A laptop, Skype, and teledildonics. The new sexual revolution is already transmitting its way through sensors into your home. But will it devolve the way we connect to each other?
It was always going to go one of two ways with robots. Either they’d outgrow us, slip out of our control and begin their inevitable march to world domination. Or, better, we’d start to fuck, from then on living together in harmony, blissfully bleeping our days away until the bottom dropped out of human society and, childless, we fizzled our way towards extinction. Either way, the robots win.
But, as time went on, neither seemed to happen. The terminator scenario lost out to the infinitely more comforting reality of intelligent industry and self steering vacuum cleaners, while however hard the sex industry tried, staring into the cold, dead eyes of an automated doll as it vibrated underneath you never took off with any but the most determined onanists. For most of us, sex with fellow human beings remained option number one, the weird world of sex toys and internet porn on hold as a handy backup.
As it turned out, instead of us resisting the limited lure of tech-sex the industry was just yet to find out what we really wanted; to fuck each other, but through computers. Now it knows, and the cybersex industry is one of the fastest growing online markets in the world, evolving at double speed to make up for all those lost years.
For many, the thought of cybersex still conjures up images of half dressed 30 somethings standing awkwardly in front of Skype, guardedly wanking while a blurred figure shouts out orders from the screen. These people aren’t looking hard enough. For one, anyone serious about their cybersex has by now invested in some form of teledildonics- a device that synchronizes in real-time with whatever is being viewed onscreen and renders one handed typing firmly as a thing of the past. Also, instead of shouting orders, your partner—whoever they may be—can now ‘stimulate a sensor covered rod’ to transmit signals directly to your teledildo. For anyone still struggling with the Skype concept, what this means is that you can get a blowjob from a thousand miles away.
Meanwhile, for those who like their partners a little less human and their courtships a little more ‘command and conquer’, the old world of virtual role player games has also been gearing itself up of late. People have been having virtual sex with anything from octopi to flesh eating Thatcher lookalikes for years, but now this ethereal orgy is one step closer to reality with the creation of machines like the Xbox Kinect which allow you to physically touch your avatars and have them respond in kind.
How pleasurable any of this can actually be seems questionable, but sales and statistics suggest that for millions, cybersex offers a preferable alternative to the tried and tested skin against skin format and, as such, the number of regular users is rapidly increasing. Sex addiction expert Robert Weiss puts it down to evolution. ‘Cultural evolution is driven by technology, and sex is a part that’ he says. ‘Just as my generation’s parents worried we would be destroyed by disease and social instability bought on by the 60s sexual revolution, today we worry about technology. That doesn’t mean it’s bad necessarily, just that people react against things they don’t know.’
In reality, it was always going to come to this. The history of sex toys reads almost verbatim like the history of technological innovation. From 3000 year old bronze dildos through to steam powered vibrators, each technological milestone bought not only cultural and economic change but also new ways to get ourselves off.
According to Weiss, this is only natural. ‘Sex is a nuero-biological function driven by the pleasure centre of the brain’ he explains. ‘As far as the brain is concerned, it makes no difference how we activate this function, whether it is through sex toys, porn or intercourse.’ Why then, as the internet offers ever more intricate means of turning us on, would anyone bother with the largely terrifying process of going out and trying to get laid?
The Japanese, apparently, have been wondering this for years. A government study, carried out in 2010 in response to Japan’s plummeting birth rate, revealed that the number of males between 16-19 who had no interest in or an outright aversion to real world sex had doubled since 2008, rising to an astonishing 36.1%. Why? The most popular answers were that real sex is ‘a bother’ and ‘not as exciting’ as what can be found online. In the west, cybersex is yet to become this mainstream, still carried out largely in secret and under anonymity. But the numbers are still there; 25% of all search engine terms are pornographic, 42.7% of internet users use porn, and between 6 and 7% of us, male and female, are hooked on cybersex.
An oft repeated line in the world of sex addiction treatment is that ‘cyber sex is like crack cocaine to a sex addict’; once in, there’s no going back. Daniel Gerrard at addictionhelper.com says that of the thousands of sex addicts they see each year, the majority now cite cybersex as their main problem. Many of them, he says, are still virgins—in the terrestrial sense—while most would never consider seeing a prostitute or even going to a strip club. ‘Why would they bother?’ he wonders. ‘The internet provides a world where fantasy reigns supreme and consequences seem non-existent—all from your smart phone. It’s an addict’s paradise.’
This is not to say that everyone who dabbles in a bit of online porn is in risk of losing their life to addiction. There are many for whom cybersex can be a liberating experience, allowing otherwise repressed sexual desires to be acted out. For others it simply solves the problem of distance; couples separated by work can still get off with each other over the airwaves. But, like most the good things in life, it can be a form of entertainment or a form of escape, and it is the latter that is the worry. As cybersex becomes more common, it is feared that users will become increasingly emotionally detached and disillusioned with the real world, while relying ever more on the internet for comfort. If impotence is anything to go by, it’s already happening. According to the Sexual Recovery Institute, those who spend too much time watching porn are considerably less likely to be able to get it up in the bedroom. Back in reality, our fellow humans just don’t cut it anymore.
Luckily, for most of us there is still more to sex than a downloadable dopamine fix. Touch, smell, taste- everything from the first tentative pecks through to post coital fanny farts are what elevate sex from a simple rush to the defining feature of love. But, according to Weiss, even this will soon be possible through the internet. ‘In ten years we’ll have body suits where I’ll move my hand and you’ll feel it, I’ll breath and you’ll feel warm air on your neck.’ What this means for sex seems clear, but what it would mean for love we’ll have to wait and see.
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Image Credit: je@n
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