>>8043219> These extracts from Gibson’s short stories ‘The Belonging Kind’ and ‘Burning Chrome’ draw attention to alternative forms of sexuality which bring into play organs other than the genitals: hybrid organs reminiscent of mythical shapes, on the one hand, and prosthetic adjuncts, on the other. In both cases, we are presented with an eroticism in which pleasure and horror are inextricably intertwined, as the abject, the tabooed and the sublime meet and merge in mutual suffusion. These alternative versions of sexual intercourse point not to the demise of the body but rather to the necessity of extending conventional notions of desire and pleasure into hitherto forbidden territories.> Ostensibly incorporeal, clean and safe, cybereroticism actually requires a merging of biological bodies and machines that is intensely physical, for it forces its users to confront the uncertainty of their boundaries and the ambiguity of all sexual and gender roles.— Dani Cavallaro, “Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson” (2000)
If all you’re getting out of transgressive SFnal sexuality is “eww, yuck! bad!,” much of the text is in fact going over your head.
P.S. Nothing is “objectively” disgusting, because disgust is an intrinsically subjective phenomenon.
