Pluto in Aquarius: Netporn and the Death of Desire
Electricity, isolation, and the ambiguous future of sex.
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A LOT OF YOUNG FOLKS are showing little interest in having sex. In Japan, the libidinal drought is becoming a national calamity—the same thing in Europe (with the Pope begging couples to start rutting more regularly). Zoomers no longer visit nightclubs and bars as they did in years past to meet up with friends or to find a possible love interest. Two key trends for sex phobia are at play. But both are internet-related.
Charles Hugh Smith highlights a facet of the economic landscape that is rarely discussed—how society has lost respect for essential work in favor of digital visibility. As he notes:
“Validation, respect, and being recognized for one’s work are no longer available for those doing the work that keeps civilization functioning; recognition and admiration—and envy—are reserved for those with high visibility on social media or mass media.”
As he explains, more people are withdrawing from competition en masse. You could almost replace “keeps civilization functioning” with “keeps civilization fucking.” Competitive drive depends on the libido finding its way outward, into engagement with others. This relates not just to pursuing a vocational calling but also to how someone pursues romantic and sexual opportunities. "Libido" is simply another word for "life force."
The other matter is both implicit and obvious. And that’s the three-decade-long proliferation of netporn into everyday life. Exposure to online porn begins, for many, as early as pre-adolescence. If you’ve ever spent time on hetero-oriented porn sites, you’d understand why sex seems a puzzle for young people.1
Much of hetero porn is often violent and centered around the degradation of women. What young girl—assuming this is what awaits her in the dating domain—would want to enter that arena? And what young guy would want to emulate the abusive behavior to prove his machismo? The thinking seems to be: Best not to venture into the wild rapids of sex (and when you are just blooming into puberty, sex can have an ambivalent—but tsunami-like aura about it, no matter how intrusive the pulse of one’s hormones).
As soon as Neptune entered Aquarius in 1998, the worship-making mechanism of the collective clicked into all things technological. This, of course, is when the internet gained traction in our lives. And porn merchants became the first innovators to remake the transitional infrastructure of the internet. They pushed forward the technology to stream videos. They also revolutionized the money-slurping capacities of credit card processing services. Gone were the days of ‘brown paper wrapper’ porn. You were at home. You were bored or horny. You’d log onto your laptop and get off. That’s the whole thing. Well, sort of.
Each fixed sign in the Zodiac is associated with some facet of nature’s procreative drive. Taurus channels the libidinal energy that propels the species’ survival instinct. Leo reinvests the libido into defining one’s identity against the familial structure that once contained it. The sign also enacts progeny production as an extension of the self, as in “Me—my child.” Opposing but complementing Taurus, Scorpio is the emotional expression of the sexual drive that merges individuals together.
And Aquarius relates to the collective’s influence on the individual’s libido. Some examples: techno/science developments like artificial insemination, cloning, CRISPR sequencing, and robot fucking. As a fixed air sign, Aquarius fixates on images as an entryway into the abstract realm that the sign favors. Naturally, internet porn would fall under the sign’s rubric. Desires that throb beyond the consensus notion of procreative sex are also fitting. Aquarius pulls the intellect into the realm of various fetishes and kinks—more abstractions—including the power plays of BDSM.
Netporn is different from garden-variety porn, the sort you’d experience in print or VCR/DVD distribution. There is an implicit relationship at play between the porn provider, the screen, and the user’s eyeballs. This is an unconscious pact. But the Aquarian relational implication is there nonetheless (even if it’s simply a bot or algorithm in lieu of a ‘cam girl’). The first thing I did once webcams were built into desk and laptop computers was cover the camera’s lens with tape.
Lately, I’ve been contemplating how Pluto’s 25-year transit through Aquarius (that commenced on November 19th of last year) will transform not only pornography but humanity’s relationship to solitude and socialization. Here are some of my takeaways:
When Pluto last moved through Aquarius between 1777 and 1798, the transit coincided with the seminal electrical discoveries of the Aquarian physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta. Yep, that’s where the term ‘volt’ came from.
Electricity still remains a mystery that scientists can’t explain. We know how electricity is generated, but what is it exactly? The fact that we can manipulate a thing differs from having a fundamental understanding of what precisely the thing is.
It’s interesting that the glyph for Aquarius, often interpreted as waves of water, actually—and more fittingly—represents the positive and negative currents of the electrical charge.
Electricity completely overhauled our species’ relationship with the Earth and each other. Electronic technology, as Marshall McLuhan put it, extended, or set outside ourselves, a live model of the human body’s central nervous system. This ‘global’ nervous system, of which the internet is a manifestation, has generated the weird effect of alienating everyone into their own solitude. Without belaboring the cliche, you see this everywhere where people are unable to engage with their environment because they are constantly staring at their phone.
Pornography excites or triggers the sexual response. But it doesn’t beget marriage or offspring. This is why most religions condemn porn. “Pornography,” as culture critic Camille Paglia puts it, “shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.” Or, you could say, stripped of the socializing aspect that romance is a central component of.
As an air sign ruled by Saturn and Uranus, emotions and sentimentality for Aquarius are secondary to ideas and laws. The sign’s detached, scientific bent is strong, as is its analytical ability. The sign doesn’t necessarily lack passion, but its relationship to sensuality is another matter. Imagine what it must feel like, somatically, to have sex with a robot.
Aquarius’ obsession with knowledge is a symptom of the libido’s investment in the intellect. But with this fixation comes a sometimes unsettling impersonality. We’re now posed on the lip where this split between the personal and impersonal is reconfiguring in startling ways. And we hear about it daily with the technocrat’s ongoing obsession with AI.
Remember in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, when HAL is slowly disassembled by Dave, the spacecraft’s lead scientist? With each interruption to its circuitry, the humongous computer moans, “Stop. Don’t do that, Dave. I can feel myself fading.” What made that scene so unnerving was HAL’s reference to feelings. 2001: A Space Odyssey imparted a disturbing prophecy, namely the horrors that might occur when sentient qualities are wed to computers.
Pluto’s twenty-five-year transit through Aquarius will exaggerate the disparity between emotion and technology and the efforts to make the gap seem nonexistent. The more we are forced to consider (and live with) machines as human stand-ins, the more the allure will wane.
Animatronic sex is a natural extension of the autoerotic realm of netporn. But the world of robots is also a soul-killing dead end. Once the novelty of erotically bonding with a machine wanes, what remains will be a stark confrontation with our inherent aloneness and the distancing from each other that technology has fostered.
Our species was designed to capitalize on the pleasurable sensations associated with sex. The hunt for sex compels people to leave their homes searching for mates. We go to parties and church and other social engagements to socialize, but more explicitly, we are there to find a partner.
Pluto’s transit through Aquarius will disrupt the culture’s current fascination with the puerile sci-fi promises made by Big Tech. Also impacted will be the monolithic online porn purveyors as they attempt to promote more sophisticated forms of autoeroticism. And the con seems poised to collapse. Dane Rudhyar writes of Pluto’s disintegrating effect:2
“Pluto atomizes all that has solid substance, reducing every concept and feeling-experience to its barest essentials—and such a process of ‘reduction’ can lead the mind to a state in which everything appears to be inherently absurd and utterly hollow. Nevertheless, it is a state of chaos out of which a new world may be born.”
Marshall McLuhan also said of electricity that instead of centralizing, the energy decentralizes. And this is what we have with four monstrous corporations—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—refashioning our world. (Most netporn runs from Amazon’s cloud services, btw). We invite these corporations into the most intimate areas of our lives. But as tech critic Scott Galloway asks, “Are these entities the Four Horsemen of god, love, sex, and consumption? Or are they the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”
Human beings can only take so much isolation. Our sex drive, as our most intimate bonding agent, needs to flow beyond the confines of the onanistic self. Sex not only propagates the species, but it also introduces us to the ‘mystery’ of the other. It is through our relationships that we are reminded of our commonality. Of our humanity. And of our divinity.
I hope that the long Pluto transit through Aquarius will reintroduce culture to the ‘erotics of knowing.’ A form of contemplation that reunites us—consciously—with our sexuality. I suppose something like the ancient art of tantra is another way of considering this rewiring of the libidinal. But without the religious or spiritual connotations.
Aquarius is a sign of science in that the inquirer wants to know and experience reality empirically—firsthand. And not through systems of faith or belief. And not through the mechanisms of a robot or porn site.
Love,
PS: I’m a proponent of limited government oversight of pornography, erotica, sex work, birth control, and abortion. Gene splicing—and not the invasion of AI—is a more alarming predicament for society and the environment. In a free world, adults (and their imagination) should have the option to choose how they express or enhance their sex lives, including the unintended consequences of non-nuclear family sex (i.e., unwanted pregnancies, etc.). I don’t think porn should be present in the town square or public space that we all partake of. And it’s to this point that online porn becomes a thorn. Indeed, adults should have access to net porn, but kids as young as, say, five years old. Uhm, no.
Opening collage by FW, elements from vintage adult magazine advertisement and creencap from YouTube, © 2026 Nightcharm, Inc.
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Not that gay male porn doesn’t have its share of distortion, but at least there isn’t the stark power disparity that exists within straight porn.
Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Transformation: A Multilevel Approach, Quest Books, © 1980