If the Marquis de Sade had encountered virtual reality pornography, he would not have understood it as technology, but as a perfected form of enclosure.
Not an evolution of the image.
But the removal of everything that is not image.
What he would have noticed first would not be the content, but the architecture: the fact that the world disappears without residue. No corner of a room, no dust in the light, no wall reminding you of an outside. Only an enveloping surface that never breaks.
That is what makes it unsettling.
Not explicitness.
But continuity.
For a long time I thought Sade was about excess.
Then I realized it was something else.
The disappearance of distance.
In VR, that distance is already gone from the start.
No stage.
No observer.
Only immersion.
And yet that immersion does not liberate. It aligns.
The body does not move toward anything.
It is held.
As if stillness had been decided as a higher form of participation.
The headset is heavy.
Not as a device.
But as a decision made elsewhere.
A slow discomfort begins there, difficult to name.
Because desire no longer appears as pursuit, but as environment.
I am not going toward anything.
I am inside something that is already happening.
And this is what Sade would have recognized immediately: not transgression, but the removal of pause.
In his world, there was still narrative. Still structure of act. Even excess required sequence.
Here, it does not.
Here everything happens as if it had already happened before being seen.
That changes something deeper than morality.
It changes the sensation of control.
Sometimes I notice myself moving my neck slightly.
Not to look at anything.
But to check that there is still an outside.
That the room is still there.
That the body has not been fully absorbed into continuity.
The problem is not what is seen.
It is that there is no place where seeing stops.
And the longer the headset stays on, the less clear it becomes when exactly I stopped being outside.
If the Marquis de Sade were to enter a virtual reality dungeon, he would not perceive it as erotic fantasy, but as a purification of space itself.
A place where architecture no longer needs to justify its cruelty because it has been dematerialized.
No stone, no iron, no real dampness.
Only texture.
Pure surface.
Continuity of stimulus.
What Sade would recognize first is not pain, but the organization of control.
Because in VR, the dungeon does not contain bodies: it contains perception.
And that makes it more precise.
More obedient.
More clean.
In a physical dungeon, there is always residue: smell, dust, mechanical failure, the resistance of matter.
In the virtual one, that residue disappears.
Everything works.
Everything responds.
Everything is designed to never fail.
And that is where the unsettling part begins.
Because in Sade, excess still had friction.
There was interruption, body, accident.
Here there is none.
Here violence—if it can still be called that—does not interrupt anything. It only confirms the system.
It is a dungeon without wear.
Without history.
Without time.
Only a sustained present that does not crack.
I imagine Sade walking through it without touching anything, observing how every element responds even before it is desired.
A door opening without weight.
A chain falling without real sound.
A body reacting without matter.
There would be no surprise.
Only a cold annotation in the gaze.
Because what would truly be Sadean is not the scene, but the absence of escape within the scene.
The fact that everything is so perfectly built that it no longer needs explanation.
And perhaps that is where the discomfort would arise.
Not in suffering.
But in the perfection of a system that no longer needs to justify it.
Then, at some point, Sade would stop thinking of the dungeon as a place.
He would begin to think of it as an interface.
A space where will is no longer imposed through force, but through continuous design.
And maybe the last thing he would notice would not be a scene.
But something much simpler.
The absence of exit as the final form of architecture.
I have to move my neck I am not moving it I should the base of the skull a porous alabaster surface the taste of quicklime filling the glottis I should…
