I don’t want to get political, but has anyone noticed that humans are kinda fucked up?
How fucked up are we? Well, we invented boredom and if you tell me you’d need another example, I’ll tell you I don’t believe it. Fine. War, genocide, fascism, chemical weapons and the Olympics, those are pretty fucked up too. But how heinous is manufactured isolation? Can you imagine being so trapped by the rat race or social media that all the things that are supposed to make you feel *anything* numb you instead? Can you imagine being so bored and so lonely with life that you can only find solace in the thrilling, highly erotic rush of a car accident?
No I didn’t just turn over two pages at once. Stay with me. Crash by J G Ballard is a science / transgressive fiction novel about people who are so disaffected by modern society that they turn to vehicular collisions for their erotic thrills.
(Sit down, you’re not getting out of this that easily. I read the damn thing, you just have to experience it vicariously.)
I’ll be honest, and I won’t live this statement down: I kind of fucks with the premise. People being so far removed from the human experience that they can only feel human connections through extreme actions is an inherently interesting theme, and fair’s fair, Ballard handles it well. When he’s thinking about it, that is. Plot wise, Crash centers on mad scientist Robert Vaughn and his menagerie of violently auto-aroused test subjects who he goads into psychosexual experiments (read; recreations of celebrity car crashes.) I say “goads” loosely, most of his subjects are happy to see how far they can push their arousal. Robert Vaughn has his own fetishes, specifically fantasizes about killing Elizabeth Taylor in a head-on collision where he can orgasm right as they both die.
(If I didn’t make this clear before, the tone Ballard adopted for this book is blatantly pornographic, and I’m not certain how I feel about that. One the one hand, the book is so gross it completely fails as porn. On the other hand, it’s exploring the boundaries where technology and sexuality meet, so writing it as gross porn makes an obscene amount of sense.)
Yeah. Don’t go looking for a happy ending (hahahahahahaha) in this one. Or for pleasant, redemptive characters, so far as that goes. In his introduction to the book, Ballard commented that he saw the book as a new type of pornography, where technology and human sexuality are pushed to their limits to see if intimacy can survive. Very Black Mirror idea, actually. Loath as I am to agree with an author’s intentions, here’s what I take away from Ballard’s perspective: Technology as an extension of the human body at the cost of intimacy.
It might be a trite observation, but the boundaries between human sexuality and technology have only thinned over time, the amount of power over ourselves we’ve ceded to said technology has grown. Yeah, most people haven’t fetishized car crashes, but technology is rampant in sexuality now. How often do you use your phone or your computer when you masturbate? Have you ever wondered if someone could hack your phone and film you in intimate moments? How often do you use an app when you want to find a quick fling for the night or do you use an app for long term dating? Do tech companies sell your browsing data? Every so often we hear about social rating apps for desirability in mating (As far as I know this isn’t a real thing, but I seem to recall Meta suggesting it at one point?) Can you log on to your favorite VTuber’s private stream and use your phone to gain control of their vibrator for a small fee? VR porn games exist, do you think people haven’t jacked themselves raw over them?
No one in Crash experiences intimacy. The narrator and his wife start an open marriage basically because they’re bored with each other and can’t be bothered with a divorce. Yet in all their flings and increasingly dangerous and somehow neither ever find any kind of intimacy. The narrator finds obsession, dominating and daring Dr. Vaughn to kill him in his experiments, but the excitement fades. What’s bleakest about the book is there’s no next thing, no new rush for the characters. They keep holding out for gratification but never find the thing that sets them off. Everyone is more isolated by the end, more numb.
I don’t think technology in a sexual context is inherently a bad thing (I’m thinking of whatever medical technology made penile implants possible, for instance.) but the amount of power we decide tech has in sexuality is a concern I wasn’t really thinking about before reading this book. Now that I am thinking about it... I’m not that comfortable, I won’t lie.
Are you familiar with the male loneliness epidemic that’s been reported recently? How some studies have shown that while both males and females are increasingly feeling lonely and isolated, young males in particular seem to be having a worse time? (FYI, Male Loneliness apparently is a contested issue, and I don’t know how reliable these studies are. For this post, I'm working with the concern that people of all genders are feeling isolated from each other at record rates.) I think of this epidemic level loneliness, and I think of the ways technology grifters and conspiracy theorists give lonely people purposes - frequently towards dangerous ends. ‘Join the cause and you wont be alone’ type of deal? And once the cause has chewed lonely people up and spat them back out while the grifters who pulled them in walk away unscathed?
Robert Vaughn in Crash is that type of grifter. He’s the only one who benefits, and yeah, he dies, but he dies gratifying his desires. Everyone else is left alone. They’ve crashed, but they haven’t climaxed. They’re left with the same desire they always had, with no outlet for their tension.
To go back to my original question, yes I can imagine a world where extreme technologies drive us to wild new forms of sexual experimentation. I can also imagine the aftermath. Sticky and gross with more to clean up.
So, good on J G Ballard for making me think about sex in a new and disturbing way. Did I like his book? No... Do I recommend Crash? Heavily qualified yes... but only if you’re willing to put up with some truly stomach churning pieces of writing. Yeah this book is gross, beyond body horror, and that’s probably why it was so controversial. As I said, it’s basically porn, but written in a really clinical tone with scatological language that’s pretty revolting at times. One of my friends described it as a ‘clusterfuck’ while we discussed it, and it literally is a clusterfuck. I’d say read it if you’re interested, but don’t blame me if you get the wrong kind of thrill when you step into your car next.
Anyways, I just finished reading Dante's Inferno and A Clockwork Orange, so hopefully we'll have something a little more lighthearted next post.
(PS, in 1996 Crash was turned into a movie by - who else - David Cronenberg. I haven’t seen it, but reportedly it focuses more on the connection between sex and death than sex and technology. I mean fair enough. Sex and death is certainly a theme of the book, but one I admit wasn’t as interesting to me.)
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