Arms Enough for Love: The Erotic Possibilities Extra Limbs, More Thumbs May Hand Us
We may soon have to add more pages to the Kama Sutra—or pen an entirely new one
Imagine the erotic possibilities of extra carbon fiber arms or additional thumbs! Cybernetic researchers like Dr. Masahiko Inami of Keio University’s School of Media Design and Cambridge University’s Dani Clode and Professor Tamar Makinmay not currently be focused on the sexual possibilities of extra limbs, but in the future, they very well could be.
Featured in a video by WIRED’s Amit Katwala, Dr. Masahiko Inami’s approach involves providing people with four additional limbs while Clode and Makin have been investigating the possible advantages of giving us two additional thumbs.
On more than one hand
Drawing from bunraku, traditional Japanese puppetry, the current iteration of Dr. Inami’s jizai, or “freely moving” carbon fiber arms, may not require an external power source but aren’t, as yet, user-operable.
As Amit Katwala showed, his prototype jizai’s are primarily controlled via a set of smaller-scale limbs, though autonomy is somewhat possible but with mixed results, having difficulty with relatively simple tasks like picking up a plush toy or not-as-successfully doing the same with a marker.
RECOMMENDED READ: Sometimes I Even Feel Hope: Celebrating Ghost In
Dr. Inami envisions his extra arms being used for everything from physical therapy to inspiring otherwise unheard-of athletic competitions. “Maybe in the future we attach or detach to play a new kind of sport,” he speculated in the WIRED video.
Thumbs up
Meanwhile, at Cambridge University, Professor Makin and Dani Clode were experimenting with what it’d be like to have an additional thumb.
Makin and Clode’s third thumb is user-operable thanks to a press-sensitive toe switch. As Katwala discovered, it didn’t take very long for him to get used to controlling his new thumb this way. He was surprised to discover that this brief demo had already remapped some of his neural pathways.
Professor Makin explained that she and Clode were using their artificial thumb to introduce participants to completely new ways to operate their bodies, allowing them to do more than they could with just their hands.
Makin explained that this type of research might eventually teach people to control any number of new body parts intuitively:
At the moment, which is the very earliest days of the field, I think we want to provide a proof of concept that, yes, we are comfortable in our bodies with our five fingers hand but any limitations in using extra fingers and arms is a limitation ultimately of our imagination as humans.
Reach for tomorrow
Imagine what it’d be like to have as many fingers, thumbs, hands, legs, or arms as we want.
By remapping our brains and integrating bleeding-edge haptic tech into our new, cybernetically augmented selves, we could sense the world, ourselves, and our lovers like never before. We could experience having more than one set of genitals.
Why stop there? Suppose our new, artificial limbs act and feel precisely the same as the ones we were born with. Why shouldn’t it be possible to construct and remotely operate new bodies as well, ones specifically designed for sexual activities we might not otherwise be capable of performing?
How does making love in a volcano, indulging in a deep space orgy, or swinging at the bottom of the Mariana Trench sound?
Or it may spark a wildly creative, gorgeously erotic renaissance where our bodies are our canvases, and what we can do with them and each other is our art.
Even if we dial our imaginations back a bit, the availability of optional body parts could aid people struggling with all sorts of dysmorphic disorders.
When all’s said and done, it comes down to the joy of having options. You may not want to have more than two thumbs, two legs, two arms, and so forth, but should the likes of Dr. Masahiko Inami, Dani Clode, and Professor Makin take their work to the next—and the next, and the next, and the next—level, for the first time you’ll be able to say to yourself, I want to try being more than I already am.
Image Sources: Depositphotos
