“If the excitement over Internet-enabled adult gadgets at the recent Erotica Los Angeles trade show is any indication of what’s to come, virtual sex may have at last become reality… Using a two-way video, audio and text chat interface, expo attendees were invited to control Doc Johnson-branded iVibe pleasure devices being put to use by models at an undisclosed location, in various states of undress. ‘The device control works both ways — the person on each end controls the speed and rhythm of the device the other is using,’ explained High Joy President Amir Vatan, as one attendee cranked his remote partner’s iVibe to warp-speed intensity… Male users utilize a sleeve-like personal device, and the company plans to market a gadget known as the ‘iVibe Rabbit’ to female members. Vatan’s company also plans to sell celebrity-branded device ’scripts,’ something like sex-toy ring tones. Were porn star Jenna Jameson, for instance, to engage in a two-way High Joy sex-toy session, the sequence of commands she used could be recorded and replayed by fans who purchase both the device and the corresponding digital ’script.’” — Wired (US)

Wow. What can you say? Cool. Neat. Three cheers for Modern Progress.

Naysayers will of course have plenty to criticize. They will bemoan the loss of “real” touch, skin against skin. They will lament how a device such as this reduces sex to the genital region — you don’t get to explore the rest of your partner’s body, exult over the curve of a breast or the smell of an armpit. For a long time it has been disparaging to call sex “mechanical.” Isn’t this, the naysayers will say, less a form of virtual sex than of bad sex?

Maybe. Maybe the more that technology becomes sexual, the more that sex will become mechanical. But maybe not. Many critics of email and the web have argued that they depersonalize relationships, and yet if anything we’ve seen that they tend to supplement and augment relationships in unexpected ways. Surveys have found that families keep in better touch. (You wouldn’t bother to call Aunt Betsy, but you would swap the occasional email.) Internet dating and “social networking” (like Friendster) have given rise to new sorts of social permutations. It’s not all bad — so why think that these virtual sex machines will be all bad?

Inevitably there will be stories of lonely cybernerds who have virtual sex with somebody for a month and then murder him the moment they meet in reality. But stories such as this will be the exception and not the rule. For most people, virtual devices probably won’t supplant sexuality so much as augment it, provide another means of release. If anything, it won’t replace sex but masturbation, since people might not bother to wank in bed when they can log on for safe and easy virtual sex.

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