Our discussion on the next 20 years of technology wouldn't be complete without a discussion of virtual sex. Will broadband Net access, new tech gear, or advances in 3-D virtual reality alter our sex lives? Find out as we explore the meaning of sex in a high-tech age.
People often sexualize technology, but technology, in turn, has given people creative license when with their sexuality. Cameras were quickly used for erotic photography, moving pictures soon became X-rated films, and with the advent of the videocassette came the booming adult entertainment industry. Enter the PC and the Internet, which completely transformed our real-time sexual interactions as well as how and where we view erotica.
Many futurists predict that as virtual reality becomes more realistic and ubiquitous, real experiences will increasingly be replaced by simulated experiences, including sex. Of the nearly 60 million Internet users, the National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity estimates that 2 million are sexually addicted Internet users, both in and out of recovery. They log on each day to participate in erotic chat-room discussions or to engage in cybersex-a phenomenon that has led to psychological studies on online sexual behavior and heated debates about whether or not sexual online correspondence is infidelity.
But what exactly is cybersex? According to a paper written by Robin B. Hamman, editor of London-based Cybersociology Magazine, cybersex can take on different forms. For example, cybersex in online chat rooms often refers to computer-mediated, interactive sexual story telling (in real time). There is also virtual-reality cybersex, where people enter a virtual environment to interact with others by wearing special goggles and movement-sensitive sensors. Similarly, multiple user domains (MUDs) are used as virtual places where characters, objects, rooms, and actions are all created in text. MUD users often have cybersex in much the same way as Internet Relay Chat and chat room users do. They tell each other sexual stories.
Finally, there is an emerging area called cyberdildonics, which relates to interactive gear and toys that can enhance the online cybersex experience with actual physical sensations. Vivid Entertainment, the world's biggest producer of adult films, for example, has been experimenting with cyberdildonics. Proud of its reputation as a company that's been on the frontline of technology, it has a functioning $200 Cyber Sex Suit a neoprene bodysuit with 36 electronic sensors in the chest, inner thighs, and other erogenous zones that transmit heat, cold, and vibrations. A person can send a signal to a DVD player via a remote, which then goes over the Internet, into the wearer's computer, and to the suit via a connector. Vivid Entertainment's lawyers, however, fear that someone might have a heart attack while wearing the suit, so the company has put it on the shelf for the near future.
But what really makes cybersex so appealing? Experts cite safety, anonymity, convenience, affordability, and escape as the five top reasons. Pornography used to require risks: a trip to the seedy movie theater or the scrutiny of a video-store clerk. Physical encounters require more serious risks, including disease. Virtual sex poses none of these problems.
Violation of privacy and other potentially threatening situations aside, online encounters give the feeling of anonymity-although we all know that we can be tracked. And anonymity can lead to wild experimentation. If a woman wants to act like a dominatrix, she can. If she's always wanted to seduce the teenager that mows the lawn, she can try it online. If a man has latent homosexual desires, he can test-drive the situation.
Escape may be the biggest factor of all. Someone once said that sex is 90 percent fantasy and 10 percent physical. So too, is virtual sex. In a virtual world, you have no bills, no lame job, and no annoying live-in lover who won't take out the trash. That's a great fantasy right there. But in a virtual world, you can have the body and the personality you want. You can have the gender you want. You can act just about any way you want.
Ultimately, what does this mean for our intimate relationships? We know one thing for sure: The phenomenon of cybersex is unleashing a new kind of addict. The Center for Online Addiction in Branford, Pennsylvania, estimates that 75 percent of its online-addiction cases are attributed to cybersex. And these people are not known perverts. In her new book, Tangled in the Web: Understanding Cybersex from Fantasy to Addiction, Dr. Kimberly Young (CEO of the Center for Online Addiction) finds that the majority is middle-aged men with good jobs, wives, and families-and no prior sexual-addiction history of any kind.
Is cybersex cheating? Dr. Young puts it this way: "All morals aside, if the actions result in hiding and lying, and it takes away from the primary relationship, then it's cheating." The Catholic church has always been clear on what constitutes adultery: St. Augustine writes in De Sermone Domini in Monte that the desire to look on a woman and to lust after her is a sin-a doubly bad sin because it involves both the mind and the body. To remove all murkiness, the church ruled recently that carnal e-mail and illicit online relationships are sins. "Virtual reality can be just as much a vice as a reality made up of facts and actions," said Reverend Antino Sciortino, editor of Famiglia Cristiana magazine.
Most mates find online experimentation by their loved ones very disturbing. In her landmark book Life on Screen, Sherry Turkle, professor of sociology of science at MIT, interviewed a man who had recently broken up with his girlfriend, because she had cybersex with another woman. To "Rudy," virtual reality made it too easy for his girlfriend to explore her possible lesbian leanings and too easy to bypass the social implications of her actions. "If she explored in real life, well, it would have been hard on me, but it would have been hard for her. If she really wanted to do it, she would do it, but it would have meant her going out and doing it."
Other couples are dismayed by the false sense of intimacy their partners are experiencing with online acquaintances. Another one of Dr. Turkle's interviewees puts it this way: "In some ways, I'd have an easier time understanding why he would want to have an affair in real life. At least there I could say to myself, 'Well, it's for somebody with a better body, or just for the novelty.' But he's saying that he wants that feeling of intimacy with someone else the "just talk" part of an encounter with a woman and to me that comes close to what is most important about sex."
There's another kind of cybersex addict with a more disturbing profile: teenagers. Dr. Young describes one 16-year-old patient. "In three months, he had downloaded 8,000 images, which were carefully categorized by topic, such as bestiality." Or another patient, a 15 year-old girl, was seeking out 40-year-old men in chat rooms with whom to have cybersex. Her response to her mom's distress was the classic, "Oh, Mom! Everyone's doing it."
If this is how today's teenagers are having their first-and subsequent-sexual experiences, what does this do to them emotionally? What does this mean for their sexual futures? "It alters their arousal templates. Kids get acclimated very quickly," says Dr. Young. In other words, if Junior is into nasty, kinky sex via pictures or chat rooms, he might not be interested in sex with a real person, or he's going to want that person to do things they might not be comfortable with. "It's Clockwork Orange in reverse: It's teaching them to like this stuff," says Dr. Young.
The online sex industry may get bigger; it already makes $1 billion a year, according to the popular guess. To keep on making bank, the major porn firms are anxiously waiting-and eagerly pursuing-beefier bandwidth. There are on-going relationships with cable providers, but no one is interested in naming names, for obvious reasons. A fat pipe would enable porn's wildest dream: video on demand (VOD). Talk about convenient-no more smirking video-store clerks.
And maybe the Cyber Sex Suit will work its way out of its legal morass. Does Jim Monroe, vice president of Vivid Interactive, want to see everyone in the world suited up? "I want them to do what makes them happy. That's what this country is all about," says Monroe.
Or maybe physical sex will become cool again, because it's so retro. As Miles Monroe says in Woody Allen's Sleeper about the Orgasmatron: "Two minutes in bed with me and you'll sell that thing for scrap metal."