HABBO (M)HOTEL - A Tale on Abstract Sex and Early Digital Girlhood Erotics

This paper proposes a media-archaeological exploration of early digital desire, focusing on the experiences of teenage girls and femme-identifying youth in the early 2000s Italian context. Situated against the patriarchal and hypersexualized media landscape of Berlusconi-era Italy, it examines how the domestic bedroom became a site for the rehearsal of intimacy through opensource chatrooms, social platforms, and early online gaming environments. By tracing the intersections of libidinal curiosity, cybernetics, and digital architecture, the study foregrounds how early online spaces enabled experimentation with desire, gender, and pleasure beyond the constraints of heteronormative, reproductive, and familial scripts. Drawing on autotheoretical reflection and dialogical memory-work with former users of Habbo Hotel, the essay investigates the ambivalent nature of these proto-immersive platforms: offering both refuge and risk, enabling playful, disembodied erotic exploration while potentially advancing patriarchal abstractions of femininity. By attending to these early experiences as historically and politically charged archives of deviation, fantasy, and technosexual relationality, the paper contributes to understanding the emergence of post-internet erotics and the complex inheritance of intergenerational sexual hauntologies.