ABSTRACT
Many psychoanalysts have written about the ‘work of desire’. Taobao, China’s version of Amazon, for example, offers virtual girlfriends and boyfriends. These are real people, but they only relate with their paying customers via the phone–calls or text–in order to perform fairly unromantic tasks such as wake up calls, good night calls, and to sympathetically listen to clients’ complaints. Her does not directly address the question of Internet pornography. However, its focus on Theodore’s autoerotic sexuality provides a helpful springboard for extending our thinking to how new technologies are shaping the development of sexuality and how they are impacting on the ‘work of desire’. Internet pornography can be accessed easily and rapidly, that is, there is immediacy without mediation. The Internet panders to the way that ‘desire finds even quickness slow’, as the Latin poet Publilius Syrus put it.
