Geoperversion
J.G. Ballard, who recently passed away, once said that “sex times technology equals the future.” It’s a prescient statement, with perhaps one qualification: the future is now. Browsing through the PervScan archives, you can’t help but be amazed by the number of stories concerning the influence of technology on sexual behavior. There are obvious phenomena, like the rise of net porn, the proliferation of child pornography, and the boom in online prostitution. But there are also less obvious ones — sexting, cybervigilantism, flash mob rape, and many others. One story even looked at the claim that online pornography constitutes a form of artificial intelligence. Impressive stuff.
Given the increasing use of “location-aware” mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone, it is difficult not to wonder if we are about to see technology influence sexuality in yet another way. For example, a science writer recently coined the term “geoshagging“:
Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers (’muggles’, in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they’re looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish your coordinates online and wait for someone to come along and sweep you off your feet. Gender roles and sexual mores being what they are, I never thought it likely that there could be hetero geocruising. For casual sex with women in western society, you need to buy strange ladies drinks in bars into the wee hours unless you’re willing to frequent prostitutes. Skulking around in parks with your GPS is fun, but let’s face it, it will rarely get a straight male laid. Now though, I find … that ‘geoshagging’ has entered the online vocabulary, referring to ‘location-aware mobile computing’ when it is used to set up such brief liaisons.
A skeptical commenter says that this “geoshagging” business will amount to nothing more than a previous fad called “toothing,” which involved random sexual encounters arranged via Bluetooth devices. The cynicism is understandable. Will people engage in any more or less casual sex simply because they have another means to arrange it? Only time will tell.
However, location-based mobile computing need not affect only promiscuity. There are other sorts — deviant sorts — of sexual behavior that may also be transformed. What if there arises an entire new genre of geoperversions? For example, imagine a pervert who develops a fetish for having sex with people at a certain intersection of longitude and latitude. Or perhaps bestialists could put mobile technology to good use. You know how sometimes wild animals are tagged so that their movements can be studied? Imagine bestialists who hunt down a wild animal, commit an unspeakable act on it, then tag it so that they can have the pleasure of hunting it down again someday…
If all that sounds insane, then perhaps it is time to offer an update to the Ballardian formula: perversion times technology equals the unimaginable.
All comments become the property of PervScan. You must use an email address to post a comment. However, PervScan disallows email addresses in the text of comments.
Tits Tits Tits