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Personal imagination is unlimited: in our own minds we can experience the love of the century or live out the most private and carefully guarded of fantasies. The Marquis de Sade holds the imagination as the center of all joy: �Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.� The Marquis de Sade's own fantasies as chronicled in his often talked about, rarely read works reveal a man whose dreams were contained in a world not ready for them: as Georges Bataille writes of the imprisoned de Sade, confined in the physical prison that dominated thirty years of his life: "he peopled his solitude with innumerable dreams: dreams of terrible screams and bloodied bodies" (111). The Marquis makes his mark on virtual space, and some of those dreams become virtually reality in the dungeons and dark corners of the worlds. But further still virtual space offers a gateway into the collective fantasies of a species, and in that space there is the opportunity for every kind of encounter. The reality on the other side of the screen need not interfere with the fantasy: �So what if you�re talking to a man, not a woman? For straight men, there�s the fact that you�re, well, straight. But you're not having sex with the person behind the screen, you're having sex with an online persona. When you boil it down, all cybersex is one big mutual fantasy. Some of the best online sex I�ve ever had was with an American GI--a real man�s man--pretending to be a female submissive. It�s about imagination. So if you�re having a good time, you might as well just kick back and enjoy it�even if it means blocking out thoughts of the-penis-that-could-be, thousands of miles away� (Ruberg Cybersex). When compared to the risks of taking the physical body into a similar world of fantasy and desire, perhaps the �healthy� choice for the separated mind and body is in indulging the family. The virtual space is, for the moment, free of many of the restraints placed upon us both by others and by ourselves: �Second Life represents an escape from repression and conventional rules.... Here you can be what you secretly wish to be, but normally wouldn't dare� (Ruberg Cyberporn). The imagination is at the heart of virtual eroticism: if the simulation in these worlds became more real, what would be left to distinguish it from the real world? The future of pornography may not be the futuristic visions of perfect replication of real experience, the type of scenario that O'Toole describes in a rising if perhaps unappealing vision: "Visions of a disincarnate sexual future sex find flesh-and-sense fetishists wondering exactly how machines, cables and hard drives are ever going to replicate the full sensual experience, the perceptual nuances of sight, smell, touch, the whole sophisticated real-sex package that comes when people make a connection in non-digital space" (295). But replication is not the point: why bring physical reality to a mental fantasy? As the Marquis de Sade advised many years before such things were possible: "The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?�
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