Reference no: EM133319458

Question: What are some of the positive and negative aspects of sex online, remote sex, virtual sex and the other technological extensions of sex now and in the future? discuss both positive and negative aspects and potentialities.The positives include the ones mentioned by Ross and otherwise scattered through the lesson. The negatives are mentioned throughout, but don't neglect the ones that are focused around the "politics" of heterosexualit?

Sex is one area in which most people still feel that the real thing is better than the virtual. But is there actually something to be said for electronically mediated eroticism and sexuality? In the 21st century, there have been many arguments for the positives, some of which are parallel to the other ideas about mediated socializing we have been looking at. All the way back in 2005, Michael W. Ross took us through several pluses of online eroticism, and even virtual sex, some of which you may never have considered. Let's start by looking at some of the positives of "virtual sex" discussed by Ross.

Ross starts with the first and probably most compelling way that technology has arguably made sex easier: hooking up with someone for embodied sex. The Internet has made it immensely easier to find compatible partners, whether they be consensual ones or hired sex workers, for both online encounters and real embodied sex. A cornucopia of platforms allow you access to hundreds more potential partners than any bar, club, party, or even escort service could, and let you swipe through these potential partners for the best complement to your own sexual profile. Once you've found someone, you can use technology to explore your erotic potential with them before actually meeting them in the flesh - through texting, images, video chat, or even virtual avatar encounters of various kinds.

You might personally feel that your own current sexual proclivities are mainstream enough that you would not need the Internet to help you find a match, but imagine you are a lesbian living in a small town in Northern Ontario. Your local options for satisfying sexual encounters might be unclear or extremely limited.

As a member of another marginalized group now, I can also say that the older you get the harder it is to find compatible available partners of any kind without tools like we now have online. Once you leave school and people start coupling up, it can be more and more challenging to find relationships in the old fashioned ways. I personally have met a number of people through online dating, and found my last two (and longest lasting) partners that way. These weren't just for hookups, but you might be surprised to learn that there are actually lots of older women out there who are mainly looking for sex! I tend to think the two long-term relationships I found online both had more going for them (the second one is still going) than the relationships that arose organically earlier in my life. If you know who you are, what you want, and what you have to offer, and are willing to be honest about these things, I'm convinced that the Internet can generally find you a better match - romantic, erotic, sexual - than Fate or Chance.

Presumably some of you know more than I do bout the convenience of purely sexual hookups. And if all one is looking for is sex, the Internet can apparently provide fast and affordable encounters online or effective methods of finding paid or voluntary real-world sex.

So now you've found someone. But what about actually being sexual over electronic media? Sexting, video chat, avatar sex, and remote sex using haptic devices?

Although mediated virtual sex using a computer, tablet, or phone may be much less physically engaging than live embodied sex, Ross proposed that these forms of satisfaction are at least less lonely than masturbation. Two lovers sexting each other to ecstasy, Skype video play when your partner is stuck overseas for a year, or even someone paying to watch a sex worker strip online while talking to her through chat - all of these are arguably more "social" and closer to real human interaction than solitary self-pleasuring to one's own fantasy or a canned porn video or VR environment product.

For some people, sex online, perhaps in a chatroom or virtual reality world like Second Life or through the use of technological add-ons, may be better than anything they are likely to experience in the real world. Those with social anxiety, some people who are physically disabled, those with extremely rare kinks, and various other people may be able to experience aspects of sexual intimacy, power, or pleasure virtually or through prostheses that they cannot experience easily or at all in real life.

"Cybersex," it has been argued, is something between fantasy and action: more active and interactive than individual daydreaming, but in many cases actually also more imaginative than immediate bodily sex. This is another point to which we will return: that cybersex could be a more spiritual or creative or unhindered expression of one's sexuality than bodily sex sometimes is, as we saw can be the case for some people in gaming environments and virtual worlds. Some people like to quote the (cynical?) quip that sex is really just "fiction and friction." Sex online can give free rein to the "fiction" part and is getting better all the time at transmitting some "friction" too. More on this in a moment.

Chat rooms and VR environments let you try out sexual milieus or lurk in them and pick up the manners and so forth. I usually use the example here of the gay person in the small town again. Where is this person going to "learn the ropes" of being gay? There are books and films, of course, lots more all the time; but the ability to enter an online "gay bar," watch, listen and interact could be a powerful bonus in developing and becoming more comfortable in one's sexuality. Anyone whose sexuality exceeds the most pedestrian of heterosexual "normalcies" could benefit from the opportunities to explore their sexualities with like-minded people in a relatively safe and discreet online venue.

As a last bonus for the more adventurous individual, Ross points out how online sex can encourage the development of multiple sexual personalities. Following on from the previous point, the chance to experiment with sexual roles and scenarios in a comparatively risk-free environment may encourage all of us to "think outside of the box" and grow sexually (and generally) as human beings. As with the multiple social identities talked about in the previous lesson, some people may welcome and embrace the opportunity to be more than a single sexual stereotype instead engage in multiple online experiments and renditions of their various sexualities.

Ross adds one final big bonus to the proliferation of sexuality online, one that is important to him as a sociologist and may seem a bit disturbing to the rest of us: online sexual activity could provide an unprecedented amount of data and a wealth of sexual "scripts" for sexologists to study and analyze in their attempts to comprehend the full and true nature of human sexuality! More recent studies point to the power of "Big Data" to give us a more nuanced, diverse, and honest picture of ourselves as sexual beings.

Sex play online

Both men and women use the internet for love and sexual purposes and usage patterns can be related to both gender and age. For the majority, using the Internet for these purposes is perceived as having positive outcomes while for a minority it may become problematic. The anonymity on the internet is a major factor contributing to make it a popular venue for love and sexual activities; not only because of the safety and security it provides by keeping others at a distance while being intimate, but also because it allows people to engage in activities that would be difficult or impossible to engage in offline.
Kristian Daneback, Love and Sexuality on the Internet

Broadly speaking, sex online today can be divided into activities freely engaged in by adults consensually without payment and those where one person pays for some kind of sex-related activity. New forms of sex work that fall between the categories of pornography and prostitution, such as performing on a web cam, could perhaps be called "interactive pornography" rather than "sex" or even "prostitution." But to the extent that pornography tends to be one-way, passive, and consumer-driven, it may not be accurate to use this term too loosely. Paid interactive entertainment like camgirls is presumably similar to stipping and lapdances - somewhere between porn and performance. (I don't personally have experience of interactive camgirls and have never even been to a strip club, but I assume it makes sense to think of this as "interactive entertainment" rather than sex .)

Let's look first at some online sexual activities that are consensual, usually unpaid, and two-way. Should they be considered "sex," or something like it? Sexting is perhaps the most obvious and basic and widespread. This is erotic chat via SMS, DMs, or an instant messaging program. Many couples engage in this practice. Singles may also go online to engage in text chat of a sexual kind with strangers or at least with people whom they have never actually met in person. The activity allows couples to explore sexual possibilities and stories in a way that is not as immediate and potentially not as threatening as actually acting them out would be, and to keep erotic energy between them mobilized even when they cannot be physically together. Those who engage in the activity with people they don't know in person can explore sexual roles and scenarios in a safe, if admittedly not entirely "real" and not physically interactive, way.

Fans of eroticized "textual intercourse" point to the important ways in which this sort of "spiritualizes" sex and makes for more erotic activity which, however virtual, is in certain important ways actually likely to be more "real" (authentic) than some physical sexual encounters are. This way of thinking should be familiar to those who have been following the arguments about how people who play MMORPGs may actually be more fully themselves in their online avatars. One of the side effects of this seemingly flat and cerebral kind of eroticism in online text chat is, according to many advocates, a deeper sense of erotic intimacy and connection!

The intemet can provide an opportunity for the participant to create his own [erotic truth], interactively, and to imbue it with intimacy, and make it an extension of a romantic or sexual fantasy. Thus, the text can become a vehicle for intimacy "not so much because the loved one is idealized-although this is part of the story-but because it presumes a psychic communication, a meeting of souls which is reparative in character" (Giddens, p. 45).

At present, a large number of online erotic encounters still occur through the medium of reading and writing. Even virtual hookups, such as those that can occur within Second Life or online game environments, are often largely conveyed via text chat. As such environments become more sexually "realistic," with the idea of third-party "plugins" taking on startling new meanings, the romantic or erotic (imaginary and self-expressive) aspect of that virtual eroticism wanes, at least according to some critics. In the "noughties," blogger Kate Amdahl (2006) took us through the finer points of buying yourself a penis in Second Life ("a penis the size of a baseball bat is not universally sexy, but a penis that matches your skin color is usually appreciated" [Amdahl 2006]). But other experts in this field have warned that the more focused on the objective qualities of the virtual body the sexual encounter becomes, the less interesting it tends to be:

There's a basic confusion about cybersex that Xcite [the main company providing sex add-ons in SL] helps to feed. Despite what a lot of people think, cybering is not porn; it's a dialogue between two eager minds. In a nutshell, it's creative writing with more than one author. But Xcite has brought a pervasive air of porn to sex in SL, and many residents are letting that become a substitute for quality cybersex. (Welles 2007)

Porn is largely about objectification, whereas online eroticism can be a kind of "conversation" (a word that long ago was used for sexual intercourse, just as the word "intercourse" used to be used to refer to conversation!). Many researchers have found that the fact that much online socializing in general requires that one read and write (good old print culture stuff!) leads to deeper, more thoughtful, more "spiritual," and ultimately more authentic and intimate interaction - and all this can be a big turn-on. So in a future where virtual physical presence (virtual reality involving all five senses) is likely to take the place of our text-based exchanges, will we be more or less "into" our encounters? In terms of our thoughts and imaginations, perhaps less! Ironically, the body can put limitations on sexual creativity, especially if one is focused on objectifying it.

But surely touch is necessary for anything we are going to call sex? Can the most intimate of touching be mediated by electronics? Well, it seems that it can! There are indeed technologies that provide prosthetic physical contact over the Internet. Originally dubbed "teledildonics," but now often referred to as "remote sex toys" or "remote sex tools," these technologies aim to make it possible to feel intimate contact with a partner over a network. (These are a subcategory of the larger family of haptic technologies, devices and protocols designed to communicate touch across a network.)

These might initially sound outrageous or creepy to some of you, but if we think of these tools being used by a married couple to continue (and indeed expand on) their sexual intimacy when they cannot be in the same city, for example, it's hard to see what the down sides of such technology would be. Like "video sex" via Skype and similar tools couples use today, these would allow us to feel more together when we are apart.

As I've mentioned a few times, on the whole our current versions of virtual reality fool only two of our senses: vision and hearing. Many speculate that when versions of virtual reality are perfected to address all five of our senses, we will be able to have fully embodied virtual experiences, including technologically mediated experiences of sex. Some people are blazing those trails now. Often this is for the purpose of porn or prostitution, but there's no reason the same technologies couldn't allow you to get it on with a partner you know and love when you are separated physically.

Presumably, in the near future couples (or even groups!) will not even have to live in the same city to share fully intimate physical lives; at night they will be able to get themselves into some sort of body suit or virtual contraption and snuggle on the couch "together" - or whatever activity takes their fancy. Many long-distance lovers already fall asleep together with Skype or FaceTime on. A new innovation is the "connected pillow," such as the product PillowTalk, which lets you hear and feel your partner's heartbeat across the Internet. There are apps that let you kiss, and there are now more and more genitally oriented devices.

Many fans of VR now take it for granted that soon almost everyone who is looking for a real-life partner with find these people online and may get to know them quite well, intimately, through immersive VR experiences before ever meeting them in the flesh. And perhaps never meeting them in the flesh at all, but engaging with them as lovers in the virtual flesh made available by VR that covers all five senses. You could be virtually embodied in that space in a simulation of your own physical body, a tweaked version of it, or in some engineered form that you feel bodies forth your soul more faithfully than the body you were born into does. Fernando Velázquez thus ends a 2019 article on "The Virtualization of Intimacy" with these rhapsodic reflections:

VR love brings two minds together with phantom bodies, but in a positive way it can make us define what it truly means to be human, and how we understand our sense of self in connection to others. It may allow us to explore who we are and reveal, how we love without the looks or traits that we feel define us physically. The long-term results and impacts of love and relationships in virtual reality are yet to be seen and felt, but the fact is that they are happening. With more questions than answers, we can only wait and see where the tech revolution turns next: at this rate VR will be the primary tool for falling in love in the first place. (Velázquez 2019)

I'm not sure what advances have been made in the last few years (I'm sure the pandemic will have fueled development), but a useful short documentary was made in 2015 that went through some of how things were changing then, and looked at issues such as "virtual infidelity," commodification, love vs porn, entrepreneurial opportunities, and the normalization of "socially sharable sex" and sexual fluidity:

While sexual extensions to our physical bodies seem almost certain to become mainstream fairly soon, and the advantages for a wide range of humans - those who must carry on long-distance relationships being only the tip of the iceberg - are fairly obvious, there are those who worry about where this sort of technology will take us. Into further seperateness and objectification, unless we "escape the trappings of porn," according to Cindy Gallop, whose 2009 Ted Talk Make Love not Porn is excerpted in the documentary.

Clearly, it seems likely that in the future there will be forms of sex work that we can still only imagine today. Today, a person may go to a website and pay to watch another person strip or do other things, often at the request of the paying party. Apparently, sex workers are already beginning to use teledildonics for haptic interaction in limited ways. In the future, people may be able to have full-body virtual sex encounters with such workers:

Augmented reality coupled with advances in robotics will allow sex add-ons to supplement traditional offerings. Future of Sex editor Meg White points to three emerging areas of commercial sex including virtual sex worlds, remote sex and robot sex. For instance, online sex workers increasingly will link their movements to remote sex toys or even robotic look-alikes. In effect, these new areas may reduce the risks associated with sex workplace violence and STIs, modernizing the online sex marketplace globally. (Empel 2012)

While on the one hand this seems like a positive thing in terms of reducing sexually transmitted disease and keeping sex workers safe from potential violence, stalking, and so forth - thus good for both the health and the well-being of the sex worker - many critics apart from Cindy Gallop worry that this virtualization of sex is just one more nail in the coffin of true human intimacy. Will people choose hyperreal objectification over embodied sex, just as they may choose parasocial television watching over embodied social interaction, or screened self-presentation through images over showing up in person?

The "hyperrealization" of sexuality may extend beyond sex work and porn into our real embodied interpersonal sexual relationships. Already many people watch porn while having sex, because the hyperreal turns them on more than embodied reality (section on porn still to come, no pun). Among the technologies currently being perfected is a kind of couples' "deep fakes" platform called DaF Masking (DaF stands for Dreams and Fantasies). "Deep fakes," as you should be aware, are video and VR porn where artificial intelligence has been used to put a celebrity's head on the body of a porn actor. So for instance, you could imagine you are experiencing porn featuring AOC (;-) or one of the Kardashians, or (though this has not been the focus so far) Idris Elba or Robert Pattinson, say.

Sorry the examples are so straight! In a way, this whole lesson is too binary and hetero and focused on the technology straight guys make and want, I know. This seems to be where most of the issues with technology and sex become issues, however. Now that gender is loosening up, presumably heterosexuality will become less problematic too. I'd like to think, as someone who has been implicated in heterosexuality my whole life, that the sexuality itself is not to blame. I tend to agree with those who see the rest of the gender bias and privilege in society to be the more pernicious cause of things that are wrong with heterosexuality. As vlogger Tara Mooknee succinctly put it, "Ultimately, the downfalls of heterosexuality come from the downfalls of gender" (Mooknee 2021).

But maybe it's not just straight men's (and virtually everyone else's) objectification of women that makes the technologies somewhat disturbing. Maybe it's everyone's addiction to hyperreal fantasies over physical realities. The company DaF Mask, as I was saying, has now developed software and technology so that we can "see" our physical partner as someone else - a celebrity crush or a friend who turns us on or whomever, presumably (Dowling 2019). Couples have long engaged in role-play and cosplay during sex, but the use of VR visors and augmented reality software could now allow them to play at being celebrities or people they know having sex with one another while they physically have sex with each other's real-life bodies. In a world obsessed with celebrities and where so many people want to be a celebrity, it is a "natural" extension of fame to be a sex product, and possibly in the future the hypersexualization of hyperreal celebrities that is common today will include pornographic and interactive sex components in some cases. "I just downloaded Tupac! Shall we get to it!"

We see this starting, perhaps, with a site like OnlyFans. Influencers, porn stars, celebrities, and anyone interested in doing so can offer erotic and pornographic media of themselves on the site, and for some it has become another branch of their online "brand." On the one hand, this has been viewed as a positive step toward self-management and control of "sex entertainment" work for women (and men) who are frequently exploited in the mainstream porn industry. But others find this a disturbing direction for women in particular, since it further normalizes turning oneself into a sex object, not just for money but for the attention and likes, which is the general currency of the online economy. It can be seen how porn and prosumer sex entertainers encourage ever younger women and girls to share themselves on social media in ways that may not be explicitly pornographic or erotic, but invite the sexualized objectification of themselves (their bodies): bikini try-ons on YouTube, dancing in underwear on TikTok (I stay off TikTok; I have some decency left in me), and now pole dancing in my Instagram feed "reels"! - does the algorithm know me better than I know myself, as usual? I never would have thought I would have the slightest interest in pole dancers. But ...), and so forth. Again, the gender categories, misogyny, and homophobia that remain in our culture make this a feminist issue. If more and more women are going to turn themselves into sex entertainment products, it's certainly good if they can maintain complete control of their online presence and its monetization. But the message being sent to young women is the same as in 20th century broadcast culture: women need to be sex objects to get attention, and getting attention as a sex object is "success." This is part, I think, of the larger overall questions one can have about everyone turning themselves into media in general. The need and desire for successful profilicity, or "publicity," as I called it in the lesson on surveillance

Sex with robots

Chess master David Levy, the author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007) was interviewed by Scientific American in 2008. He saw a future in which humans will have relationships with humanoid machines, and thinks some people will prefer those relationships:

I don't think the advent of emotional and sexual relationships with robots will end or damage human-human relationships. People will still love people and have sex with people. But I think there are people who feel a void in their emotional and sex lives for any number of reasons who could benefit from robots. Other people might try out a relationship with a robot out of curiosity, or be fascinated by what's written in the media. And there are always people who want to keep up with the neighbors.

One point a friend made to me was that there will be people who say, "Oh, you're only a robot." But I also think there will be people who take the view, "Oh, you're only a human." (Levy 2009)

Those who see such a possibility not as a positive new option but as a frightening addition to the technological forces that are pushing us to dehumanization and disconnection from one another may raise many objections to this kind of attitude. Among them is even the question of whether it will be fair to treat such complex mechanisms as servants of our wills. But this sort of I, Robot question is not the chief concern the opponents of sex with robots tend to raise. Again, they revolve more around "the downfalls of gender." (Or rather the ways in which gender has not completely fallen down yet.)

They worry about some of the same things that trouble the critics of pornography, video games, and even much mainstream entertainment today: that by portraying certain people (women, members of other cultures, poor people) as subject to the desires of certain others we encourage those privileged people (mostly men in recent history) to look upon the others as subject to their wills and in some important sense not to be real, not to have feelings that need to be taken into account. If a man has a sex robot who "adores" him and does everything he wants it to (we'll leave aside for the moment whether this is even a very exciting prospect; it certainly doesn't seem like a very erotic one ), won't that lead him to treat real women - who look just like these robots - as though they too are just robots?

Nassau Hedron (2012) argues that the closer machines come to looking and seeming like humans, the more dehumanizing for us our treatment of them as machines will be: "even if something really is a mere machine and we therefore feel free to subject it to any desire we may have (however lofty or base) does giving ourselves that liberty potentially degrade or de-humanize us, especially if the machine is a reasonable facsimile of a human being?"

In particular, there seems to be a danger, at least in the short-term, of dehumanizing some of us. Because while there will undoubtedly be all sorts of sex robots, it seems clear that the biggest industry will be feminine robots for straight men to "have sex" with. This brings us back to the questions around pornography. Many people who have a problem with mainstream pornography feel that what makes it wrong is precisely this one-sided commodification, objectification, and instrumentalization of female sexuality for a male consumer. Sex with a fembot could be the ultimate de-realization of women's sexuality and humanity for the purpose of satsifying male fantasies. Such an eventuality would be the triumph of mechanization and could spell the death of the struggle for heterosexual intimacy and real connection between men and women, or indeed sexual intimacy of any kind, between anybody.

Worries such as these may be somewhat mired in a 20th century understanding of gender and sexuality that seems to be rapidly collapsing for many of us, but if porn and sex work are anything to go by there are still a lot of "very straight" ("super-straight"?) men in the world and a thriving market for various forms of objectified female sex service for them. I'm not sure how much interest there is in gay sex robots or lesbian robots or even male sex robots for straight women (though more about that in a moment!). The industry's focus is clearly on men seeing female partners as appliances of a sort.