You're Already a Sexual Cyborg

Notes on the relationship between the mainstreaming of gooning, your phone as a reproductive organ and the Skims merkin.

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

When Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, I imagine there was excitement to the concept. To be a cyborg was to be liberated from the boundaries that separate human from nature, human from animal, human from machine. There’s a lot more to it — Haraway has said she feels that “very few people are taking what I consider all of its parts” in their embrace of her essay. I, too, will not be taking all of its parts. Her essay is less about the intertwining of human and machine as it is a work of feminist theory, but nevertheless the two aren’t separate. We can imagine, particularly from the viewpoint of 1985, a future in which the intertwining of human and machine led to further feminist emancipation. I’m not sure if in 2025 that viewpoint remains the same.

We have all been made cyborg, particularly from a sexual standpoint. For much of the population, our sexualities are inextricably linked to our phones, even if only in part. Whether it be through using dating apps to meet people, watching pornography, or using social media to display a specific vision of ourselves, our phones are a reproductive organ. Many of us do not understand our sexuality or its functions without our phones as mediators.

The weekend before last, I saw Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet, an interactive live performance at Performance Space NYC. In a large black box theater, the audience seated throughout the space, we were each asked to pull out our phones and open Instagram in order to participate. With some careful coordination, we all watched the same series of Instagram stories on our own screens as Mindy narrated the legacy of the Internet as a sexual engine from its origin. The phone was an extension of the performance but moreover an extension of ourselves and our bodies. The setting made this feel novel, almost foreign. On a day-to-day level, though, our use of our phones as an extension of the body has practically become instinct.

But the phone as reproductive organ isn’t actually all that reproductive. For many people, it is more of an impediment in real-world sex than it is a facilitator. The phone becomes not just an additional sex organ, but a replacement for the ones we’re no longer able to use to their full extent.

With our phones substituting much of the symbols of our bodies as sexually active, we have turned to artificial signifiers, instead. Kim Kardashian’s Skims’ brand has exemplified this on several occasions, from a bra with the built-in appearance of always-erect nipples to her latest merkin thong. This new underwear pairs an ultra-skimpy string thong with a curly faux bush to mimic the appearance of a full pubic bush, in a variety of skin and hair shades. “With this iconic new panty, your carpet can be whatever color you want it to be,” the listing for the already sold-out product reads. Surely it is just a limited-run gimmick, but Skims has become one of the biggest intimates brands in the business: when they release a product, some reality of consumer desire is on display.

What both of these garments say is that the body has grown so distinct from its status as a body that it must utilize artifice to suggest it. It’s a body that yearns to depict itself as human and lustful and of sexual maturity but is incapable of doing so. It is in many ways, a sexual cyborg: Inert and impotent, yet visually reminiscent of something real and erotically capable.

What’d odd, of course, is that most of us are theoretically capable of still displaying these signs in their natural form. Perhaps the Skims merkin is for the woman who has already lasered away all her pubic hair to the point where it never grows back. In any case, these items represent a want that is not naturally being fulfilled, a bodily void intended to be momentarily repaired.

For men, the constant advertising of Viagra alternatives on every guy-centric podcast represents a similar transformation. Blue Chew and similar products suggest that young men are experiencing increasing difficulty in performing sexually, or at very least are experience increasing anxiety toward it. In some cases, the problem may be one in the same: young men are anxious about being unable to get hard or last in bed, and the anxiety itself leads to the unwanted effect. Either way, the message is clear: the sexual body is not functioning as it should, and requires augmentation to fix it. Said augmentation can be purchased with a quick swipe of your fingers across the screen and a double-tap of a button, without ever having to leave home or turning off Stavvy’s World in your AirPods. Again, your phone is an extension of your reproductive organs, if not one if its own.

Last week, Harper’s published a deep dive by Daniel Kolitz on gooning, the practice and culture of ritualistic porn and masturbation addiction that I have routinely written about here. It is a frightening and sharply reported essay, one that has introduced the nauseating depths of techno/pornosexuality to the intellectual mainstream. “If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them,” he wrote, in what I think accurately summarizes the fatalism at much of the practice’s core. “‘Ruin your mind,’ ‘go deeper,’ ‘give up on life’: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries.”

In reporting the story, Kolitz created a questionnaire for gooners that, to his surprise, they eagerly answered. “What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history,” he wrote.

While it might take these sorts of essays to parse out the details of pornosexuality to the average audience, this point by Kolitz reveals that our own distance from it is not that far. Some of that distance, we can hope, will remain: most of us, even probably many of the gooners, do not delight in the fantasy of our own demise.

But even so, these stories accentuate that the ultra-fringe porn addict whose dick might as well be plugged into his computer is not nearly as fringe as you’d hope. The depravity has no limit; the depravity is the point. But while stories like this might make you look upon your own relationship with technosexuality with relief, it is almost a deflection. Even if we are not consciously thinking of ruining our lives of giving up on life, the signs that much of our culture has distanced itself from our organic symbols of vitality are already there in the form of direct-to-consumer merkins and Gen Z Cialis subscriptions. The sexual cyborg isn’t the person who fucks a robot. It’s not the person who is exclusively aroused by AI pornography. It is you and your phone.