ejaculate bursts out slightly black (although not viscous at all). As if alluding to the oil or soot of the mechanic’s workshop in hue, if not in consistency. This is relatively rare, as Overwatch porn’s wiki page states: “The superpowers and symbols of agency of the female characters are usually not integral to these fanworks” [2]. Here, her occupation as mechanic literally permeates her to such an extent that it is evident in her discharge. 

Tellurian Lube

The second moment of substanceal genius occurs postdiluvially. Brigitte lays back, stretching with kittenish abandon into a ray of sunshine, and for just a brief moment, the post-orgasmic dopamine glow is reified by means of an inner incandescence.

Like shining a flashlight through a hand

The third moment occurs towards the end of the video when the anonymized male (another trope of Overwatch porn, if it is not a male character from the game, the male sex partner is often rendered rather nondescript, albeit well endowed and ripped) shoots his load, the semen of which is excessively reflective, behaving as a heavy liquid, mercurial, with a high surface tension, its total opacity latently attesting to, or certainly intimating, procreative potency.

This mercurial cum is the final flourish in a demonstration of alchemy.
 

To coom actual tonnes (An ejaculation contains around 220.000 terabytes of raw data)

Hilariously, when I asked the author about these details, he responded: “The things mentioned are results of general incompetence, insufficient sample count, and lack of understanding regarding shaders. They were compromises that at the time somehow seemed passable to me.” So what, to me, appears as the absolute pinnacles of artistry within the genre are, by the somewhat critical admission of its creator, considered nought but failures of execution. Blemishes on his attempts at verisimilitude.

To him, the 3d animated pornographic works he and other authors create exist within a discourse of animation rather than one of pornography. His position seems to be one of privileging the craft of animation within the authoring of SFM works. SFM as means to an end (both in the sense of using the tools at hand to represent with maximum verisimilitude, and in the sense that creating this type of content is done for money). he adds: “...that for myself, and a handful of others I've spoken to, this field of work is a means to an end rather than an artistic means in and of itself. I don't believe something in that bracket has merit worth being discussed, nor do I believe the people who consume it have any real desire to discuss to an extent beyond titillation”.

The internal discourse between authors within the genre seems to be one of a technical, rather than critical nature, and Nordehartet was the only author with whom I spoke to whom the positioning of the genre within a pornographic discourse was not agreeable:

“If your genuine concern is animation, go study the greats and engage with the 7+ decades of debate and discourse on the field. If you just want to shoehorn porn in for some bizarre reason, acknowledge that it exists because people pay for it, once that money disappears, so does the vast majority of creators”

Other interviewees were generally more affable in the tone of their response to my questions. And apart from Nordehartet, the other three interviewees’ answers and positions largely conformed to one another. They work primarily with characters they find exciting or arousing themselves. There also seemed to be a consensus that they generally try to conform somewhat to the morphology of the base character model, but do not shy away from altering its proportions into something they assume would be more appealing or exciting to their audience.

Nordehartet and my respective differences in perspective aside, I do think there is significance to this difference in perception between the creators and the consumers of this type of content. If his claim is true, the difference is vast. And even if it is not, to the authors working with it, there must be some depreciation of the erotic value. From bare gray T-posing model to the final product, I assume a lot of the eroticism is lost. But to the viewer, none of the grayworld machinery is visible. To the viewer, it is a pornographic surface that induces an arousal like any other.

These sites of rupture, between author and reader, between work and pleasure, between detachment and prurience, mark critical distinctions from other genres; crevices out of which we might be able to coax interrelations and inconcinnities concerning technologies of desire in the digital age. Tracing the ontogeny of this nascent genre, are we to read it within the phylogeny of developing pornographic discourses?

Exegetic Edge

Having investigated the position of the author a bit, I now want to shift my glance towards that of the reader. Here my analysis will be leaning somewhat on the writing of Magnus Ullen, particularly on the figure of the masturbating reader and the concept of a hermeneutics of masturbation.

“In contrast to Kant's aesthetic ideal, the masturbating reader — the reader of pornography, regardless of whether it's a book, picture, or film — is anything but disinterested. On the contrary, this reader does not have as a goal establishing the text's meaning through disinterested contemplation, but rather reducing the text's significatory potential to the pleasure of his or her own body.” [3]

It is through the figure of this masturbating reader (a figure I will perhaps warp and concretize in ways that diverge from Ullen’s conception) that I will investigate the radical processes of subjectivizationings that are taking place in SFM. To me, this angle of approach opens up an interesting space in which a true exegesis of such works can only be undertaken dyadically, both with disinterest, and as it were, with our cock in our hand.

As Ullen puts it: “pornographic discourse makes no secret of the constructed nature of its “truth,” and that its consumers are likewise quite clear on its essentially rhetorical nature, but that this does not detract from its persuasive efficiency.” (emphasis added)

I want to posit that there is a convergence in the ways in which we, as masturbators, consume human pornography and animated pornography. The voyeuristic aspect, the knowledge that the pornographic object is an actual person, is perhaps not of great significance in internet pornography. Likewise, I contend that the unrealness of SFM does not necessarily represent a marked difference to the masturbating reader. A goal of this mode of analysis is to try to tease out, through a reading at once sensually immersed (panting) and distanced (Looking at production, dissemination, cultural context); striations and chatoyancies of the genre

-at once inhaling the perfume of the water lily and sequencing its genome-

Modern pornography has reached a sort of media-maturity-self-awareness. I am speaking here, for example, of porn reaction videos and behind the scenes porn. Pornography watching itself. Wherein the act of spectation (the role of the masturbator) is inhabited within the media itself. 

Arousal’s mode of action moves along a thread through the different layers, the reactor is aroused by the video, you are aroused by the video itself, you are aroused by the reactor, you are aroused by the reactor reacting to the video - by this interpretative interplay where meaning is simultaneously created and destroyed. Through such meta-device, pornography creates a commodious and affirmative masturbatory space.

Some SFM works are also at play with their own mediation. Gentle bobbing of the camera, the action coming out of focus for a moment, are both common motifs in the cinematographic vernacular of SFM, playfully alluding (or indeed manufacturing) to the presence of a human cameraman.

D.Va bored in class - a vertical video presented as if filmed from the characters own smartphone, is one example of this self-medialization. 

As animators’ aptitude for verisimilitude

matures, we might see further converging, a dissolution of boundaries, not only of form, but also of genre conventions, between human pornography and SFM.

Our approach here is a balancing act. It requires holding two thoughts in your head at once. Doing so might yield, if not a full wrought accounting of the genre, then at least a somewhat accurate adumbration and runways for lines of flight. [4]

Edging is the deferment of pleasure, to sustain the middle of the bow, a tight regulation of carnal amplitude, to savor, in the same (throbbing) vein, we will attempt to exegete languidly, right on the edge of (be)coming: 

“..like a discontinuous yet infinite rhythmic dispersal that generates singularities. It isn’t knowledge at all. It’s a timely dallying and surge among a cluster of minute identifications…” [5]

There's a prosody to SFM, penetration’s rhythmic lockstep spills from one video into the next, it’s an onrush - a paradisiacal promiscuous plane, the attestation of a wraithworld - a flurry of images, but also boring - terribly mundane once the curtain’s pulled back.

Perhaps it is necessary to expound on the differences between how desire is experienced and enacted live to contrast and compare with its mediations.

Eros at play 

How does desire operate when the distance between lover and beloved is of a dimensional order?

The Greeks situated desire in the features of the landscape - nymphs as reifications of principles of natural beauty, able not only to be admired but also desired. Uncountable reality educed into image which can then be parsed.  Into this multitude; the Nereids of the sea, Oreads of the mountains, the Alseids and the Lampads. I want to introduce Histead (from greek histo- meaning web, tissue) as a term we can use to describe the internet situated desire object, animated or not.  

In Eros The Bittersweet, Anne Carson explains how the movement from an oral to a literary tradition brought about an acute awareness of the borders of the self in its practitioners because literature could now be composed and disseminated in greater privacy. We see this reflected in the poetry of the time, which often concerns itself with affairs of desire, stories of the self and the other, rather than the grand peopled epics like the Iliad.

I wonder whether a similar shift towards insularization or interiorization is at play in pornography. A transition from something produced and viewed in a public setting, towards something produced and viewed in a private setting.

I want to posit the following lineage: From porn productions that required a whole crew to operate the equipment, through modern internet amateur porn recorded by the couple on a smartphone, arriving finally at SFM productions made by a single person. The manner of  its spectation enacts a similar filiation: from public screenings of stag films in gentleman's clubs and bordellos, through viewing booths in seedy porn shops, arriving finally at internet porn consumed in the privacy of one's own home. There are, of course, other shifts and displacements at play here too, but I do think it is significant that both the authoring and spectation of pornographic work have shifted along this axis. 

Without getting too embroiled in the history and scholarship of pornography, I do want to briefly mention that I think this shift has also engendered a change in how the masturbatory reader engages with the pornographic object. In classic porn cinema, the pornographic object is a character, there is a narrative, they enter into the play of the erotic. Additionally, by virtue of their uniqueness, from being on screen if nothing else, they attain some of the glow of the beloved.  Internet porn, however, presents the viewer with an infinite sea of bodies, none unique, none entering into narratives of uncertainty, variations of morphology - sure, but the immensity of choice homogenizes the Histeads, flattens desire’s amplitude. There’s a mechanism of depersonalization at play within this multitudinousness that I think might be functionally similar to how our empathy is numerically bounded (We may be able to empathize with the single starving child, but not with the whole village). The notion of eros might be useful in trying to understand the differences at play here.

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.”

Of course the boundary between the masturbator and the Histead is immense. They will never say “I love you”, at least not to you. But that injunction does not necessarily negate the flow of desire.

“Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole”. [6]

Eros plays along a tenuous current. The lover must have some connection to the beloved to sustain the buildup of desire. I am unsure of what the relations between the pornographic surface, the Histead and the beloved are. It probably differs from person to person, surface as archetype, as fantasy, as irreproachable memory of love lost.

How eros operates under and through surface is difficult to entangle in itself. So let us for a moment tentatively accept this; erotic charge exists between the subject and the object of attention - the subject has access to the surface of the object, but it is only through the gesturation of that surface that the presence of a soul is intimated. In this way SFM Histeads represent a kind of pure eros; accommodating of every sexual whim, the reader can access her moans, her sweat-slick thighs squirming in pleasure - all her haptic idiosyncrasies, he can aalmost touch her, but as beloved, she is fundamentally unreachable. The impossibility of the moment of embrace arrests the zenonic arrow of desire, locking it in flight at the zenith of erotic reach.

 Is not the 4chan NEET abjuring the allures (and depredations) of actual breathing women (who are unattainable in actuality) in favor of the angelic 2d waifu Histead (who is unattainable in the abstract), a perfect and pathetic allegory of the action of eros?

The distance of that erotic reach, one that would bridge dimensionality - a simpler love, one literally without depth. Grayson of Kotaku, writing on Overwatch characters: “by design, they can’t be fully fleshed out. There has to be room for player identity”. [7] The SFM body is void, it points proudly at its own transrealness.

Overwatch porn is the veneration of a radical Other, an Other that is pure form, pure dream, pure image.

It is not love, 

It is marble! 

Pornography and eros are both implicated in the sensuousness of touch, or at least the possibility thereof. I therefore think an enfolding of the haptic is apposite to furthering our understanding.

Order of sensation

Humans are audiovisual animals. We navigate the world primarily through sight, and we navigate sociality primarily through speech. It does not seem like a coincidence that the sensories we are able to record and transmit - to mediate - are those two. [8] Since we do not yet have the means for transmission of haptics, the dissemination of such material is relegated to a second order of sensation. A homology of sensory transubstantiation exists in the proliferate food content, where, even with a total absence of the olfactory, the audiovisual content begets, by synesthetic sleight of hand, a portion of the stimuli, enough that we can make the leap of inference. Porn is, in my immediate gauging, the nearest we have to a mediation of the haptics. It depicts coitus, which I would argue is a primarily haptic event - sex after all, functioning just fine blinded or deafened. But without touch, it is phone sex.

Let us take the example of intercourse chest to chest. If we were to transcribe just the tactile sensing of one person, we would have to map, across multitudinous planes of contact, exactitudes of vectors of motion and pressure, of heat and moisture, of resistance and give. I imagine this would yield a tremendous amount of data, that recording even 10 seconds of tactile information in high resolution would produce a file of many gigabytes. [9] This information is encoded along the two edges of contact, and contact, visual closeness, occludes lines of sight. There is an inverse relation between the sites of touch and the sites of photographic access. The photographic transmissibility of haptic events is thus fundamentally compromised. If we accept for a moment the assignment of pornography’s goal as the mediation of haptics, it becomes apparent that even before the possible infractions of a male gaze against reciprocal togethering, there’s a central injunction. The dancer’s costume impedes their movement. We may have the grand jeté, or its visibility from the cheap seats rendered in tasseled afterflow. The sex or its depiction, but not both. 

The director of pornographic photography thus aims towards a bodily openness, where positions of haptic intermingling and visual occlusion are eschewed. 

Open your eyes and your mouth! 

Open your legs wide! 

Kiss with tongues suspended freely! 

Seeing as bodies in coitus are constrained by all kinds of physical limitations, and that the pornographic gaze desires not an occlusion but a total openness (this desire being brought to its panoptic apogee in hentai when the internal cumshot is rendered visible by cross-section), the carnal dynamism is strictured in a tensive compromise. The porn actors who are indeed having sex, which, although nerve pleasure is concentrated along the genitalia, constitutes a whole body event, are incentivised to reconcile with an audiovisuality in their haptics and their choice of positions. Having your abdomens pressed together, being close, kissing deeply, being joined along a long border of skin, these things do not facilitate good viewing of the penetrating action. 

Although pornography does its best to hide him, we must also not forget the cameraman. Since most pornography is shot without the use of advanced cranes and dollies, the line of sight is not just compromised by the bodies of the actors, but also by the limitations of physical access of the cameraman.

SFM is not hobbled by these latter limitations (unconstrained as it is, by bodies’ flexibility, lines of sight, even by the limits of cosmetic surgery). Although one could, in the strictest sense, argue that SFM does not have a haptics at all, seeing as it does not involve actual physical bodies, I want to posit that since: To the viewer, the meaning that is being consumed is of a primarily haptic nature and to the author, it is the orchestration of bodies in space - the site of touch is of primary of importance.  [10]

Haptic horizons

Although they do not, in my opinion, quite qualify as media per se, [11] haptic tools of pleasure, penetrators and orifices have been around since forever. The dildo seeks to mimic the haptics of the human penis, and is designed to stimulate parts of the body whose nerve endings’ ontogeny is traced in an evolutionary waltz between these organs of pleasure. With the advent of electrical engines, vibrators effectuate a haptics beyond that of the human body. No finger can go brrrrrrrrr like that. 

Humans can touch the digital. At this very moment a global mangrove of fingers, like the legs of an immeasurable herd of horses, are engaged in haptic intercourse with touchscreens. But there's a non- or at least pseudo-reciprocality there. The smartphone screen always feels the same, apart from perhaps the vibration to notify or alarm, its tactility is not one encoded with information in the way that the finger is. The flow of information along this haptic bridge is thus monodirectional. The smartphone reacts to our touch with a visual response, the conversation runs along parallel but differentiated channels.

It's not surprising, after all, save for our interaction with other entities, our manipulation of the world is done almost entirely through touch. We cannot sing the stones to stack. Nor can we, by any visual means, by any dance or grimace, make the corn grow. So it is sensible that we should effect our will into machines also through touch. As digitality´s radicles spread and intensify and come ever closer to actually perforating the delineating border of our skin, we approach a more reciprocal relation of touch between us and machines. A remote controlled buttplug is one herald of the nascency of such digital touch. 

What forms will pornography take within such haptic futures? When the dimensional gap between masturbator and Histead collapses, when actual embrace becomes a possibility?

Ghost in the shell

I want to speak a bit on the implications of certain haptic futures. Technologies of immersion are rapidly at work to bridge this carnal-digital gap, when (and I do believe this is a when and not an if) we develop technologies of haptic transmission it will beget the development of a field of new haptic discourses. The possibilities of such haptic futures intrigue me. [12] Once we create machines capable of translating the digital into the tactile, I believe that these machines will not just mimic human touch, but will also, analogous to the evolution from the dildo to the vibrator, engender new forms of touch. 

What haptic novelties lie behind this horizon? How does the figure of the Histead actuate when a translation into haptics becomes possible? When she can actually touch you?

Ghosts are represented often as visible and audible, never, or commonly only partially, as tactile. Perhaps the fact that we have developed means of the recording and transmission of sound and sight rather than touch and taste, stems from the former consisting of the emission of waves while the latter requires the contact of molecules, the actuation of matter. Or perhaps it was the necessity of technologies of telecommunications along our primary senses that made it so. I do not repeat these deliberations to attempt a conclusion, to privilege one overt causality over the other, but rather to bring to the forefront of your mind’s eye the luxuriant uncanninesses that will apparate at that technological moment - when something ethereal corporates.

When we consume porn, we are consuming surface and gesturality. Perhaps the genealogy of that gesturalization is not of prime importance? A prevalent motif in the critique of pornography is deriding its dehumanizing aspect. Let us accept this position, and say that the masturbator is consuming surface, regardless of its soul. I want to posit that in this aspect the masturbatory reading of SFM is not so different from that of human pornography, the prime difference being that in human pornography, the ghost operating the machine; its gesturalities and haptic specificities, is a person inside of their own body - while in SFM it is an author orchestrating gesturalization through an animated body. 

The eros of SFM is amplified by the translation from game character (set, bonded, owned as intellectual property) into Histead - during this process of transfiguration the character is made myriad, her facial expression, her exactitudes of gesture, her voice, her temperament and her body, all these enter into a discourse, hundreds of nameless authors extricating her from morphological finitude. 

The eros of the Histead operates in a kind of temporal stasis, her moans and orgasms are repeated in enfilade across space and time, unvarying.

Unpored alabaster skin stretched over lissom frame, a topological map of ginormous mommy milkers, a vessel of desire - the Histead is a shell proportioned and gesturalized according to the inclinations of her author. Entering into the fantasy of the pornographic object, a surface that is engendered with a haptics and a gesturality is a process that itself gestures to a question: Does the surface need an individuated soul? Is our SFM Histead really so far from the human Histead?

Although one is unreachable in social distance and the other would require a dimensional leap, to the masturbator they are equally distant.

It seems that we are simple enough machines that engendering “a thing” with a gesturality and an illusory haptics is enough for us to not only identify, but also desire it. It’s a complicated eros, the directionality of desire is muddled when the author of lively gesturalities and the figure performing them are divorced.

A shell without soul and a soul without shell.

It is in this orchestrated sensuousness we begin to trace the outline of a new haptics. Something just beyond the horizon, and the terminal dissolution of the difference between virtual and real.

Notes:

[1]: I want to add here that there are almost no examples of male same-sex SFM. Out of literally hundreds, if not thousands, of works I have been able to locate only two such works. I suppose that the Venn diagram spanning Animated Porn, and First Person shooters overlaps in a territory that is not exactly rife with queerness. My initial supposition was that Overwatch porn would represent a relatively “liberated” sexual space, this is perhaps true of fanfics, of 2d and 3d smut drawings on sites like deviant art. 3d SFM works totally reproduce the sexual dynamics, power relations, body aesthetics and gazes of pornography at large. This gaze is particularly prevalent in the presentation of skin, which is nearly without exception, white, smooth and totally glabrous.  That said, I should state that the goal of this essay is not to formulate a feminist critique of the aforementioned issues in relation to SFM, I will be conducting my analysis primarily through the eyes of the masturbatory reader - a concept that will be elaborated further.

[2]:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwatch_and_pornography here quoting Emily Gaudette of inverse.

[3]: Magnus Ullen (2009), Pornography and its Critical Reception: Towards a Theory of Masturbation, Stockholm University.

[4]: Or flights of fancy?

[5]: Lisa Robertson, Nilling, 2020, p. 3.

[6]: Anne Carson (2014), Eros the Bittersweet, p. 30, Princeton University Press.

[7]: Nathan Grayson (May 23, 2016). "Inside The Surprisingly Big Overwatch Porn Scene".

[8]: Although it is also a possibility that the material preconditions for creating technologies of transmission of the olfactory and the haptic simply make it more complicated, after all, photons and soundwaves require much less actuation of matter.

[9]: This opens up the discussion of: at which point of verisimilitude or resolution an image reaches what we could call qualified representation? I neither think there is a particularly good answer or that this is an operative dialectic. But I do think it is useful to hold in our minds the problem of resolution, what would a pixelated touch feel like?

Fuck me in 480p

Of course this folds out and teases at whether even our sensories exude a “qualified” representation of uncountable reality, I digress, we are veering into epistemology.

[10]: Only low quality work displays “clipping”, that is, instances where the topologies of the bodies do not represent actual physical boundaries and can thus intersect or pass through each other. In high quality work the breasts and buttocks compress and mush and blossom when pressure of the other body is applied.

[11]: Could perfume be considered a media of the olfactory? It is certainly a medium, a means of transmission of scent. Does it qualify in representing something else? My feeling is no but I cannot justify that feeling rhetorically. It is possible I am reflexively excluding it on grounds that are entirely audiovisuality-centric.

[12]:  I recently saw a reel of an american teenager playing for their mother an AI generated voice clip of president Biden spewing obscenities. The mother, believing the clip to be authentic, was shocked and appalled.

 To the younger generations the slide into this technology - and its consequence; that the human voice is no longer a guarantor of truth, is a seamless and natural progression.

I wonder if one day we will be the boomers at whom our children will laugh when we are fooled by actual physical sensation.