Kati Stevens

Free early reviewer book. An extended musing on the concept of “fakeness,” mostly taking the position that there’s nothing wrong with fake things that aren’t frauds. Replicas in museums, for example, don’t bother her; they serve conservation goals by allowing current publics to experience artifacts/fossils without letting the real things deteriorate. And body alteration is fine and just as real as anything else; she points out that “Baudrillard [with his criticism of the unreal] would be a terrible person for anyone with a prosthetic to encounter.” Prosthesis, Stevens contends, is “already humanoid. The prosthesis’s entire reason for being is to service the body ….” Contradictions are everywhere: “If man is made in the image of God … Man is the first cheap knockoff.” Stevens gets self-contradictory in arguing that virtual reality would seem as creepy as cloning if we hadn’t encountered it first as/in entertainment, even though (a) we encountered cloning there too, and (b) she then argues that clones and robots are scary because “we have met ourselves, and there is no reason to think anything made in our image would be better than us,” which doesn’t apply to virtual landscapes. Stevens also is a fan of sex workers and sex tosy: “by demanding nothing of the customer but legal tender, their so-called ‘inauthenticity’ allows the customer to be himself, to be authentic. He does not have to cyborg himself, try to trick the prostitute or phallus into fucking or loving him—he has paid with cash instead of his identity.” That seems to undervalue the role of power and the differences between using a sex toy and hiring a sex worker. Stevens doesn’t like faked orgasms, though; unlike other proxies for body parts or relationships, they aren’t honest about their limits/un-“real”ness. Fake orgasms are frauds. But she insists that, in the era of Trump, it’s important to remember that good v. bad, real v. fake, and what I like v. what I don’t like aren’t synonymous.… (lisätietoja)