!!!SEX!!!

You love it, you hate it, you can't get enough of it, you wish you'd never even heard of it, it's all you think about, you wonder what all the fuss is about . . . whatever the case (and at times it seems that all the above is the case, sometimes apparently simultaneously!) it is the case that SEX, with capital letters, is in our face, at least those of us who are infomaniacs, almost continuously. And not `gender' and not `sexuality' but SEX, the grinding, moaning, messy, sheer horniness of whatever the hell it is, the cultural environment is saturated with it. You can't turn on the television without it steaming up the place, news, sitcoms, drama, talk shows. It has become the cover story of seemingly every magazine (and lets face it, most times, for most magazines, it's the cover story, de facto--you want the best way to get some attention? you got two choices: blow somebody away or blow somebody. And do it in public if you possibly can.) And the net . . . well, that's what got this issue of Perf going. Your humble collator happened to be cruising porno sites (it's none of your damn reason why) and he was even more humbled by the sheer mass of sex materials of every kind. And yes he is aware that each emergent info tech seems to be cuddled up to SEX, and of course the body, before anything else whether the medium be cd-roms, photography, movies, video, etc.

And the new rage in academic circles is --- the BODY! and, increasingly, the sexed body. It's almost as if the human race has suddenly decided (relatively speaking anyway), in the agora as well as the grove, no less, that, WOW! humans have this thing called a body and if you do these things to it certain other things happen, usually `pleasurable' (those scare quotes indicating a certain indeterminacy as regards the pleasure/pain stroke). What's going on? Is it simply that systems of representation have gotten so sophisticated that capital flow can now fully exploit the most primal human current(cies)? That's not a particularly new or original thought but.. . . why then did he have the feeling that a new plateau had been reached, some new border breached within the last few years?

He thought in terms of one of his favorite--let's call it Foucaultian--stories of the Victorians, being collectors generally and plant fanciers especially, bringing in tons of orchids around the turn of the century. Not knowing all of their requirements but thinking: orchids--> tropics---> hot-----> monus ponens, bony marony, good for plants! Especially when they flowered profusely in their hothouses (ie, greenhouse), stoked to the max, the plants trying desperately to reproduce themselves (and the victorians thinking Ahh! Success! Flowers!) --- before they died en mass in due course, all orchids in fact not having the same requirements. A form of `reproductive confessional' if you will. Perhaps you catch my drift, genetic and otherwise.

So, pick your target: fetish, s/m, dna, hetero, homo, repro, sublimation, consumation, conflagration, the gaze, the Look, the lock, the haves, the have-nots, the cunts, the cocks, teledildonics, Freud, fraud, fried, freak, implant-love, border-crossers, cross-dressers, sex-changers, chicken-sexers (can't tell'm apart -- chickens that is-- w/o yer manual), celebates, cerebrates, celebrant swinger/orgy/baccanaliasts, one-handers, lonely-hearts, no-hearts, mechanical hearts, (oops, no sex there! hmm....), cyber-sexo-tekno-oedipo-shmedipo, elektric, tantroid, latex-dipped, mutant futur-phreaks--- you tell us. You know where we are, you know what we do. Help allay our confusion or: confuse us even more.
We await your orchid.

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As always, new and inovative approaches to the arrangement of knowledge/information welcomed.

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