Helladildonics: The Shortcomings of Teledildonics and their Social Networking Sites

Ted Nelson coined the term “teledildonics” in 1974 to refer to a combination of technologies that allows users to feel presence and engage in sex at a distance. Two social networking websites, HighJoy and Sinulator, attempt to foster community among users of remotely manipulated sex toys. Each site sells essentially the same hardware: a dildo with various programmable spinning and vibrating functions; and a sheath that records the speed and pressure of that which thrusts into it. The many conceptual possibilities of teledildonics are impaired by the introduction of a mediating technology. The teledildo as a new media object fails as an integral part of an online sexual community, a facilitator of sex in all its emotional complexity, and as the enabler of a truly private act. This paper will first provide a history and account of teledildonics, including speculation about the reasons for its relative unpopularity; then, the paper will turn to an analysis of teledildonics in relation to its status as a new media object, user/technology interactions, and the conceptual issues of vulnerability, control, voyeurism, and surveillance.
HighJoy advertises itself as “online dating and social network” with “audio/video text chat capabilities.” An account provides access to the chat and message board, and includes a profile of one’s characteristics and preferences, public bulletins, friends, messages, and a private “backdoor” section. Even if the site were fully functional (it is not nearly), its features do not comprise a networked public by Daynah Boyd’s criteria. Limited publicity and searchability, not to mention barely operable software and shoddy web design, may account for HighJoy’s apparent unpopularity: scanty membership and minimal message board activity hardly encourage or demonstrate participation. There are few opportunities to even initiate dialogue (or sex) with anyone. Thus, strong ties that form social groups, and weak ties that attract those groups to one another, are nearly impossible to create.
Perhaps HighJoy is in a liminal state of existence, its growth stalled until the “perceived risks of adoption” of its technology and associated practices are lessened and its round of “first adopters” can attract critical “early adopters.” The ultimate obstacle to HighJoy’s success, therefore, is either that its first adopters are simply too deviant to draw attention to it, or that the sex toys themselves, crucial components to involvement in the HighJoy community, are prohibitively expensive for web users who are only casually curious. Users signed up only for a couple’s membership, allowing only a one-to-one connection between two partners, inhibit the growth of a community by severely limiting the possibility of weak ties and bridges to form. The unfamiliarity of teledildonic devices is evidenced by HighJoy’s small user population and the toys’ relatively steep price.
A closer look at the technology itself reveals a problematic “newness.” Teledildonics as a new media object are new because of their programmability and mobility. These devices, composed of rubber and plastic, attached to a computer wirelessly or through a USB cord, are a hybrid of cultural definitions of cybersex and a computer’s interpretation of how to simulate sex. The desire for cyberspace is the desire for a separation between flesh and mind. It is an escape from real life’s banalities and woes of the body. Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” explains this desirable no-place of mind that muddies the boundaries between mind and body, technology and humans, and the real and unreal. Cybersex differs from teledildonics—teledildonics introduces a physical object as a third term to the two-party interaction of cybersex. Teledildonic devices are new media objects that bridge the gap between real life and virtual reality.
The mediation of sex through virtually controlled objects is teledildonic technology’s attempt to produce the experience of sex in the symbolic space of cyberspace. Julian Dibbell in his essay, “Rape in Cyberspace,” describes an object oriented virtual reality of LambdaMOO (Multi-User Domain, Object Oriented). In this MOO, virtual reality meaning is found in the gap between real life and virtual reality. In order to participate in this disembodied world, the body becomes the mind. LambdaMOO’s exterior relationship to technology allows this disembodiment. Technology enables the existence of LambdaMOO, but it is indifferent to the system and the user. In contrast, teledildonics has an interior relationship to technology. Technology then is intrinsic to the communication and sexuality of teledildonics.
This changing relationship between the mind and body in relation to teledildonic devices is a two-way communication between users and devices. The software interface of HighJoy’s teledildonic devices demonstrates their primary existence as machines. The focus of interacting with a HighJoy-enabled toy’s interface is on the utility of the action—this reveals that the interface “does not stem from an aesthetic tradition, but from an engineering tradition”. Rather than allowing for—or requiring—the simulation of a penetrative sex act, HighJoy’s interface encourages a “mimetic model” simply of manipulating a vibrating sex toy. In short: this is not sex.
Users must have a certain degree of openness in order to participate with teledildonic devices and with another user. The body of the user is extremely vulnerable when using teledildonics. The physical nature of teledildonic devices implicates both the new media body and the biological body. The user’s body is split, a contested site of pleasure and fantasy. As in Thomas Keenan’s essay, “Windows of Vulnerability,” the open relationship described between windows and light is like the open relationship between users and computers. Windows that look out onto the world, rather than frame a scene, present a view from a distance. In our technological age, our windows are computer screens, framing an unbounded interiority that allows for information to come through, but at a distance from the user. Teledildonics works because of the distance between device/user and screen. Information is able to come through the computer screen and device; there is still the illusion of a private space because of this two-way interaction between users.
HighJoy.com has the capability to use tracking surveillance to monitor the frequency, duration, variety, and other aspects of user interaction for statistical information. Surveillance of this nature poses direct access to sexual activity (in user connections, chat conversations, profile information, etc.) that advances to define digital voyeurism by coding and decoding teledildonic commands.
In the parallel way that Philip Agre cites surveillance applicably shifting from the political to the commercial, the concept of teledildonics shifts surveillance to an ultra-personal form of capture, which goes beyond simple interpersonal verbal communication toward an interaction that translates the digital into the physical. Thus, by surveilling these objects’ keystroke commands over the HighJoy network, you are viewing a representation of physical action that someone is experiencing as sex, breaking the barrier between code and experience, and recontextualizing the act of intercourse.
Sex is not synecdochically definable by the argot of social conduct, unlike many social or public interpersonal communications. To design a realization of sex in digital language is to not only counter-intuitively dissect the act of sex itself, summing inconsequential parts of a climactic whole, but to purport that this distinctive act can be expressed through impersonal, digitized communication and recreated after limitless electronic mediation. This dissection represents a new form of capture that exceeds Agre’s epistemological and ontological definitions by requiring an arbitrative, evincive language that facilitates both the execution and memory of teledildonic interactions . Yet with this coded language of teledildonics, what then are the implications of being able to track, surveil, and ultimately capture a digital act of intimacy?
While voyeurism and surveillance, embodiment and isolation are in play across multiple virtual contexts, teledildonics specifically poses them in the framework of the most intimate entanglement of bodies and technologies. It is therefore a valuable site for articulating the contradictions and complications of cyberspace more generally. Howard Rheingold saw dildonics as a form of communication rather than just a physical act. The social networks that enable teledildonics fail in their communicative aspects. The hardware and software acknowledges that this new form of sexual communication through a synthetic object is a vulnerable act. The new media body is a disembodied body that interacts in virtual space with a program and device it does not control. Therefore, the failure of teledildonics lies in illusion: an illusion of community, sexually traversable distance, and ultimate privacy on the Internet.

Megan Goetsch, Michael Fruta, Steve Hall