Relevant to course PHIL/COGS26 Philosophy & Computers 

The novelist Jeanette Winterson once imagined a brave new digital world where things get treated as people: 'You may live in a computer‐created world all day and all night. You will be able to try out a Virtual life with a Virtual lover… Why hesitate when you could simulate? And sex? Certainly.’ This world has a darker side, when it involves people being treated as things. Feminist critics of pornography have described a kind of sexual solipsism where 'the human becomes thing and the mutual becomes one‐sided and the given becomes stolen and sold and objectification comes to define femininity’ (Catharine MacKinnon). They say pornography subordinates women, eroticising hierarchy through its harnessing and shaping of sexual desire. What are the options? Winterson’s narrator rejects that brave new world: ‘For myself, I'd rather hold you in my arms. Luddite? No, I don't want to smash the machines but neither do I want the machines to smash me.’