No one should have to be made “better” in order to be accepted and desired

On the receiving end of media age discrimination, fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle (brilliantly portrayed by Demi Moore) is devilishly tempted by The Substance, which will ultimately prove to be a literally bleeding-edge, illicit treatment promising to spawn a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” variant of herself.

Needless to say, it all goes grotesquely and disturbingly awry, culminating in a guts, flesh, and bloody body-horror jamboree of epically disgusting proportions.  

Succeeding as a daring, dark social commentary or not, The Substance puts forward an engrossing idea: would interacting with a different version of yourself be, as the film suggests, horrific or rather nurturing, self-affirming, and sexually enlightening?

“Pretty girls should always smile!”

Produced, directed, and written by Coralie Fargeat and co-starring Margaret Qualley as Sue, Elisabeth Sparkle’s perfect alter ego with Dennis Quaid in an over-and-over-and-over the top portrayal as their toxic television producer.

The Substance has garnered mostly positive reviews with a few, such as El País’ Javier Ocaña comparing it unfavorably to the thematically similar, more highly regarded John Frankenheimer film, Seconds.

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While the latter employed extensive plastic surgery to transform the tired, stodgy John Randolph into Rock Hudson, his idealized self, The Substance takes a less grounded, more Cronenbergian approach with Sue physically emerging from Sparkle’s body and must exchange places once a week or … well, things could and do get messy.

The core message of both is to love and accept oneself, which comes too late in Seconds and not at all in The Substance.

Dancing with yourself

What if we could someday develop a more emotionally fulfilling, even sexually liberating way for people to come face to face with who they truly are, not who they think they should be?

How we might pull this off is less important than what we’d possibly take away from the experience. That said, AI-enhanced virtual or augmented reality could provide an effective option, especially since it wouldn’t be necessary to actually construct or manufacture another but merely study and then approximate your personality.

RECOMMENDED READ: A Touching Tomorrow: Why Future Relationships Will Be More, Not Less Intimate

Branching off from there, interacting with a virtual counterpart might be therapeutic in coping with low self-esteem issues, being able not just to examine and appreciate your body but open up to someone who knows you as well as you know yourself.

The same may be true for sexual exploration, including making adjustments to one of your copies, such as its memory and physical parameters, to alter its gender expression and, from there, provide an exciting new sexual world to discover.

If you’re thinking we’re treading into creepy territory, keep in mind it’s basically masturbation with a few extra steps, something that has never been physically or emotionally unhealthy.

As this Men’s Health article puts it, “In addition to feeling ridiculously pleasurable, masturbation also has several health benefits, from lowering your risk for certain diseases to boosting your satisfaction during sex with a partner.”

You and me—

Have you ever wanted to do something but, for whatever reason, don’t have the time or are overly concerned about the bad things that might happen?  

With another self to play with, why not send it out in the world as your proxy, which, as it’s a version of you could report on whether it had a good or not-so-good time?

Looking further ahead, we might reach a time when you and your copy—or a whole multitude of slightly or significantly modified copies, plural—wouldn’t need to talk but would merge their memories.

Imagine the new insights you’d gain and how much you might learn about who you are.  It’d be like test-driving different versions of yourself, comparing what life is like for younger or older, the taller or shorter, the vulva or penis-equipped, the straight or gay versions of you.

—and we are all together

My biggest problem with The Substance is its needless cynicism, dodging what could’ve been a poignant moment of self-love for nothing but gore for gore’s sake hollowness.  At least in Seconds, the protagonist is granted a fleeting moment of emotional clarity.

Worse, The Substance mocks what’s perhaps the most emotionally uplifting and healing crucial thing anyone can do: to look into themselves and see not flaws or imperfections but a person worthy and deserving of love.

Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB 

The post “The Substance” and the Importance of Self-Love—and Pleasure appeared first on Future of Sex.

Sexually intriguing sci-fi from when “cyber” was cool

Though popular and widely respected, particularly among fans who appreciate their frequently disturbing erotic imagery, directors like David and Brandon Cronenberg aren’t the only filmmakers who’ve dared point their cinematic imaginations towards an exciting view of what life—and sex—might be like in the years ahead.

Since many of the following movies were released nearly twenty years ago, their future is closer to today than tomorrow.  Even so they’re entertaining and even offer up a bevy of quite frequently fascinating, sexually speculative ideas. 

XChange (2000)

Its budget may have been small, but when it comes to fast-forwarding the imagination, few films can match XChange. For starters, it revolves around an up-and-coming technology that enables person A to switch minds, even over long distances, with person B.  

Think telepresence, but instead of inhabiting a robot, you’d instead take someone else’s body for a spin.  The plot twists when Toffler (played by Kim Coates) swaps with Kyle MacLachlan’s criminally nasty Fisk.  On the run from the cops, Toffler resorts to hiding his consciousness in a mass-produced synthetic (Stephen Baldwin) with a built-in 24-hour lifespan.

While not perhaps not Oscar-worthy, XChange’s plethora of cyberdelic details and erotically enthralling possibilities is surprisingly enthralling and well worth hunting down.  

Gene Generation (2007)

As icky as it is sexually provocative, Gene Generation goes where science fiction movies rarely venture, showing what happens to people and the society they inhabit when we can reshape our bodies however and whenever anyone desires.

RECOMMENDED READ: Science Fiction Novels That Helped Us Explore Exciting New Sexual Territories

Starring the striking Bai Ling as an professional assassin trying to protect her brother (Parry Shen) from ruthless DNA Hackers, Gene Generation’s overall aesthetic tends toward the slick, wet, and generally disgusting while managing—largely due to Bai Ling’s performance— to be erotically enchanting.  

On the subject of genetic engineering, we’ve also speculated about everything from grown, not made sextech playthings to sexually super changing our bodies.

Avatar (2004)

Sharing a title and nothing else with James Cameron’s films, Avatar—also sometimes known as Cyber Wars or Matrix Hunter—is one of those unexpected treasures, like XChange, that understands you don’t need tens of millions of dollars to tell an intriguing-futuristic, sexually-enthralling story.

Dash MacKenzie (Genevieve O’Reilly), a classic forced-out-of retirement bounty hunter who ends up a mega-corporation’s crosshairs.

Virtual reality is another favorite topic of ours, which makes Avatar such a welcome addition to our list as rather than focusing on clunky hardware, it instead gives us a world where slipping in and out of cyberspace is as easy as stepping from one room to another.

Plus, it gets a special kudo for sensitively showing how our physical selves don’t need to mirror our digital avatars—and how this could be emotionally and sexually liberating for people with physical limitations.

Strange Days (1995)

On the subject of Cameron, his two-time Academy Award-winning ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow helmed our next entry, a chaotically sprawling whodunnit set during the last riotous days of 1999.

The speculative sextech side of Strange Days revolves around an illicit memory recording device, to which ex-vice cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has become hopelessly addicted, endlessly replaying when he and Faith (Juliette Lewis) were together.

Thematically akin to Douglas Trumbull’s equally excellent 1983 Brainstorm, Strange Days doesn’t shy away from the good and potentially not-so-good sides of this sort of technology—each raising the possibility of user addiction: emotional, sexual, or both.

That said, the idea of sharing memories and experiences is the stuff erotic dreams are made of.  It’s just unfortunate Strange Days, aside from an extremely brief scene, doesn’t take time to explore how this technology might positively affect the future of human sexuality.  Hopefully, other filmmakers will someday pick up the flag from Bigelow and Trumbull and take it into a more optimistic direction.

Tomorrow’s sexuality—yesterday!

Big-budget cinema experiences certainly have their place, but remember, as with any other medium, there are unexpectedly arousing erotic speculative future treasures out there waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.  

If you have some you’re particularly excited by but may have slipped our attention, please feel free to share their titles in the comments! 

Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB

The post Looking Forward—From the Past: Retro Futuresex Flicks Worth Checking Out appeared first on Future of Sex.

Father and son share a fascinatingly organic/orgasmic view of the future

Science fiction cinema may have given us masterpieces like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the bubble gum delights of Star Wars, but it took David Cronenberg, and as of 2012, his son Brandon, to give us—albeit often unsettling—glimpses at human sexuality’s potential evolution.

Shivers (1975)  

The elder Cronenberg may have begun exploring similar ideas in experimental films like Stereo and Crimes of the Future; it took Shivers, aka They Came From Within, to establish him as a groundbreaking director with a penchant for disturbingly erotic body-horror imagery.

Set within the claustrophobic confines of an ultra-modern Montreal apartment complex, Shiver’s plot revolves around the illicit creation of a bioengineered parasite, which, once taking hold of its host, drives them into a sex-fueled frenzy.

Like many of Cronenberg’s works, Shivers relishes showing the dark side of future sexuality, noticeably when technologies like genetic engineering get in on the fun.  

Though frightening, the concept of a desire-enhancing or more beneficially regulating, self-contained organism is intriguing. Grown, not manufactured, it could be affordable, and sufficiently genetically tweaked, it would mesh perfectly with its host’s system, reducing the possibility of rejection.

eXistenZ (1999)

Reality isn’t what it once was in Cronenberg’s latter film, which deftly inserts his fondness for organic ickiness into an endlessly recursive virtual experience for its characters and the audience alike.

As the old saying goes, getting there is half the fun, and in the case of eXistenZ, the titular game exists as a classic, old-school console or, during its initial introduction, a squishy, glistening, pulsating organism not played with buttons but plugged directly into the player’s spine.

RECOMMENDED READ: The 15 Sexiest Robots in Movie History

Interestingly, Cronenberg doesn’t depict eXistenZ as neither a positive or a negative, merely the biogenic McGuffin everyone’s pursuing.  

Again, cultivating rather than assembling pleasure devices or virtual reality interfaces has a respectable number of pros in their favor, and when they die, could be composted or used to make biofuels.

Crimes Of The Future (2022)

Sharing its name with his early 1970s short, Cronenberg’s 2022 Crimes Of The Future is jam-packed with increasingly outré concepts from a deathless/painless society for whom Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen)—aided by his wife Caprice (Léa Seydoux)—performs as a surgical artist to rebels fighting a ruthless government for the right to adapt their bodies to consume plastics and toxic waste.

Off to the side of all this is Tenser’s move away from today’s physical intimacy, as he succinctly puts it, “I’m afraid I’m not very good at the old sex.”  

Crimes of the Future intentionally or inadvertently shares a commonality with anti-sextech advocates who fear pleasure devices might supplant good, old-fashioned human sexuality.

Unsure if that’s Cronenberg’s intention, I prefer viewing the film’s message as more about the underground’s rejection of outdated societal norms by opting to evolve socially, psychologically, and sexually.

Antiviral (2012)

Not so much following in his father’s footsteps as contributing his unique perspective, Brandon Cronenberg’s second full-length release spins off today’s celebrity worshipers with a dash of medical fetishism by constructing a future where obsessed fans can get unsettlingly close to their favorite A-listers—by infecting themselves with their illnesses.

It may be hard to face, but considering our already celebrity-obsessed culture, it’s not difficult to imagine Antiviral’s fantasy eventually becoming a contemporary reality, especially in light of how many people are already willing to pay top dollar for a lock of a famous person’s hair, their worn clothing, or even more intimate aspects of their lives.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Like his father’s Crimes Of The Future, Brandon’s recent Infinity Pool is replete with enthralling possibilities.  The difference is in Crimes, bodies are inescapable prisons, while in Infinity Pool, they and the people whose minds inhabit them are as unendingly reproducible as they’re utterly disposable. 

A maze of interlocking who’s who, Infinity Pool plays havoc with the audience’s expectations, killing or, in some cases, psychologically warping its protagonist, James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), over and over, steadily unpeeling his personality like a blood-soaked onion.

Infinity Pool’s reality might appear too far-fetched, but approximating it may not be.  For instance, keeping cloned or bioengineered copies of ourselves in storage, fitting each with a high-speed neural implant, using artificial intelligence to smooth out any problems and jumping from body to body, or putting one or more on personality-mirroring autopilot might give us a more benevolent version of Infinity Pool’s world—one where we could try on bodies or selves at a moment’s notice.

Flesh is here to stay

Despite the Cronenbergs’ shared fondness for viscera, father and son remain two of the few writer/directors willing to delve into some of our darkest, most disquieting sexual nightmares or, more troubling, our fantasies.  

In cinema, as well as the rise of new and perhaps potentially challenging sexual technologies, it’s up to us, the audience and/or consumers, to fear the future or dare to dream of a better one.
Image Sources: Depositphotos, IMDB

The post Long Live the New Flesh: The Cronenbergs’ Take on Tomorrow’s Sexuality Might Grow On—or In—You appeared first on Future of Sex.