On the Possibility of Sex in Space, a Serious Joke
At least as far back as Lucian of Samosata’s 2nd century satire True Histories, which includes a tale of sailors taking a powerful spout of water to the moon, space travel has occupied part of the collective imagination, blending seamlessly with our curiosity and drive to explore. Over the last five years humans have landed probes on asteroids, private corporations have introduced high price space tourism and private companies and nation states alike have started planning missions to build permanent bases on Mars and the moon. There are many good critiques of both the militarism of space and the environmental impact of viewing our planet as disposable, but we are now a space faring race whether you agree with it or not, and the way things are going we may need to leave earth whether we like it or not.
As the curse of private property has spread across our planet, hemming in the free movement of people, frontiers have become more and more important, not just for free living but for free thought. As Bob Black says in his Anarchy 101 “everyday life is almost entirely anarchist. Rarely does one encounter a policeman, unless he is writing you a traffic ticket for speeding. Family life, buying and selling, friendship, worship, sex, and leisure are anarchist.” and the further from the state apparatus you are the freer you are. With the closing of the commons in England, 1914, and of the American frontier, 1890, the few frontiers left on Earth are increasingly inhospitable to human life and the state's stranglehold on humanity has gotten tighter.
In 1861, a Scottish preacher and astronomer became the first to propose using rocket technology to explore space, three years later Jules Verne first published Journey to the Center of the Earth, often considered the first modern science fiction book. In 1944 the Germans fired the first rocket credited with reaching space. As soon as space flight became a reality it changed the way that humanity viewed itself, causing an explosion of speculative fictions, and opening up a whole new frontier not just in the popular imagination but in physical space itself. In High Weirdness, Eric Davis speculates that the science fiction of the 1950s informed the radical societal transformations of the 1960s. Though I find lately the subject of space travel in radical circles is overshadowed by very understandable anti billionaire sentiment, a few brave weirdos over the years have dared to imagine the implications of space on the future of freedom, and they’re worth revisiting.
The Situationist International, a group of avant-garde French artists and writers working in the
50s and 60s, recognized the political possibilities offered by interplanetary travel early on in a 1969 essay entitled The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power by Eduardo Rothe. Most of the essay is a critique of the cosmos in its operation as archetype in “the society of the spectacle” and the alienating logic of hard science and dead matter. “The space scientist is to the small-time doctor what Interpol is to the policeman on the beat.” But the SI, through their work in “psychogeography”, the psychology of cities and towns, were experts in the radical potentials of places and spaces.
Rothe ends his essay with the following two passages:
“But the revolutionary old mole, which is now gnawing at the foundations of the system, will destroy the barriers that separate science from the general knowledge that will be accessible to everyone when people finally begin making their own history. No more ideas of separate power, no more power of separate ideas. Generalized self-management of the never-ending transformation of the world by the masses will make science a basic banality, and no longer a truth of the state.
“Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: the revolt that will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains.”
In the 1970s, psychedelic advocate and psychologist Timothy Leary published a handful of books in which he outlines his predictions for humanity's future, summed up with the equation space migration + intelligence squared + life extension, or SMILE. SMILE’s tone, though much more detailed in terms of both science and mysticism, matches that of the SI in viewing true and complete freedom as an ecstatic spiritual state. The basic idea is that psychedelic drugs and tantric sex open up an evolutionary potential in human consciousness that will assist in our move off the planet to explore the stars, where the planet earth plays the part of a sort of evolutionary womb. This process would culminate in things like self-directed evolution and telepathy. Consciousness change is a consistent theme throughout utopian space thought, but a group of anarchist explorers from the UK looked beyond psychedelics.
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts, founded in London April 23rd, 1995, called for “an independent space-exploration programme, one that is not restricted by military, scientific or corporate interests. An independent space-exploration programme represents the struggle for emancipatory applications of technology.” Unlike NASA or other governmental organizations, the AAA’s training program focuses not on physical prowess or technical know-how but instead on imagination and out of the box thinking. One such exercise is the playing of three-sided football. Played on a hexagonal pitch, three-sided football is won by the team who gives up the fewest goals.
The AAA set themselves apart from their “enemies at NASA” by designing a number of experiments on sex in space. The official government line is that sex in space is not possible, the AAA has other ideas. “We believe that sex will be even better in outer space and that it should be freely available for all. One only has to look at any of the numerous fetish magazines to see the immense amounts of creativity that humanity has put into its sexuality, and we expect this to increase in outer space as new dimensions and possibilities open up” proclaimed autonomous astronaut Luther Blissett on Radio AAA. Mr. Blissett then points us to the work of American designer Elaine Lerner, who patented a harness that allows one to control the hip movement of their partner in zero gravity.
In 1999, Swedish production and distribution company Private Media Group released the Uranus Experiment, a three part science fiction porn movie, in which two performers have sex in “microgravity” for about 20 seconds. Microgravity is apparently the same as zero gravity in effect but “the g-forces are never exactly zero.” The 136 minute “anal space opera” tells the story of a joint Russian and American space operation infiltrated by the KGB who are studying the effects of space travel on sperm production. Hijinks ensue. For budget reasons, the actual weightless scene is mixed into lots of CGI zero gravity and is pretty much indistinguishable. While the microgravity filming process was described as “particularly difficult from a technical and logistical standpoint,” the pioneering swedes have proven that zero gravity sex is in fact possible.
In a 1983, issue of Sexology Today doctor of Space law Robert A. Frietas Jr. published an article called Sex in Space. Dr. Frietas takes a very practical and indeed open-minded approach to the subject which may help us deal with a number of the technical and logistical issues of the Private Media Group. First, there is the issue of where best to have sex in space. If you start on
a surface like a bed, any movement will send participants careening around the room, so you both must reach a neutral hanging point in midair. Dr. Frietas offers two solutions, the ballast method and the impact method. In the ballast method, the couple push off a surface and when they reach the right point toss some sort of sticky counterweight to the opposite side of the room. What the good Dr. says sounds like the most fun technique would be the impact method, where partners push off opposite sides of the room and meet in the middle. The second issue is that any hot sweaty air produced by the couple will hang around them, making sex “much hotter, and wetter than on Earth.” Then there’s the effect that space travel has on the body. Zero gravity causes the fluids in the body to redistribute to the head and torso and the Dr. speculates that may cause any engorged organ such as the penis to be smaller. The good news is that “pioneers of three-dimensional lovemaking” will find “even the most startling contortions” achievable.
The frontier of space is now a reality of human experience, but we can rest assured that, despite the best efforts of authoritarians everywhere, perverts, artists, and kooks of all kinds will utilize the frontier of space to find new ways to express their immense amounts of creativity, not just in sex but in music, poetry, sculpture, philosophy, drug use, painting, science, and storytelling. As the Autonomous Astronauts say, “only those who attempt the impossible achieve the absurd.”
Ian Blumberg-Enge
Ian Blumberg-Enge is a model agnostic anarchist, writer, and utopian kook. His work is focused on the intersection of mysticism and anarchism. He is co-author, with Peter J. Carrol, of Interview with a Wizard, published by Mandrake of Oxford.