Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the romantic poet Lord Byron. He and his social entourage were disappointed with her gender and he soon separated from both her mother and England. Byron died when Ada was nine.

Ada’s mother arranged the girl’s life to avoid any contact with either her father or his attitude toward life. She considered Lord Byron insane and, worrying her daughter might share it, educated Ada in mathematics from a very early age, even through prolonged health problems constrained the girl to bedrest. Ada Lovelace died at 36 from uterine cancer and requested to burial next to Lord Byron, finally joining the father she never knew.

Alan Turing (1912–54), English mathematician and cryptoanalyst, had enormous influence on computer science. His Turing machine incorporated important advances in the formalization of algorithms and computability. Turing conceived the Turing Test which defined a “thinking machine” as one that fooled a person into believing s/he was having a conversation through a keyboard with a human being in a remote location. During the Second World War his cryptoanalysis was fundamental in breaking the German ciphers, contributing to the defeat of Nazism.

In his era, homosexuality in England was subject to criminal prosecution. In 1952, after admitting to having sex with a young man, Turing was given the choice between incarceration or a treatment with female hormones (“to reduce the libido”). How absurd that after helping save his country from Nazism, it treated him as a criminal. In 1954, Turing died of poisoning. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized on behalf of the British government for the way he was treated.

Jaron Lanier, in “One Half a Manifesto,” commented on the tragic death of Turing in these terms:

Turing died in an apparent suicide brought on by his having developed breasts as a result of enduring a hormonal regimen intended to reverse his homosexuality. It was during this tragic final period of his life that he argued passionately for machine sentience, and I have wondered whether he was engaging in a highly original new form of psychological escape and denial; running away from sexuality and mortality by becoming a computer.

I think the denial is deeper than the sexuality issue: It has to do with the denial of anything but the “pure” Cartesian mind, including the body and sensuousness. With both pillars of contemporary IT we see how a denial of sexual identity, the sensuous and non-rational world shaped their lives. Lovelace’s gender was rejected by her father, while her mother pushed her toward a purely rational life. The law repressed Alan Turing’s homosexuality, as he likely did himself.

The mind is regarded as the most important human feature and the identification with it is so deep that we want to reproduce it on machines, becoming creators in our turn. We even have developed a test to ascertain the “intelligence” of a machine.

Joseph Weizenbaum in 1964 created Eliza, an interactive program that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist. Weizenbaum himself was surprised and concerned to see that users were taking its words seriously. While the mind can surely be simulated, this tell us nothing about what’s going on inside. However it does underscore how much the mind can be fooled and how we can actually behave mechanistically.

I wrote in Google, Privacy and the Need to be Seen that we are apt at showing ourselves online in trying to fulfill the natural human need for mirroring, to be seen and understood, which probably hasn’t been actualized in the proper way at the proper time in our lives. Also, our skills for self-recognition and inner mirroring is becoming weaker and weaker because of the growing pressure from external inputs, mostly by the Net. No time for reflection and no empty space.

Social network analysis can infer much more about us than our sexual preferences. The ordinary mind in itself, as most spiritual teachers say, is quite mechanical in its behavior. Joining this mechanistic nature of the mind with the amount of available data which most people spontaneously show on the Net is such that a well-written software could guess many of our ideas, opinions, tastes and, most important for marketers, which products we’ll be willing to buy.

Psychoanalysis, neuro-linguistic programming and any other science of the inner being knows well that our beliefs and ideas are for the most part created by the conditioning acquired during our lives, especially in childhood.

Marketers have a special aptitude for cataloging people on the basis of their personalities, attitudes, lifestyles and preferences. But they aren’t interested in understanding the roots of those attitudes or in going beyond them. More than anything else, marketers are interested in the conditionings which have been created through a compensation for an undeveloped inner quality.

For instance, we might “need” some sort of external appearance (goods, clothes, gadgets, make-up, muscles or a slim figure) to compensate for a weak sense of self-worth, or we could need to connect frequently with people online because we aren’t able to keep in touch with our inner self and for the lack of authentic real-life relationships, thus needing computers, connections, smartphones and such gizmos.

Marketers, as well as psychoanalysts or spiritual teachers, are interested in knowing us and our conditionings, but the former are interested in making them stronger, reinforcing our “needs” instead of liberating us from them.

The understanding of marketers of the human soul is quite superficial since they don’t really need to go into the depths of people’s souls to exploit their weaknesses commercially, as much as a pusher doesn’t need to know the reasons why his client needs drugs.

I prefer to define it as “The Digitalization of Reality,” wherein more and more human activities are being translated into bytes. Work, communication, media, entertainment, friends, dating, sexuality, culture, shopping, politics and causes are among the growing number of human needs that have gone digital.

While the Internet was something which earlier we mostly visited, now we are inhabiting the virtual worlds full-time and engineer them according to our mental projections. The Cartesian dream of a mind without a body has almost been fulfilled (even though in his old age Descartes, in Passions of the Soul, affirmed that “the soul is jointly united to all the parts of the body”).

This separation has a long history of Western thought starting from the Judeo-Christian separation between body and soul up to people like the transhumanist Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, or the singularity guru Raymond Kurzweil who want to download the biological human mind to a safer mechanical medium in order to achieve nothing less than immortality.

Technology itself is less and less “embodied” and physical. Technology is going toward Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and various wireless ways of communicating and even wire-free charging for devices. We have made even hi-tech tools withdraw physically from each other.

Weizenbaum, more than 30 years ago in Computer Power and Human Reason, described a typical computer programmer thus:

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice…Their food…coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer…Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.

Brenda Laurel, designer of human computer interaction, notices differences in gender:

We have a class of people we call nerds who are radically uncomfortable with their bodies and their sexuality…When men talk about virtual reality, they often use phrases like “out-of-body experience” and “leaving the body.” These guys are not talking about out-of-body experiences in the way that some Eastern mystic or Peruvian Indian would. They are talking about it in the sense that if you slap a screen over your eyes you won’t have to see air pollution…When women talk about VR they speak of taking the body with them into another world. The idea is to take these wonderful sense organs with us, not to leave our bodies humped over a keyboard while our brain zips off down some network (Susie Bright, Sexual Reality, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1992).

What was an attitude confined to technicians and nerds became “mainstream,” where most people are in front of a computer, TV or mobile screen for most of their waking lives, distancing themselves from a felt connection with their bodies, living in a purely mental world. Alexander Lowen, in Joy, wrote that in the more than 50 years since he began studying the human condition, he has seen a general deterioration in the bodies of the people who come to him; the bodies are less energized, less integrated and less attractive than those of the patients he used to see earlier. He writes that the old-fashioned hysterical patient that Freud wrote about is almost never seen. While the hysterical person couldn’t handle his feelings, the schizoid individual nowadays – dissociated from his body and living predominantly in his mind – just hasn’t many.

If technology is conducive toward the disappearance of physical reality, there’s a second philosophy which seems allied to the same goal. Several mystical traditions and spiritual teachers of the past and present consider physical reality as a dream – maya – as something to overcome in order to expand our awareness and connect with our deeper soul and with the ultimate. Physical reality is then something to be abandoned while advancing on our path toward spiritual enlightenment.

Shri Ramakrishna, in L’Enseignement de Ramakrishna, said that when a man becomes crazy for God, he becomes unconscious even of his body. Taking Chaitanya Deva as an example, Ramakrishna said that he “many times fell on the ground. He didn’t have any more hunger, or thirst, or even become sleepy. He completely lost the consciousness of his body”.

In Ramakrishna’s description of God’s crazy state we can see some similarities with Weizenbaum’s programmers. Apparently. Mystics abandon the body/mind in order to reach what is beyond the mind, while our society has relegated the body to a marginal role in order to give the mind the superior and controlling role.

Technologically-oriented people and mystics have another common point in saying that the world is unreal, an illusionary state. The former involve neurophysiology and psychology, while mystics talk about their first-hand experience in having reached a state where a broader awareness comes to the forefront, not depending on our body/mind filters any more.

But while virtual reality disconnects us from our bodies to give priority to the mind (considered the ultimate attainment of human beings), the spiritual paths toward awareness need to know, feel and live in the body as a source and object of knowledge before going beyond mind and body. In the spiritual path the body is seen as a whole body/mind entity, observed by a broader awareness. In that journey, both body and mind might be lost for a while, to be retrieved later. David Cooper in The Grammar of Living wrote: “We have to lose our heads to enter our bodies. There is a time for minds, a time to leave our minds and a time to recover them.”

The body in the spiritual path is a fragile bridge toward the ultimate which has to be crossed with respect and care, sensing and feeling it without rushing to overcome it, otherwise we risk falling into the waters, losing our minds prematurely as well. Some religions discouraged or prohibited a close meeting with our bodies, particularly in the monotheistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Being far from the sinful body was supposed to bring us closer to the divine incorporeal entity. But mystics – even the ones who came from those traditions – could not escape experiencing the body in its fullness.

The body can’t be ignored in our will to expand our awareness. Almaas (the pen name of Hameed Ali) expressed the connection with the body in the spiritual search for the truth in these terms:

As we get more present in our bodies, in our bellies, we can get closer to our essence which is truth, which is what makes us know what is true, what is false, not from logical deduction, or from the unconscious. You just know. You are close to that subtle sense which is truth. (A.H. Almaas. Elements of the Real in Man (Diamond Heart Book One). Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1987)

Eckhart Tolle expressed it in similar terms:

The most powerful anchor for staying present is to inhabit the body. That means to have some of your attention in the inner energy field of the body – to sense, to feel the animating presence that gives life to the body, which ultimately is consciousness itself. The physical body is a temporary expression of that consciousness, but the essence of it is the consciousness itself. So to connect with the physical body, and even as you perceive the world and interact with the world, to have some attention in the inner energy field and to feel the aliveness that is there in every cell and every organ as a single feeling. You are then rooted in your body, which becomes the anchor for staying present and for staying out of the mental noise (from Lynn Marie Lumiere and John Lumiere-Wins, The Awakening West, Oakland: Clear Visions Publications, 2000).

Feeling our presence and connection with our bodies works as well as the needed grounding for keeping our minds healthy in a technology-saturated disembodied schizoid condition. “The person who does not act in reality and only acts in fantasy becomes himself unreal,” wrote Ronald Laing in 1959, based on the observations of his patients, in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1959), while Marshall McLuhan wrote that, “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms”. Through our technological race toward the digitalization of reality, we risk abandoning our bodies and split our minds as well, without finding anything superior for our soul to join, as is conversely contemplated in the Eastern spiritual paths.

There’s an echo of a deeper truth in the desire of replacing reality with a virtual one: the truth that the world as we see it is not the whole story. But through virtual worlds we might bend the distorting lenses of the mind even more, creating a further layer of illusionary maya. Instead of liberating ourselves from the deceptive mind, we liberate the mind from the “restrictions” of the body, coming closer to fulfilling the Cartesian dream. But the mind without a felt connection with the body doesn’t have support from our embodied intelligence and becomes compulsive in chasing every small bit of information which appears in our already-scattered attention, transforming our mind in servomechanisms of technology. Is it not a case that meditation techniques reinforce our concentration ability, usually giving attention to a part of our body or to our sensations.

However, even without any virtual technological life, the unreal can’t be avoided. Lila, the divine game played by the universal consciousness, has been playing the hide-and-seek game much before the human mind created a new hi-tech version of the game. Many spiritual teachers say that we live in a dream state, looking at reality filtered by the veil of maya which gives the mind many layers of conditionings. Perhaps lila is having fun in hiding even deeper, adding another layer by encouraging the collective mind in building its own virtual representations of reality. Ultimately, lila will become tired of playing and will reveal the true nature of reality, maybe through apparently hiding even more.

“To consider Maya, a deeper Maya is needed,” said Swami Nityananda, while Nisargadatta Maharaj said “Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality,” suggesting that one be attentive and aware of recognizing the nature of the false. Since the real timeless soul (the atman) can’t be simulated or manufactured, Osho said that, “By going deeper and deeper into the artificial, science helps religion, extending the limits of what can be manufactured and thereby defining what the Atman is not”. What will be left from the limits of the artifice can be no more than the real.

In the Buddhist tradition there’s the metaphor of our illusionary ego as a thorn we have in our skin, where the Buddhist teachings represent a second thorn, useful in extracting the first one. Then we can discard both. Even an illusion can break into the ultimate reality as the Zen story, “No Water, No Moon,” where the nun attained enlightenment when the old pail broke and there was no more water in the pail, no more moon reflected in the water and, suddenly no more mind also distorting reality.

So the technological way of disconnecting from reality could be like the moon reflected in the pail which, once we become aware of the unreality of it (perhaps through the supposed big electromagnetic storm forecast in the next few years, which could block every electronic equipment), can break the mind free from any other obscuration?

I don’t know what the plans of lila are – and maybe there aren’t even any – as when kids are playing, but since the nun was carrying water, not Twittering, chatting, browsing websites, trading online or updating her Facebook page, she was present in feeling her body and her mind was probably empty for most of the time, in a state more receptive to be filled by Truth. In many spiritual paths the students are suggested to make repetitive actions, as cleaning the rice as a way to strengthen our presence and attention, taming the wandering mind. Those tasks would bore us to death, while we prefer instead, paraphrasing Neil Postman, to be amused to death.

Orgasms make us vulnerable; they show our intensity and we can let the other hear our deepest screams of pleasure. As a man, it’s beautiful to see and feel the shakti energy of a woman as she has an orgasm. Orgasms trigger the release of many hormones, among them oxytocin that induces feelings of love and bonding. They are good for health and circulation; they can start in the body but expands to the soul, or vice versa, representing a holistic experience for the person. Everybody could list more benefits for themselves.

But… Having “ordinary” orgasms seems not to be enough anymore. Clitoral orgasm is just for beginners. G-spot orgasm, trigasm, multiple orgasms and squirting are all musts now for a woman. Men usually don’t have any problem reaching an orgasm so the frontier for them is to become multi-orgasmic; having a 30-minute orgasm or reaching a prostate orgasm. Oh yes and than orgasms should of course be simultaneous.

I have always loved to experiment and to share intimately and deeply with a partner. However, up until a few years ago, when there wasn’t yet any definition of those different kinds of orgasms, we just felt free to experiment with our bodies and sensations in a playful and passionate way. We were moving from one position to another and from one sensation to another, guided by the gods Eros and Aphrodite.

Now we are required to look for those kinds of orgasms, define and maybe even count them. “Honey did you get that g-spot squirt or was the air-conditioner spilling water”? Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health and other magazines are efficient in telling readers the hot sex trends and the tips that can transform everybody into Gods and Goddesses in the bedroom. That sells!

Nevertheless, if we don’t let our controlling mind relax and if we don’t surrender every goal while having sex, we can’t reach deeper states. There are experiences in life for example: meditation, falling asleep, even defecating or becoming spiritually enlightened, that happen more easily when we are not overly interfering as personalities with goals, when we just let ourselves go. Every woman knows that the harder she tries to have an orgasm more difficult it becomes.

Of course, orgasms can be sparked mechanically as well in many ways. Sex toys are there for that. Nothing wrong with a couple “work-out” orgasm or with sex toys, they can be lot of fun and a great way to get to know our bodies. However, the bliss of being open to Eros is mostly a receptive experience that is being transformed in our culture into a goal-oriented “have to”. Eros can’t guide and transport us anymore, we want to be guided by the how-to’s, as if sex was a technical manual.

Orgasms haven’t moved much from the space they always had in our psyche. In the past (and in part nowadays too) they were confined to the controlling superego in the forms of prohibitions, inhibitions and judgments; now they are still in the judging superego, they just disguised themselves as “have-to”, “the right kind”, “how many”.
I can predict that more new orgasms will be “discovered”: the mind orgasm (then the various brain areas will be more precisely distinguished from each other), the emotional orgasm, the chakra orgasm, probably somebody will write books about it all and will organize workshops. What about “discovering” a DNA orgasm?

In my experience, I can recall that among the best sexual experiences that I had, the presence of having an orgasm wasn’t the main ingredient. I remember a lover that had multiple orgasms while we had sex. So I was puzzled at the beginning when she told me that the best sex she ever had in her life was when we explored our sensuality in a way that didn’t bring her any big O, and not even penetration. I realized then how much emphasis we misguidedly give to orgasm.

Why do we give such importance to climax? One obvious reason is that it feels good but I think there are two main ingredients in how the collective mind works: one is the obsession to finish, to complete, to have a goal. This is a hard obsession that has its roots much deeper than the inception of the industrial age and that will be the subject of a future, longer article.

The second ingredient is, paradoxically, religious. For the Christians, sex is for reproduction, and for this to happen, at least the man needs to climax. Women’s orgasms have been ignored for long time and it is good that female orgams have come out of the closet. However, the masculine need to reach an orgasm and to have a goal have been exported to the other gender without being integrated with other dimensions. Even though most people nowadays consider sex as something that is more an emotional and pleasure-oriented connection than about having babies, the importance of the orgasm tells us that the unconscious association between sex and reproduction is still influencing our approach to sex.

See also:

Eros and the sexualization of society

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

During these very hot days in Italy a lightweight article about media and gender relationships. Marshall McLuhan as a media analyst coined the terms hot and cool media.

Hot media are those media that express an analytical, precise and well-defined message. Most of the visual media, especially the high-definitions one, are hot media. The message conveyed by hot media usually doesn't need much participation from the audience. For instance a movie is hotter than television since has a higher definition. Other examples of hot media are radio, the photograph, a lecture.

Cool media are those media that need the participation of the audience. Comic books and cartoons are cool media since the audience has to fill missing details. A seminar is considered a cool media since it requires an active role of the participants.

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In questi giorni di gran calura, un articolo leggero sui media e i rapporti uomo donna. Lo studioso dei media Marshall McLuhan ha coniato le espressioni media “caldi” e “freddi”.

I media caldi sono quelli che trasmettono un messaggio analitico, preciso e ben definito. La maggior parte dei media visivi – soprattutto quelli ad alta definizione – sono media caldi. Il messaggio trasmesso dai media caldi di solito non ha bisogno di molta partecipazione da parte del pubblico. Per esempio, un film è più caldo della televisione, perché possiede una definizione più elevata. Altri esempi di media caldi sono la radio, la fotografia, una conferenza.

I media freddi sono quei media per i quali è necessaria la partecipazione del pubblico. I fumetti e i cartoni animati sono media freddi, perché il pubblico deve riempire i dettagli mancanti. Un seminario è considerato un media freddo, perché richiede ai partecipanti un ruolo attivo.

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McLuhan associated hot media with the industrial and individualist societies and cool media with the oral, village and tribal societies.

Cinema for instance is more "hot" and individualistic than television, because the audience is not supposed not to communicate among themselves in a movie theater. It is more compatible with a detached attitude, present in our individualistic society. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, by director Giuseppe Tornatore (1988), narrates the arrival of a movie theater in Sicily in the 50's, where the hot-blooded Sicilians react to the movie scenes with shouting and standing up. They are used to engage, not to be detached spectators.

I have some doubts around this classification of hot and cool media, and I would like to see many more parameters involved in the media analysis; nonetheless, it is valuable for increasing our awareness of the impact of media.

If a medium is less defined, there is going to be more audience participation in the message. However, what do we really do when we complete the message of a cool media? We immerse ourselves in the media and can became almost hypnotized looking for instance at television or reading comics books. This "effort" to complete is mostly done in a passive effortless way. We enter an almost dreamy state where our attention is not consciously there, but nonetheless our minds are comparing what we see with our complex world of projections, structures, wishes. As McLuhan noticed, with any media we are on one side extending our possibilities and on the other side numbing and amputating the equivalent characteristic in ourselves. In Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote, "Self-amputation forbids self-recognition."

For instance, the car as a medium extends the limited possibilities of our legs; at the same time represents a loss of the legs muscles and the disappearance of the walking culture, transforming our towns into spaces no longer suitable for walking.

Women know well that less is more. Showing a part of their bodies makes the seer activate his imagination to complete the picture (well, in this case completing could mean… completing the removal). Lingerie is a typical "cool" medium. A club where women show sexy clothes is probably more exciting than a nudist beach. Perfect make-up on a woman is for me about as sexy as a plastic Barbie doll. Cover models on magazines never fascinated me. However, the spark of a spontaneous glance can trigger a cascade of feelings.

A low-resolution video makes us more involved than a high definition one. The challenges for porn producers about HDTV are not because the better resolution can show flaws in the actor's bodies, but the real threat comes from the better definition in itself that allows less participation on the side of the audience. Actors can probably avoid expensive and painful surgeries to fix little imperfections.

If seeing less is more participatory, saying less gives space to our wishes and hopes in making a picture of the other person. Women often prefer to communicate in a "cool media" manner, with less hard-defined statements and more first person subjectivity. Men in general are more inclined toward rational, objective, hot media messages, both verbally and visually. I use "women" and "man" as I'd use "jin" and "yang". It's more an energetic quality than a gender issue, even though often it overlaps with genders.

Women are considered better human communicators in particular on emotional issues, since the other person feels more willing to enter and be engaged. On the other side, this gives more space to projections and misunderstandings and to a numbing effect that is probably necessary to fall in love. Seducers know that giving hints is more effective than giving clear statements.Too, talking about love in a "hot media" way, well defined and rational, could be as well a defence mechanism against real participation.

There is a saying: "Try to reason about love and you will lose your reason." This doesn't mean that our awareness shouldn't be present in love; the best modality is probably a mix of cool and hot media language where both precise hot definition messages are well mixed with less defined cool messages. Many misunderstandings happen when somebody answers his partner with a different temperature modality.

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I media freddi sono quei media per i quali è necessaria la partecipazione del pubblico. I fumetti e i cartoni animati sono media freddi, perché il pubblico deve riempire i dettagli mancanti. Un seminario è considerato un media freddo, perché richiede ai partecipanti un ruolo attivo.

McLuhan ha associato i media caldi alle società industriali e individualiste, e i media freddi alle società orali, tribali e dei villaggi.

Il cinema, per esempio, è più “caldo” e individualista della televisione, perché si suppone che in un cinema gli spettatori non comunichino tra loro. Esso è più compatibile con l’atteggiamento distaccato tipico della nostra società individualista. Nel film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, del regista Giuseppe Tornatore (1988), si vede l’arrivo del cinema nella Sicilia degli anni Cinquanta: i focosi siciliani reagivano alle scene dei film urlando e balzando in piedi. Come spettatori, erano abituati a farsi coinvolgere, non a restare distaccati.

Ho alcuni dubbi su questa classificazione in media caldi e freddi, e mi piacerebbe veder includere molti altri parametri di valutazione. Tuttavia, riconosco che questa definizione è utile per accrescere la nostra consapevolezza sull’impatto dei media.

Se un medium è meno definito, il pubblico parteciperà maggiormente al messaggio. Ma cosa facciamo davvero quando completiamo il messaggio di un medium freddo, per esempio della televisione o di un fumetto? Ci immergiamo in esso al punto da lasciarci quasi ipnotizzare. Tale “sforzo” di completamento è svolto per lo più in modo passivo, senza sforzi. Entriamo in uno stato di quasi sonnambulismo in cui la nostra attenzione non è consapevolmente presente e la mente confronta ciò che sta vedendo al nostro complesso mondo di proiezioni, strutture, desideri. Come ha osservato McLuhan, tutti i media fanno sì che, da una parte, noi estendiamo le nostre capacità; dall’altra, limitiamo e amputiamo le caratteristiche corrispondenti in noi. Ne Gli strumenti del comunicare, McLuhan scrive: «L’amputazione di sé vieta il riconoscimento di sé».

Per esempio, il medium dell’automobile aumenta le limitate possibilità delle nostre gambe, ma allo stesso tempo rappresenta un indebolimento dei loro muscoli e la perdita della cultura del camminare, perché trasforma le nostre città in luoghi non più adatti al passeggio.

Le donne sanno bene che il meno è il più. Mostrare una parte del proprio corpo fa sì che lo spettatore attivi l’immaginazione per completare ciò che vede (anche se in questo caso “completare” potrebbe significare… completare la rimozione). La lingerie è un tipico medium freddo. Un club in cui le donne indossano abiti sexy è probabilmente più eccitante di una spiaggia per nudisti. Per me, un make-up femminile perfetto è tanto sexy quanto una bambola di Barbie di plastica. Le modelle da copertina delle riviste non mi hanno mai incantato. Al contrario, il lampo di un’occhiata casuale può provocare un’ondata di sentimenti.

Un video a bassa definizione ci coinvolge maggiormente di uno ad alta definizione. I rischi legati all’HDTV per i produttori del porno non consistono nel fatto che una risoluzione migliore mette in luce le imperfezioni del corpo degli attori, ma nel fatto che il pubblico potrà partecipare in misura minore nel completamento delle immagini. Gli attori possono probabilmente risparmiarsi interventi chirurgici costosi e dolorosi per correggere piccole imperfezioni.

Se il vedere meno è più partecipatorio, il dire meno permette ai nostri desideri e speranze di plasmare la nostra immagine di una persona. Le donne spesso preferiscono comunicare alla maniera dei media freddi, ovvero con affermazioni meno definite e più soggettive. Gli uomini in generale sono più inclini al razionale, all’oggettivo e ai messaggi “caldi”, sia verbalmente che visivamente. Uso le parole “donne” e “uomini” come userei “jin” e “yang”. Si tratta più di una qualità energetica che di qualcosa che ha che fare con i sessi, anche se spesso vi è una coincidenza con i generi sessuali.

Le donne sono considerate migliori comunicatrici soprattutto riguardo i temi emozionali, poiché l’altra persona si sente più spinta a partecipare. D’altra parte, questo facilita le proiezioni, le incomprensioni e quella sensazione di smarrimento che probabilmente è necessaria per innamorarsi. I seduttori sanno che l’accennare è più efficace del comunicare direttamente.

Inoltre, parlare d’amore in modalità “medium caldo”, ovvero in modo razionale e ben definito, potrebbe essere un meccanismo di difesa contro un’autentica partecipazione. Esiste un detto: «Prova a ragionare sull’amore e perderai la ragione». Ciò non significa che la nostra consapevolezza non debba essere presente nell’amore; la modalità migliore è probabilmente un misto dei linguaggi dei media caldi e freddi, in cui i messaggi a definizione “calda” si accompagnano a quelli “freddi”, meno definiti. Molte incomprensioni si verificano quando qualcuno risponde con una modalità diversa da quella del partner.

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