Projekt Melody: Virtual Women Come to Porn
There’s a live stream going on now on Chaturbate with a semi-human 3D rendered anime girl. An ever slightly muffled voice comes out from the character. It is unmistakably a woman’s voice, yet it gives off the aura of a teenager spouting memes whilst trying to not wake their parents. The chat bar is filled with comments over every slight error which strangely only enhances the fantasy, spurring on further donations and cries of erotic love. With pumping fists and hearts in their eyes, men offer money to reach out in the area of a virtual fantasy and participate with it. With each donation, a vibrator activates somewhere in the world where a woman with a VR headset pretending to be this character is masturbating. She is being artificially fucked by money. This is Projekt Melody in action. In the next moment, a 3D character just stands against a cyberpunk background swaying like a drunk and speaking to her audience in the style of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Projekt Melody isn’t simply some virtual camgirl. She is a full-blown brand. She live streams on Twitch. She has youtube videos and a burgeoning social media presence. In this area, Projekt Melody is not the first. The phenomenon can be seen as early as 2007 when the future virtual singer star of ‘Hatsune Miku’ was created. In 2010, she had the number one album in Japan. Later this year, she’s scheduled to be an act at Coachella 2020. In late 2016, a virtual character by the name of ‘Kizuna AI’ started a Youtube that now has over 2.7 Million subscribers. As of 2018, there were an estimated 4'000 Vtubers (Virtual Youtubers). The name is slightly misleading as it also includes virtual streamers, characters who live stream to audiences of thousands just talking about their lives. Unlike all these other virtual characters, there is very little is known about who is behind Projekt Melody beyond the group that designed the 3D model. It remains a mystery. It allows for a deeper fantasy.
The words typed with one hand that come from the Projekt Melody chatroom are not ones that communicate a brutish lust, but a yearning for erotic love. If people wanted that, they could just go and masturbate to some generic pornography. She’s the ‘not like the other girls’. She’s the cool girl. She’s an empty space with the aesthetic modifiers of a subculture. This isn’t unique to virtual characters. For as long as sex work has existed, it has served to provide a sexual fantasy for men that substitutes for a regular sexual relationship. The uniqueness of Projekt Melody is that it spells a new threshold being broken in sex work.
Projekt Melody is limited. Her aesthetic taste caters to anime-loving nerds and a growing horde of men who consider themselves ‘digisexual’. The virtual sex worker as a concept is only limited by technological advancement. Outside of full contact sex work, humanity is very much a detriment to sex work. A fantasy, by its nature, exists in the realm of the virtual. It is an unreal thing. Real humans only serve to clash with this fantasy. The terrifying emotional toll paid as a sex worker is to trample of on your humanity — to restrain it as much as possible — to embody an inhuman unreal fantasy. Each crack in the facade of this put-on delusion comes off as a blemish and a mistake. It makes the men who use their services feel angry and betrayed by this human woman behind the sex commodity for ruining their fantasy. For other men, it causes them to feel sad, pitying the woman who they were just exploiting for sexual pleasure. Neither pity nor anger is good for business as an online sex worker. The digital being doesn’t have to constrain itself at all. Its momentary cracks are seen as endearments. The imperfections, technical glitches that would otherwise show the human, only continue to show the production of a fantasy.
These virtual women offer a pure fantasy to their audiences. Unburdened by flesh and their subjectivity, they can cultivate their image more exactly to their audience’s desires. This has been even more so with Projekt Melody. Projekt Melody has yet to ever break character. Projekt Melody speaks according to its created backstory — an artificial intelligence that scanned too many pop-up ads and got ‘curious’ about sex. It speaks like this to the media, to its viewers, to everyone. In this sense, Projekt Melody shows herself as the first Post-Postmodern Pornstar. Her backstory is clearly nonsense, yet survives on the suspension of disbelief that is consciously upheld for a simulacrum of sincere intimacy. There are genuine feelings of intimacy from those who consume her work, although it is wrapped in ironic memes.
Projekt Melody is a strange glimpse into the developing relationship between sex and technology. The understandable fears of many feminists are that this will continue to trend in the direction of objectification towards women and their bodies. Projekt Melody hints at a subtly different future. It’s future where the spurious fantasies these men hold as a standard for women can be fulfilled by the virtual. Projekt Melody is not an object; Projekt Melody is a fantasy.
