However, the buyer in the virtual gallery is still interested and she’s not sure how to react. The artist dredges up some memory of reading poetry when she painted it and feels fake. He is seen as an avatar, but shows an interest in a painting that’s now ten years old. An artist is connected to a virtual gallery to be on hand to talk about her paintings as a client is shown around. Yet her male partners fail to notice her disconnect, that she’s not fully present.Ī broader exploration of presence and presentation is explored in Julianne Ingles “Dante’s Dream”. His questions are so stigmatising… nothing you would ask a real woman.” Her conclusion is that generally clients don’t see the woman they are paying as completely human so robots aren’t the problem for sex workers, the problem is the clients, “John Doe fucks women like they are robots because he wants a human connection he just doesn’t know how to get it.” Ellie Stewart’s “Send Nudes” picks up this theme as she ponders on how women lay themselves out on screen for passive consumption and do similar in real life, “eyes somewhere else/ screen glowing”. Tamara MacLeod’s non-fiction “Cyberwhores_Sex_Robots_and_Aliens” looks at attitudes towards sex workers, “He brings society into my bedroom and I resent it. This human need to be listened to is picked up in Rab Ferguson’s “The Call” where a helpline operator doesn’t know if she’s real or AI and hatches a plan to find out. The student knows the till isn’t a person but ‘she’ listens to him and responds whereas his student friendships feel fleeting and temporary. In Ross Baxter’s “Self Service” a till gets friendly with a student doing night shifts, offering connection through conversation and emojis. Liam Hogan’s “Plastic People” explores whether cyber relationships are better than real life encounters as the narrator struggles with identifying whether the image in front of him is real or virtual. How far do we care about someone we’ve never met but discard the person next to us? Similar issues are explored in Kristian X’s “Metrics” looks at a relationship with one of the couple more preoccupied with her twitter following and the reactions of the twitter followers who have never met the couple in real life. Knowing where your partner is at any and every point of the day might appear to provide reassurance, but it also destroys the intimacy as the person being traced has lost their freedom. Reassures the blurb on Ispyoo, as the loopsīubble-wrap your screen, a pattern of ties That circles me 24/7 – you may have reason: Julian Bishop’s poem “Tracker” opens the collection, where an unnamed ‘you’ is watching a tracking app on a partner’s phone, leading to questions such as The “smut” part of the title is more about the willingness of writers to look at the dark side of relationships and what pushes people and/or machines together when intimacy is desired but in short supply. Sex is mentioned but the focus in on the desire to connect, loneliness, addictions and search for a soulmate, even a platonic one. But, as Ingrid notes, the care that Kevin takes in making April’s fantasies reality is really wonderful, and I was so happy that these two nerds found each other.“Cyber Smut” is an anthology of fiction, non-fiction and poetry looking at social media and technology’s influences on relationship between people and machines. I had the biggest smile on my face at the end of it, which is WILD for an erotic short-story with an HFN. Which brings me to point number two (which is the bigger one): how utterly charming this story is. I certainly was feeling some kind of way about what was happening, and it was a weird experience for me. But the mechanics of faux-mermaid tail bathtub sex are kinda weird and not obviously sexy…and it’s also weird how well it works. I am not trying to kink-shame here-especially because a Google image search of “Splash movie bathtub” come up with a LOT of pictures of people recreating that scene in their own bathtubs.
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