Sex and technology have long been intertwined – millions of us use dating apps to find partners, and some of the earliest commercial online activity revolved around pornography.
So, it’s not surprising that generative AI – technology that enables computers to create realistic, lifelike content in many forms – is already creating new avenues for exploring digital sex and intimacy.
From chatbots and image generators to AI-enabled sex toys and even lifelike, functional robots, new opportunities for exploring intimacy and fantasy are quickly becoming a reality.
Of course, this raises some important ethical questions. How will this explosion of possibilities reshape our perceptions and attitudes of such fundamentally human experiences as sex? What is the role of consent when we involve intelligent machines in our intimate lives? And what might the impact of developing sexual relationships with technology be on our emotional and psychological well-being?
AI-Powered Intimacy And Relationships
Virtual influencers are widely used by brands to promote and sell products, but today, they are also regularly selling sex. OnlyFans rival Fanvue hosts virtual models – who also promote themselves on Instagram – offering adult content and chat to a growing fanbase.
Sika Moon is one such model, with over 300,000 followers. Other sites like Candy.ai, DreamGF and VirtualGF let users create their own virtual girlfriends that will then engage in explicit chat with them and even send revealing pictures of themselves. When I spoke to them a while back, the people behind DreamGF (men, unsurprisingly!) said that they are getting ready to take this to the next level with AI-generated video.
As well as virtual influencers that exist entirely in the digital realm, these sites also offer real live models the chance to create AI versions of themselves that will handle the time-consuming work of chatting to fans for them.
While virtual partners can happily exist in the digital world, some are already doing their best to bring them into the physical world. Sex robots have been in development for a long time, and while they haven’t yet made it to market, models like Harmony are getting close. While the development of these robots initially focused on replicating the “look and feel” of human beings, the advent of generative AI means they are now being equipped with personalities of their own.
Interestingly, Dr Kate Devlin, author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, says that her research shows potential buyers are just as interested in the companionship that these robots offer as they are in the sexual possibilities.
For dating app users who are fed up with being ghosted, Flure has come up with a solution. Their AI, Anna, is “always on” and promises to give each user her undivided attention. This allows users to exchange an unlimited number of messages and pictures, all personalized to their own taste.
Generative AI is also making its way into sex toys. Manufacturer Lovense has created the ChatGPT Pleasure Companion, which is capable of narrating erotic tales based on its users’ preferences while in use.
It’s even been reported that a growing number of people are identifying as “digisexuals”. This means that their sexuality is primarily defined by their use of technology- be it online pornography or cybersex.
The Ethics Of AI Sex
All of this clearly shows us that human sexuality is evolving alongside technology – just like every other aspect of our lives is.
But is it all harmless fun? It’s easy to see that some people might become dependent on virtual or AI-based relationships to the detriment of their ability to form bonds with real humans.
This could cause problems if we consider that AI partners have the potential to be very personalized and compelling. Programmed purely to please and perfectly in tune with their users’ specific desires, they could become very addictive, and some people might find themselves feeling that they are falling in love or becoming dependent on their AI partner.
Another issue is that the ease with which AI can fulfill fantasies means that these simulated, virtual experiences could easily distort expectations of real-life sex and intimacy. Once someone is used to an AI partner that always puts them first, how will they feel about having to take a human partner’s needs and feelings into consideration? Just like how early exposure to pornography has been shown to impact expectations of sexual relationships, this could be particularly concerning when we are talking about young people with limited experience of interpersonal relationships.
And where does consent figure into all of this? After all, an AI partner can’t say no – or at least, can be programmed never to say no. Does this have the potential to normalize unhealthy or one-sided power dynamics within relationships?
The questions raised by the issue of consent within human/AI relationships must be carefully considered to ensure they don’t compromise our ability to build genuine, human relationships built around reciprocal feelings, desires and respect.
AI And The Future Of Intimacy
The impact of AI on sexuality and intimacy is likely to have far-reaching implications.
Thinking beyond recreational sex, AI has the potential to enable new forms of therapy and sex education. This could help individuals to learn about themselves and perhaps even heal the damage done by negative experiences in a safe, simulated environment.
However, the hyper-real experiences that could soon be available—particularly when we combine technologies like generative AI, robotics and virtual reality—create a need for ethical guardrails that will ensure this is done responsibly.
One thing that’s certain is that sex sells, meaning that businesses will always be happy to provide products and services that fill this niche.
This means we must learn from past experiences, such as the impact that the explosion in the availability of online pornography has had on society.
Crucially, the ethical concerns we’ve identified here have to be proactively addressed to ensure that we establish clear guidelines and minimize the potential for harm as we move into a new era in human sex and relationships.
— How these terms changed and why states now want to define them
Transgender rights advocates rally at the Kansas capitol, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024. In 2023, the state enacted a measure that says there are two sexes, male and female, based on a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth.
This year, 17 state legislatures sought to narrowly define “sex” or “gender” in state law as based solely on biological characteristics. In Utah, one became law.
Although they’re sometimes used synonymously, “sex” and “gender” have different meanings to medical professionals. Sex traditionally refers to one’s biological characteristics, whereas gender is how a person identifies.
Laws redefining sex in state law could require driver’s licenses and identifying documents to display a person’s sex assigned at birth, a policy that transgender advocates say would lead to discrimination.
After decades of creating laws that assumed “sex” and “gender” were synonymous, lawmakers across the country are taking another look at how states define those terms.
Scientific and legal interpretations of these words have evolved considerably in the past century. Today, medical experts understand biological sex assigned at birth as more complex and consider it distinct from gender identity.
In 2020, the Supreme Court also broadened its understanding of sex discrimination in employment to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Grappling with this cultural, scientific, and legal shift in the meaning of “sex” and “gender,” lawmakers in some states have tried defining the terms narrowly in state law as biological and binary. In 2023, four states passed such laws and, this year, 17 states introduced bills defining “sex.” Some bills in Florida and West Virginia were defeated, but 15 bills are still advancing in states across the country.
This focus on terminology may seem rhetorical, but these legislative changes can restrict access to driver’s licenses and documents that match a person’s gender identity. Transgender rights advocates say that requiring IDs to match the sex a person was assigned at birth can expose transgender Americans to discrimination.
So, how do we understand these terms, and what could these definitions mean for everyday life once codified?
How have the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ evolved?
Until the mid-20th century, Americans’ understanding of “sex” was largely biological and binary.
“For a substantial time period, law in the United States defined identity categories, such as race and sex, in biological terms,” said Darren Hutchinson, an law professor at Emory University law professor.
In the 1950s and ’60s, psychological research emerged that differentiated biological sex from “gender.” Researchers coined terms such as “gender roles” as they studied people born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that didn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female and observed how children sometimes developed identity distinct from their biological sex.
By the early 1960s, the term “gender identity” began appearing in academic literature. By 1980, “gender identity disorder of childhood” was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ third edition. This inclusion signaled that the concept of gender identity “was part of the accepted nomenclature being used,” said Dr. Jack Drescher, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
Before the 1970s, the word “gender” was rarely used in American English, according to research by Stefan Th. Gries, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He said evidence suggests it was used mostly when discussing grammar to describe the “gender” of a noun in Spanish, for example.
Edward Schiappa, a professor of communication and rhetoric at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in his book “The Transgender Exigency” that the rising use of “gender” in English coincided with the term’s introduction into psychological literature and its adoption by the feminist movement. Feminists saw the term as useful for describing the cultural aspects of being a “woman” as different from the biological aspects, he said.
After the 1980s, gender’s term usage rose rapidly, moving beyond academic and activist circles. In common American English, “sex” and “gender” began to be used more interchangeably, including in state law — sometimes even in the same section of the law.
In Florida’s chapter on driver’s licenses, for example, the section on new license applications uses “gender,” but the section on replacement licenses uses “sex.”
Modern legal and scientific views of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’
Sex is a biological category determined by physical features such as genes, hormones and genitalia. People are male, female or sometimes have reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical definitions of male or female, often called intersex.
Our legal understanding of “sex discrimination” has also evolved.
In 2020, the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County, a series of cases in which employers were accused of firing employees for being gay or transgender. The court held that this was a form of “sex discrimination” prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Whether the court will extend this interpretation to other areas of federal law is unclear, legal experts told us.
How have lawmakers responded to this shift?
Recently, lawmakers have tried to codify their understandings of “sex” and “gender” into law.
In some cases, these laws aim to recognize and protect transgender Americans. The Democratic-backed Equality Act, which passed the House, but not the Senate, in 2019 and 2021, would have federally protected against discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity. Some states have passed similar equality legislation, creating a patchwork of anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people.
But lawmakers in many Republican-led states have proposed narrow definitions of sex and gender that would apply to large sections of state law. “Women and men are not identical; they possess unique biological differences,” Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds said in a press release detailing her support for the state’s version of such a bill. She added, “This bill protects women’s spaces and rights afforded to us by Iowa law and the Constitution.”
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks July 28, 2023, at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa.
Opponents reject the idea that the bills relate to women’s rights and claim the bills are an attempt to “erase” legal recognition of transgender people.
The Kansas Legislature, for example, passed the “Women’s Bill of Rights” overriding Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. The law says that “pursuant to any state law or rules and regulations … An individual’s ‘sex’ means such individual’s biological sex, either male or female, at birth.”
The law defines male and female as based on whether a person’s reproductive system “is developed to produce ova,” or “is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
The Kansas law also states that “distinctions between the sexes with respect to athletics, prisons or other detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, restrooms and other areas where biology, safety or privacy are implicated” are related to “important governmental objectives” a condition required under the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Rose Saxe, lawyer and deputy project director of the LGBTQ and HIV project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Kansas law does not explicitly require those spaces to be segregated by “sex” as the bill defines, but tries to justify policies that would do so.
Current bills defining ‘sex’
This year, 17 more states considered bills that would narrowly define “sex” and/or “gender” in state law according to the ACLU’s anti-LGBTQ legislation tracker. One, Utah, signed a definition into law, and 10 other states are advancing 15 bills combined. In the remaining six states, the bills were carried over to next year or defeated.
The Utah State Capitol is viewed March 1, 2024, in Salt Lake City.
Some bills, such as Arizona’s S.B. 1628 change the terms for the entire statute: “This state shall replace the stand-alone term ‘gender’ with ‘sex’ in all laws, rules, publications, orders, actions, programs, policies, and signage,” it reads. The state Senate passed the bill 16-13 on Feb. 22, along party lines with Republicans in favor.
Other bills, such as Idaho’s H.B. 421, don’t replace the word “gender” but declare it synonymous to “sex.” Gender, when used in state law, “shall be considered a synonym for ‘sex’ and shall not be considered a synonym for gender identity, an internal sense of gender, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender role,” reads the text of the bill, which passed the Idaho House 54-14 on Feb. 7.
Saxe said the bills could have a cascading effect on other laws.
Transgender rights advocates say access to identification that matches an individual’s identity and presentation is important. “If you can’t update the gender marker on your ID, you are essentially outed as transgender at every turn,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality to PolitiFact for a previous story on drivers licenses in Florida. This can happen during interactions with potential landlords, employers, cashiers, bartenders and restaurant servers.
“Even in the states that have passed these bills,” said Paisley Currah, a political science professor at the City University of New York, “there’s still going to be these contradictions,” because a person’s driver’s license might not match the gender on their passport, for example.
“Unless you’re a prisoner or immigrant or you are in the Army, the government actually doesn’t get to look at your body,” said Currah, who wrote a book on how government agencies address “sex” categories. “It’s always some doctor that signs a letter … and so there’s always a document between your body and the state.”
How these sex-defining laws would affect state agencies remains to be seen. And the laws may face court challenges, likely on the grounds that they violate the Equal Protection Clause or right to privacy, Saxe said.
If you’re in your 20s and 30s, you probably watch pornography. Millennials and gen Z are watching more pornography than any other age group and are also more likely than any other demographic to experiment with AI pornography.
As technology advances, AI-generated tools and techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible. This can lead to unethical content, including deepfakes – videos in which a person’s face is replaced with someone else’s likeness, without their consent. Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) recently faced a scandal when it became awash with deepfakes of Taylor Swift.
But what about other kinds of AI pornographic content? How can consuming it affect you, and how can you make sure that you’re consuming it ethically? I’m a sex and relationship therapist, so I’m interested in helping clients with various sexual issues, including porn consumption problems. I am also curious about the ways AI could be used positively to create pornography that is not only ethical, but educational and sexy at the same time.
The impact of watching AI porn
While it’s perfectly normal to be curious about sex, watching a lot of pornography can affect your sexual satisfaction – and AI porn is no different. You might, for example, start comparing your partner to the hyper-realistic, but impossibly perfect, digitally generated actors of AI porn.
Already, research suggests that men who frequently watch online porn may experience erectile dysfunction. This could be due to the idealised unrealistic portrayals in pornography compared to real-life sexual encounters. AI pornography would likely only exacerbate this, with AI porn avatars able to participate in sex acts that wouldn’t be possible, or as accessible, for real people.
Among women who watch porn, opinions vary. Some women have noted positive changes, including a reduction in the shame associated with sexual pleasure. But others have expressed reservations about the beauty standards in pornography, finding them unattainable.
This stance is very much shared by anti-porn campaigners, who claim that porn degrades and objectifies women. They believe it feeds into ideas of male supremacy, potentially leading to violence against women.
Regulating AI pornography
The roles women are given within mainstream pornography often portray a different power imbalance than, for example, gay male porn. For this article, I spoke to porn actor John Thomas. He argued that gay male porn was somewhat more ethical than mainstream straight porn which is [made for men to consume]. “Both roles in a gay scene might be appreciated by the viewer, rather than the pure objectification of the woman in a straight scene.”
One of the many concerns with unregulated AI-generated pornography is that it can distort a viewer’s sense of reality, leading to misinformation, unrealistic expectations around sex and potential harm. However, since the moral landscape surrounding ethical AI porn is a grey area, we are pushed into uncharted territory. As new technology emerges, new challenges arise.
To ensure responsible innovation within the adult entertainment industry, it’s essential to be aware of AI’s ongoing integration into our daily lives. For example, risks could be mitigated by training AI systems to recognise deepfakes, violence or child pornography.
For actors in the adult entertainment industry working pre-AI, consent has always been key. I asked John Thomas about best practice in the industry:
When working for a porn studio [as a freelance worker], I sign a contract which typically includes clauses relating to rights to my image – usually I am signing to give the studio the right to use, and alter, my image [from the photos or video created] and distribute it. AI is not specified in any contract I’ve signed.
But since AI porn is expected to become more mainstream, the topic of consent becomes more ambiguous. As John Thomas adds: “I think one could interpret the contract to include AI … the contracts are written in such an expansive way that, having signed away the rights to your image, and consent to your image being altered, it could [hypothetically be used in AI].”
How to be an ethical porn consumer
Just as there are fair trade brands known for their ethical practices in producing coffee and clothing, there should be a safe space for consumers to explore their sexuality and fantasies.
As a porn viewer, you can be more ethical in your consumption by becoming porn literate, improving your understanding of realistic sexual expectations, gender identities, sexual orientations, relationship styles, kinks and ethical BDSM practices.
And if you decide you want to watch AI porn and want to minimise the risk of consuming unethical content, here are some tips to help enhance your porn literacy skills:
• consider joining online communities where discussions about “feminist porn” and sexualised content are open and encouraged
• if you are a fan of a particular porn actor, consider following them on social media. This will provide you with some insights into their performance activities and their preferred ways for you to access their content
• when coming across porn sites, take a moment to assess if they are recognised for ethical production practices. Some established sites are known for their commitment to ethical pornography. Typically, the ethical emphasis will revolve around aspects such as production standards, consent, representation of diverse body types, genders and races, portrayal of safe sexual practices and prioritising the enjoyment of all involved
• keep in mind the difference between fantasies and real sexual encounters when watching porn. Remember that what you see online may not translate to real life
• keep a close eye on your porn consumption. If you sense it’s becoming overwhelming, or impacting your daily life or sexual experiences, don’t be ashamed. Seek support from a professional, such as a sex therapist.
In a society in which nine-year-olds watch pornography and song lyrics are more explicit than The Kama Sutra, the revolution that Shere Hite helped to bring about in the 1970s, employing the words vagina, clitoris and masturbation, on primetime television for a start, is easily forgotten – which is exactly what has happened.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite, a documentary made by Nicole Newnham and produced by Dakota Johnson, and released in the UK this weekend, charts Hite’s rise in the 70s and her decline by the 1990s. “It’s just as simple as know yourself, not your role,” she says as advice to herself. “It’s hellish hard.”
The documentary charts how, over a period of four years, Hite had sent out thousands of questionnaires asking detailed questions that probably hadn’t even been asked at the consciousness raising sessions then emerging in the second wave of the women’s movement and at the gatherings in which participants equipped with mirrors took at a look at their own vulvas, aghast or overjoyed with what they spied. It was a fun time to be alive.
“Does your partner realise you come when you come?” Hite asked her anonymous respondents. She received thousands of replies to dozens of detailed questions. One woman was in her 10th week as a cook with an all-male crew on a freighter in the North Sea. “I enjoy sex,” she wrote, in itself a challenge to the prevailing stereotype that nice girls thought it an unpleasant but necessary business. “I enjoy sex… but never have I experienced a more concentrated dose of chauvinism than being the only woman on a freighter with young men I am unwilling to fuck.”
In the documentary, Shere (pronounced “share”, born Shirley Diana Gregory) Hite talks coolly about the shocking revelation (at least to many men) that women had orgasms easily when they masturbated and that they preferred clitoral stimulaton to vaginal penetrative sex, a challenge to what the sexologists Masters and Johnson had asserted.
Whether you agreed with her or not – and plenty of feminists such as the redoubtable Lynne Segal in Straight Sex rightly took her to task for her oversimplification – Hite was trying to point out that the lack of words to portray the female sexual experience was an example of the patriarchy in action. The clitoris, whose only role is to provide pleasure, might have been discovered and illustrated in medical journals in the 17th century but by the early 20th century its value had been eroded.
In 1987, Hite published Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress. Her responses this time told her that women were fed up, they wanted intimacy and emotional connectedness with men. I interviewed her at the time. As the documentary portrays very accurately, Hite was unique: clever, spikey, ethereal with almost see-through alabaster skin, a cloud of curls, white eyelashes and a soft, baby voice. As an interviewee in the documentary says, Hite had made herself a brand. In the 1970s and 80s, it still wasn’t acceptable to be female with a brain, beauty, wit and a publicly viewed vulva (Hite had hers photographed often by the German photographer Iris Brosch in later years); a scholar and a slut.
The joy of the documentary is that it provides a history of the women’s movement in which Hite felt at home. Bisexual, she was an advocate for gay rights at a time when it was dangerous to do so. She had featured in Playboy, and, as a model, in an ad for Olivetti typewriters: ”The typewriter that’s so smart she doesn’t have to be.” Sexism was that bad, and worse.
Hite confessed to her modelling past and the liberationists took her to their heart. On one occasion, she asked those in the room to raise their hands if they masturbated; nobody moved. The idea for the first Hite report was born.
Hite, whose 16-year-old mother dumped her with her grandparents, had two history degrees. When she and her fellow activists picketed Washington’s National Museum of Natural History – “the Unnatural History Museum – women were only portrayed stirring a pot and holding a baby. I was studying the past,” Hite says in the documentary. “Because I couldn’t understand the present… why couldn’t everyone have an equal chance?”
Hite wrote half a dozen books; her report on women’s sex lives was followed by The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, published in 1981 and drawn from 7,239 questionnaires. Reading some, her editor, Bob Gottlieb, said: “I haven’t had many sadder experiences as an editor in my life.” Men said they were lonely, some were afraid. Other men reacted angrily. The backlash had already begun because Hite called herself a social scientist.
In a letter to the New York Times in 1981, she noted that “science” comes from the Latin root “to know”. Hite had employed percentages in her books – but percentages of what, her critics asked? Seventy per cent of 10 or 1,000? Regardless of the numbers, as Oprah Winfrey says in the documentary, “Nobody can deny there’s a problem.”
By the 1990s, Hite was in financial trouble and couldn’t get her books published in the US. In 1996, she became a German citizen, having married Friedrich Höricke, a couple of decades her junior in 1985. She developed Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s and died aged 77. In her New York Times review of The Hite Report, Erica Jong quotes a character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962): “Women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.” Shere Hite deserves to be remembered.
— Have you ever considered the ways technological advances could transform human relationships? From male contraceptive medications, to personalized 3D printed sex toys, to haptic suits that could allow us to experience pornography more directly, there are a variety of unexpected ways tech will shape the future of sex. WatchMojo counts down ten future technologies that could drastically alter our sex lives.
By Nick Roffey
Top 10 Shocking Ways Technology Could Change Sex in the Future
The tech world may very well transform the way we get intimate. Welcome to WatchMojo.com, and today we’re counting down our picks for the top 10 ways technology could change sex.
For this list, we’re looking at emerging and predicted technologies that could significantly change our sexual relationships and impact our sex lives.
#10: DIY-Customizable, Printable Sex Toys
3D printing: the revolutionary technology used to create engine parts, human tissue, houses . . . and Eiffel Tower-shaped dildos. Don’t want to walk into a sex shop or receive a mysterious package at home? Sex toys are becoming printable and customizable. Online retailer SexShop3D allows customers to completely customize their sex devices and print them at home. Choose from a range of adjustments, or just make something up. Get as creative as you like!
#9: Avatar-Based Sex & Virtual Prostitution
In the online world of Second Life, users can make connections, explore an extensive multiverse, and even start virtual businesses. Or you can also, y’know, Netflix and… pixel mash. Just grab some genitals for your avatar at the general store, and you’re off. If you can’t find the right match, there are virtual sex workers available (for a price) in certain locations. Another massive multiplayer online world, Red Light Center, caters to adult tastes exclusively, and employs freelance Working Girls and Guys to entertain their members. Meanwhile, prostitution itself is going virtual, pushing the boundaries of online sex chats, and bringing avatars together in new and… interesting ways. And that’s not even taking into account webcam shows.
#8: Haptic Suits
Several companies have been hard at work creating advanced haptic suits that mimic physical sensations. The Teslasuit, for example, uses “neuromuscular electrical stimulation” to simulate a wide range of tactile sensations, from a breeze to a bullet. Right now, the industry focus is primarily on gaming, but futurologists predict that such suits will one day allow us to experience porn more directly and have sex at a distance. Admittedly however, the early examples of suits designed specifically for sexual purposes are… alarming. Here’s hoping that future incarnations are a little more discrete and less… awkward-looking.
#7: Artificial Wombs
Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia made headlines in 2017 when they successfully “grew” premature lambs in artificial wombs. The lambs were placed inside fluid-filled plastic “biobags” and attached to mechanical placentas. The researchers hope to develop similar technology for humans. Sound like something out of a sci-fi novel? Well, writers in the genre have been anticipating this development for some time. In the utopian society of Marge Piercy’s acclaimed “Woman on the Edge of Time”, babies are gestated in mechanical brooders and men can breastfeed, allowing both sexes to “mother” children. One day, human babies could grow entirely in artificial wombs, changing our ideas about gender, family, and equality.
#6: Laboratory-Grown Genitals
Dr. Anthony Atala, a urological surgeon specializing in regenerative medicine, has engineered and successfully transplanted artificial bladders and vaginas. Since the organs are created from a patient’s own cells, there’s no risk of the body rejecting the transplant. Tissue engineering could completely revolutionize organ transplantation… and genitals. Atala is growing human penises in vats, and believes transplants will be possible very soon. His work provides hope for people with damaged reproductive organs, or who just want some new junk. Could designer genitalia be just around the corner?
#5: Male Contraceptive Medication
In 2016, the trial of an injectable male contraceptive was halted early due to side effects such as mood changes and acne… which, understandably, prompted women around the world to collectively roll their eyes. Many of the men reportedly actually thought the side effects were worth it, but researchers stopped the trial due to an unexpected and unexplained spike in these effects. Despite mixed results, numerous researchers are continuing to work on solutions for men, such as pills, topical gels, and perhaps most promising, one-time reversible injections, such as Vasalgel and RISUG. Regardless of which option hits the market first, they could finally balance out the burden of birth control.
#4: Teledildonics
Personal sex devices that connect via Bluetooth are providing new ways for couples to relate over long distances, and making porn interactive. A company known as Kiiroo already offers pairable sex toys that promise to let you “feel your lover from anywhere in the world”. This also has applications for pornography. In 2015 pornstar Lisa Ann held what was billed as “the world’s first virtual gangbang”, allowing male viewers to “feel her” by syncing their Kiiroo masturbators to her vibrator. For added intimacy, other companies have developed “hug shirts” and long-distance kissing devices. Teledildonics, paired with haptic suits, promise to make remote sex increasingly realistic.
#3: Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is becoming an increasingly common medium for pornography, with content available on many of the major sites. Add the aforementioned haptic suits and teledildonics, and you have everything you need for virtual sex, be it with actors, or avatars controlled by other people. In an interview with Playboy, Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, predicted that virtual sex will eventually become commonplace thanks to nanobot networks that will be installed into our brains. Some research projects suggest that VR also has the potential to increase empathy between the sexes. Be Another Lab’s Gender Swap experiment swapped male and female perspectives, while the YWCA in Montreal, Quebec, Canada has used VR to educate young people about consent.
#2: Augmented Reality
At the 2017 Facebook Developer Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the future of the company lies in augmented reality, in which digital images are superimposed onto the physical world. The company is working on smart glasses to help make AR a ubiquitous part of our lives. And futurists claim that this will greatly influence how we have sex. In the same aforementioned Playboy interview, Ray Kurzweil, predicts that we will one day be able to change how our partner looks, making them more attractive, or like someone completely different. Of course, AR also has interesting potential uses for dating apps.
#1: Sex Robots
Sex robots are on their way. Futurist Ian Pearson predicts that by 2050, we’ll have sex with robots more than with people. Seem far-fetched? A subsidiary of Abyss Creations has been working on a robotic head that attaches to their line of life-sized sex dolls. The head features a customizable personality storable on smartphones, thanks to 2017 app Harmony AI. And, a number of other companies are working on their own automated sex dolls. Some observers worry that sexbots will increase gender inequalities, while others believe they’ll reduce human prostitution and trafficking, blowing away the competition with uncanny abilities. Only time will tell just how drastically this will shape the future of sex culture.
— Examining various players in the field, from established dating platforms to innovative sexual wellness startups, reveals the multifaceted ways technology can serve as a bridge to understanding and acceptance.
How can technology assist us in having more open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality? This question strikes at the heart of a major cultural challenge: the taboos and stigmas around discussing sensitive topics like sexual health and pleasure.
Yet avoiding these conversations leads to negative outcomes on individual and societal levels. The good news is that technology is emerging as a powerful tool to enable shame-free dialogues and create social change.
Platforms enable constructive conversations
A number of platforms provide an opportunity to foster open and constructive dialogues that address sexuality and stigma.
Match, one of the trailblazers in online dating, has consistently refined its platform to foster more nuanced and authentic interactions among its users.
Recognizing the importance of sexual well-being as a component of overall compatibility, Match has integrated features that allow users to communicate their needs and desires more transparently. The profile structures, messaging systems, and compatibility algorithms are carefully designed to create a comfortable space for individuals to express their sexual preferences and boundaries without fear of judgment.
Match’s commitment to creating a user-friendly environment goes beyond mere matchmaking; it encapsulates a drive toward cultivating a community where open communication about sexuality is not only possible but encouraged.
Grindr, a platform dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, confronts the intersection of technology and sexuality with a keen awareness of the historical and ongoing stigmatization faced by its users.
Grindr has carved out a space in the digital world where individuals can explore their identities, connect with others on a basis of shared experience, and find solidarity in their journeys of self-discovery. The platform’s approach to anonymity, safety, and community engagement is specifically tailored to reduce the sense of isolation that often accompanies the exploration of one’s sexuality, particularly in less-accepting environments.
Through features that cater to the nuances of LGBTQ+ dating and networking, Grindr plays a critical role in facilitating access to supportive networks and resources, thereby contributing significantly to the destigmatization of LGBTQ+ sexualities.
OMGYes dives into the relatively under-explored territory of women’s sexual pleasure with an educational and research-based approach. It represents a significant technological and cultural shift, leveraging empirical studies and real experiences to enhance understanding and communication around sexual pleasure.
Unlike traditional platforms, OMGYes employs tactile simulations and comprehensive tutorials derived from extensive research, including partnerships with researchers at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute. Users are offered an array of interactive features that teach various techniques to improve sexual satisfaction, presenting this sensitive subject matter with the rigor and detail it deserves.
The platform uses direct user feedback and interactive content to empower individuals to explore and communicate their preferences more confidently, thereby contributing to the larger aim of normalizing conversations around sexual health and pleasure.
Match, Grindr, OMGYes, and others serve as case studies in the creation of digital environments that are respectful, inclusive, and affirming. Their success demonstrates the appetite for platforms that prioritize the complexities of human sexuality and the demand for innovations that transcend traditional limitations on sexual discourse.
Bridging online and offline worlds
Let’s do a deep dive into one specific platform. “Through technology and anonymity, we hope our users are empowered to ask other users anything they want regarding sex and sexuality and not feel judged for both their questions and their replies,” says Mariana Tomé Ribeiro, founder of Quycky, an innovative tech company focused on sexual wellness and education, in our interview.
As Ribeiro explains, Quycky aims to build a bridge between theoretical knowledge and lived experience by “making it easier for users to find toys and other accessories to support their sexual fantasies.” In doing so, it closes the gap between abstract information and embodied wisdom. Integrating mind and body leads to deeper understanding and self-acceptance.
Quycky utilizes gaming features and matching algorithms to connect users based on shared attitudes, interests, and compatibility regarding sex and relationships. This increases the likelihood of forging substantial connections that aren’t limited to physical attraction.
Creating a fun and playful environment through the game also helps users open up. Ribeiro observes that the screen acts as a buffer that allows people to connect more readily. Gaming dynamics make it easier to initiate substantive conversations and share intimate details that many people tend to keep private.
Designing safe community spaces
When tackling sensitive topics like sexuality online, maintaining a respectful environment is crucial. Quycky incorporates community reputation systems where positive behaviors like openness are rewarded through badges and statuses. Users can also block disrespectful individuals.
According to Ribeiro, the goal is to “cultivate respect” because “everyone is different.” Though anonymity sometimes breeds toxicity, consciously fostering inclusive norms can counteract this tendency. Setting communal guidelines, encouraging empathy, and giving users tools to curate their interactions enables healthy discord.
For marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ people, finding spaces to openly discuss sexuality can be especially challenging due to stigma. At Quycky, an adaptive matching system connects users with similarities in sexual orientation and interests, without requiring them to explicitly state a label. The platform “creates a sexual chart that will match you in the future with users alike,” Ribeiro says. This allows organic discovery of one’s desires and preferences.
Of course, bringing sensitive discussions online also poses potential risks around privacy, harassment, and misinformation. But conscious design choices can mitigate these pitfalls. Ribeiro believes that overall, tech will expand access to knowledge and community around sexuality: “I think it can be huge because it’s a way that people feel safe and they can understand more about themselves.”
Countering shame through virtual connections
Religious and cultural conditioning often discourage openness about intimacy. Most people feel some awkwardness discussing sexual details even with close confidantes. Anonymity helps override this hesitancy to share vulnerabilities.
According to Ribeiro, users tend to be more open online. The technology itself acts as a buffer against judgment. This psychological distancing empowers people to voice questions and details they may keep private in their daily lives. Virtual interactions can thus facilitate honesty that for many is much more difficult to achieve in actual relationships.
Some may argue that online platforms foster superficial connections compared to in-person interactions. Ribeiro asserts that by emulating the fluidity of face-to-face conversations, tech can enable meaningful exchanges: “It’s about creating something that is more meaningful and how people connect digitally.”
Elements like games and algorithms to drive interactive narratives counteract the static nature of most online communication. Kinetic energy flows when users respond dynamically to evolving scenarios. The nonlinear spontaneity of natural dialogue gets preserved in virtual environments that are designed to mimic real-world encounters.
Countering biases that perpetuate stigma
Two cognitive biases that likely reinforce stigma around sexuality are confirmation bias and the empathy gap. Confirmation bias leads us to interpret information in ways that fit our preconceptions, making us resistant to changing our minds about taboo topics. The empathy gap makes it hard to relate to experiences outside our own, causing judgment toward sexual practices we don’t share.
Virtual platforms help counteract these biases by exposing users to diverse perspectives and narratives they otherwise may never encounter. The anonymity provided online also bypasses knee-jerk judgments that are often experienced during in-person interactions. Gradually, assumptions get challenged and empathy gets fostered through broadened horizons.
Ultimately, technology platforms like Quycky and others aim to destigmatize sexuality on a societal level by empowering honest personal conversations. Ribeiro explains that “breaking the taboo around sex” begins by helping “people feel comfortable talking about sex in a fun way, and making conversations shame-free.”
Through strategic gamification and adaptive matching, virtual platforms can make users feel at ease opening up about intimate topics. Then the data and insights gained can inform educational content to further reshape public knowledge and attitudes. It is a self-reinforcing cycle where micro-level interaction feeds macro-level progress.
— SF State prof sees reasons for rethinking LGBTQ history
San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein holds a copy of his new book, a second edition of “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement.”
by Brian Bromberger
For Marc Stein, professor of history at San Francisco State University, queer history is a calling, realizing he is part of a network and a community of gay intellectuals. Many U.S. college history departments don’t even define queer history as a bona fide field or it’s been ghettoized to a few classes, despite the fact courses in the subject are very popular with students. Even Stein is technically a historian of constitutional law and politics at SF State.
Stein has become an evangelist for the promotion of gay and lesbian history, rooted in his orientation as an activist. His passion for the field is exhibited in his newest book, a totally revised second edition of his 2012 classic, “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” (Routledge, $42.95) including a new chapter, “LGBT and Queer Activism Beyond 1990.” When he wrote the first edition his aim was to provide an up-to-date account of the movement that was “national in scope, comprehensive in chronology, and synthetic in ambition,” he noted.
In his book’s introduction, Stein lists the reason why gay and lesbian history needs to be rethought: to help address the widespread lack of knowledge about that history; to serve the needs of today’s gender and sexual dissidents, along with everyone who identifies with the movement’s agendas and aspirations; and to teach people about some of the major political and philosophical questions that have absorbed the U.S., such as what is meant when referring to freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy, especially pertinent in these politically partisan and divisive times.
Stein mentions that studying this history can help readers reflect on why some people become activists, why movements develop when and where they do, why they adopt particular strategies and goals, and why they rise and fall. He notes in the introduction that the book also underscores the historicity and variability of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially how these forces changed the movement and vice versa; shows how people can support those who are working to promote equality, freedom and justice in the 21st century; and finally, to show the interrelationship between political and cultural activism, which has promoted social change.
Stein, 59, discussed the new second edition with the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview, and explained why he decided to add the new chapter.
“As a gay man who was born in the 1960s and came of age in the 1980s, I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the decades that most directly shaped the world I came to know in the 1980s,” Stein wrote. “I don’t think historians are particularly good at analyzing the present or the very recent past. Other types of scholars, including sociologists and political scientists, tend to focus on the present. But many publishers and many members of the public commonly want historians to include a ‘bring the story up to the present’ chapter or conclusion. I often teach my students that those chapters are commonly the weakest in historical studies. As I say in both editions of my ‘Rethinking’ book, that perspective haunted the writing of the book’s final chapter.
“In any case, I was pleased when Routledge informed me that my volume was one of the most successful in its social movements series and commissioned me to write a second edition. Since the original version was published before the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decisions and before the Trump era, the 2012 edition was outdated,” he added, referring to the high court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.
“I originally was only going to substantially revise the final chapter, but because there’s been such great LGBT history scholarship about the pre-1990 era published in the last decade, I ended up revising the whole book. Because the post-1990 period now includes the Trump era, I was able to strengthen my arguments against historical narratives that assume that progress is linear and inevitable,” Stein stated.
Stein writes that the gay and lesbian movement has been replaced or superseded by LGBTQ and other movements in the post-1990s era. There’s even been controversy in the title of his book.
“My book’s title has been misunderstood as implying that I am anti-queer or that I don’t appreciate the broader coalition that we invoke when we refer to the LGBTQ+ movement,” he wrote in the email. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I helped found an early queer activist group, Queer Action, in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. My first book, published in 2000, offers critically queer perspectives on the history of gay and lesbian politics in Philadelphia. I have commonly used LGBT, LGBTQ, and queer as key terms in other projects. But as a historian, I believe it’s important to be true to the historical evidence of the periods we’re studying.”
Stein doesn’t think there was an LGBTQ+ movement before the 1990s, but rather a gay and lesbian movement.
“For most of the period from 1950 to 1990, the gay and lesbian movement functioned largely as just that; it was commonly anti-bisexual and anti-trans, even as bisexuals and trans people argued for the gay and lesbian movement to change,” Stein explained. “Bisexual and trans people were part of the gay and lesbian movement, but that doesn’t mean the movement prioritized their issues. People with disabilities were part of the movement, but we don’t talk about the [lesbian, gay, disabled] movement because the movement did not organize or understand itself that way.”
Stein stated that a largely autonomous trans movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, which he discusses in the book.
“Starting in the 1970s, there was a largely autonomous bisexual movement and I discuss that,” he stated. “We know of key episodes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when bisexual and trans activists pushed the gay and lesbian movement to be more inclusive; they commonly failed in those efforts until the 1990s. ‘Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement’ devotes lots of attention to these issues, in some cases more so than other books that purport to cover LGBTQ+ history, but I try to avoid the problem of projecting today’s favored terms and concepts onto historical periods when they don’t work particularly well.”
People filled the Castro to celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision on June 26, 2015.
Political coalitions
Stein is interested in the ways in which political coalitions come together and fall apart.
“I think the LGBTQ+ political coalition is a remarkable achievement; we should pay attention to how, why, and when it happened (and how, why, and when it did not include other groups that might have become part of the coalition but didn’t),” he wrote in the email. “I’m glad that since the 1990s we’ve developed a stronger LGBTQ+ political coalition; I just don’t believe that we should minimize the efforts that it required to make that happen. As for the future, movements come, go, change, adapt, and reconfigure themselves. It would be arrogant for anyone to assume that today’s language and today’s way of thinking will be embraced by future generations; haven’t we learned enough from the past to know better?”
Queer activism today
In characterizing the new queer activism of today, Stein stated that he resists the tendency to consign the pre-1990 movement to the dustbin of history.
“It shows that much of what queer activism values — celebration of gender and sexual dissidence; rejection of gender and sexual privilege; critiques of racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and ableism; intersectional multiculturalism — existed in nascent form in the pre-1990 era,” Stein stated. “But something happened in the 1990s, when radically queer tendencies within larger LGBTQ+ worlds became more influential and powerful. This had happened before — in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, for example, and in the second half of the 1980s, when radical AIDS activism emerged — but in the early 1990s there was a more sustained transformation, one that was significant enough that we now find it difficult to talk about the ‘gay and lesbian’ movement when we’re talking about post-1990 developments.”
Stein also talked about the gay and lesbian movement’s biggest success and failure.
“If we’re talking about the period from 1950 to 1990, I would say that the movement’s biggest success was changing mainstream and lesbian/gay ideas about lesbian/gay people,” he wrote in the email. “We could talk about concrete policy successes, including the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; the decriminalization of sodomy in half of the states in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the passage of sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws in many local and state jurisdictions in the 1970s and 1980s; and the emergence of lesbian/gay people as an important part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition in the same period. But underlying all of those policy successes was lesbian/gay political mobilization, which transformed mainstream and lesbian/gay consciousness about gender and sexuality.
“As for the biggest failure, I think the movement was more successful at combating anti-homosexual bias, discrimination, and prejudice than it was in challenging heteronormative privilege,” Stein stated. “The movement succeeded to some extent at convincing many straight people to adopt ‘live and let live’ philosophies, but not at forcing straight people to renounce their special rights and privileges or encouraging everyone to come out. More concretely, I think the movement of 1950 to 1990 failed at transforming the country’s educational system, which continues to relentlessly reproduce heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and gender normativity.”
Current backlash
Stein was asked how to interpret the rash of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the country and whether it’s a backlash to the queer movement’s successes.
“I think in part we can see the rise of anti-trans legislation as an example of backlash politics, and the particular type of backlash politics that bullies some of the most vulnerable components of a disenfranchised community,” Stein stated. “Without the trans-affirmative reforms that occurred in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, I don’t think we would be seeing the anti-trans backlash that we are seeing in the 2020s. But, there’s also something else going on that relates to the politics of conservatism, populist conservatism, and fascism, in and beyond the United States.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, key conservative leaders in the United States made critical decisions about the future of their electoral coalition,” he explained. “Faced with the prospects of permanent political marginalization, foreign policy and economic conservatives formed coalitions with religious and social conservatives, most notably in the Christian right. By the Trump era, the culturally reactionary tail was wagging the economically conservative dog. Anti-trans politics, like anti-Black and Brown, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant politics, works by deluding working-class and middle-class white people into thinking that their interests are aligned with corporate America, traditional values, and strong-man authoritarianism rather than with broad-based democratic coalitions of the dispossessed.”
Stein also discussed the current effort on the right to ban books in schools and libraries, including many on LGBTQ topics.
“I think this is all about so-called child protection. For centuries, we’ve seen gender and sexual conservatives weaponize ideas of “child protection” to further their aims,” Stein wrote in the email. “We’ve also seen them instigate ‘moral panics,’ where popular sentiment is mobilized to address problems that are exaggerated far beyond empirically valid foundations.
“In the past, cultural discourses about sexual ‘perverts’ and gender ‘deviants’ played up the innocence of youth, who were seen as vulnerable to enticement, grooming, recruitment, and seduction,” Stein stated. “This led, for example, to the passage of ‘sexual psychopath’ laws in many states in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1970s, similar dynamics led to Anita Bryant’s ‘Save Our Children’ campaign against sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and to California’s Briggs initiative, which targeted LGBT teachers and their allies.”
Stein talked about work he has done.
“In one of my recent research projects, published this spring in the journal Law and Social Inquiry, I showed that in the 1970s, students at 14 U.S. colleges and universities, including two California State Universities, had to go to court when their institutions denied formal recognition to newly established lesbian/gay student groups; one of the common justifications offered by school administrators was that vulnerable young people might be tempted to try out homosexuality if there were officially recognized lesbian/gay student groups,” he explained.
Parallels
Stein sees many parallels between what is occurring today with what happened in the 1970s.
“In both cases, social and cultural conservatives responded to gender and sexual liberalization by attempting to freak people out with moral panics,” he stated. “Unfortunately, many media outlets play into conservative hands by reporting relentlessly on issues that are framed in reactionary terms. Today, for example, we rarely hear about the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public education [including California]; we rarely hear empowering stories about drag queen story hours; we rarely hear about the joys of athletic competition from the perspectives of young trans people and their allies.
“We also don’t hear about the ways in which social and cultural conservatives want our children to be taught rigid and inflexible ways of thinking about gender and sexuality — we don’t hear, for example, about the ways in which traditional educational practices offer up narrow and propagandistic lessons about gender identities and sexual orientation,” he added. “It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the states that are banning public school lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation actually were true to that notion — imagine a future world in which ‘boys’ were not taught to be ‘boys,’ ‘girls’ were not taught to be ‘girls,’ and children were not taught to be straight!
“As for book banning in particular, this arises in all of the contexts I’ve just mentioned, but it also arises in the context of declining support for public education in the United States, attacks on colleges and universities, and anti-intellectualism in public discourse,” Stein stated. “LGBTQ+ liberals and leftists should be mobilizing to support public education, not just to defend LGBTQ+ interests. Beyond that, I would just add that it’s a little bizarre to be focusing on banning books at this particular historical moment, when information is increasingly shared in forms other than books.”
Effort to silence queer history
Stein is concerned about the silencing of queer history in school curriculums.
“First, I would encourage us not to ignore the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public schools. When’s the last time we read a mainstream media report (or even a queer media report) about how that’s going or how things are going in the next set of states that will do likewise?”
Stein mentioned Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed last year that bans discussion of homosexuality or gender identity in schools through the third grade. Recently, DeSantis signed a law extending the ban through eighth grade — and the Florida Board of Education expanded the limiting of classroom instruction through 12th grade.
“As for what’s going on in more conservative states, I wrote a satirical piece recently for the History News Network that praised “R. DeSantis” for banning lessons about gender and sexuality in public schools. I was trying to get at what I hope will prove to be a legal fatal flaw in these policy initiatives,” Stein wrote. “We commonly refer to these laws as ‘don’t say gay,’ but they’re more than that: they ban lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation, which presumably means that public schools should no longer be teaching boys to be boys, girls to be girls, or all people to be straight. Imagine a second grader who asks which bathroom to use; under Florida’s new laws, the teacher should be prohibited from answering. And the laws have to be framed in theoretically neutral ways, or they would be vulnerable to First and 14th Amendment challenges based on free speech and equal protection. If interpreted literally, these laws ban teaching youth about gender and sexual normativity, just as they ban teaching youth about LGBTQ+ identities and orientations.”
Stein stated that as a college professor, the bans don’t really affect him. But he has other concerns.
“As someone who teaches in the post-secondary education sector in California, I’m not concerned about those types of bans,” he stated. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have ongoing concerns about how we teach LGBTQ+ history in colleges and universities. My university seems to be happy to have a set of specialized courses on LGBTQ+ topics. But do colleges and universities have ways to encourage faculty who teach courses on other topics to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ issues? Do my colleagues who teach introductory history courses incorporate LGBTQ+ history into their classes? I honestly don’t know.”
The future
Stein discussed the future of the queer movement.
“I’ll say that asking a historian to talk about the future is like asking a doctor to draw up architectural plans for a new house,” he stated. “I know this: there’s much more work to be done. My book’s new conclusion references a whole series of recent commentators who contend that the LGBTQ+ movement is finished, having succeeded in accomplishing all of its major goals. And these are not comedians. I’d like to see the movement broaden out, forming effective coalitions with other gender and sexual dissidents. I’d like to see the movement more effectively utilize creative direct action protests and mass grassroots mobilization. I’d like to see the movement focus more on education.”
Last year, Stein authored his “Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism” (University of California Press, $29.95). He defines himself as a queer scholarly activist. He explained that role.
“My ‘Queer Public History’ book reprints more than 30 essays that I’ve written for general rather than scholarly audiences, some for LGBTQ+ newspapers such as the B.A.R.,” he stated. “It also reflects on how queer publics nourished LGBTQ+ history projects, long before there was a place for LGBTQ+ history in college and university history departments. I use the notion of scholarly activism in a few different ways. It refers to the use of research for activist purposes; it refers to the activism that was necessary to make a place for LGBTQ+ studies within higher education, academic disciplines, and scholarly associations. I’ve been engaging in that work for decades and I used ‘Queer Public History’ to reflect on that.”
Accolades
Stein recently has received two accolades recognizing his role and contribution to both academic and public history.
“In January, gay public historian Jonathan Ned Katz selected me to replace him as the director of the OutHistory website,” he stated. “One of my first major exhibits on OutHistory, since becoming its director, is a study I completed with my students that documents more than 600 LGBT direct action protests from 1965 to 1973; we’re now working on expanding the study to cover 1974-76.”
The B.A.R. reported on the direct action history study when it was released in March.
“Then in April, the Organization of American Historians, which represents thousands of U.S. historians, nominated me to become its president in several years,” Stein stated. “If elected this fall (and I’m the only candidate, so I’ll be very embarrassed if I lose!), I’ll be the first president whose work has focused primarily on LGBTQ+ history and the first to come from the California State University system. I see the nomination as a statement about an entire generation of us who succeeded in using scholarly activism to make a place for LGBTQ+ history in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.”
Ultimately, Stein believes that rethinking the history of the U.S. gay and lesbian and LGBTQ movements should lead to a more general rethinking of U.S. history.
“This will likely only occur if more students, teachers, and scholars engage in political activism to change the ways in which history is learned and taught in primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions,” Stein stated. “It might mean trying to convince LGBT, queer, gender, and sexuality studies programs to make the history of political activism more central in their courses and curricula. And it might mean developing new ways to promote critical thinking about LGBT and queer history outside the classroom: in libraries and museums, on television and the internet, in film and video, and in various other venues. In other words, we need a new movement to rethink history.”
Human sexuality has long been a subject of fascination and curiosity in the scientific community. Researchers from different fields have sought to understand why we are attracted to certain people and how our sexual orientation develops.
From Sigmund Freud to Judith Butler, the road to a science of sexuality is a fascinating history of ambition and culture wars, error and scientific breakthrough.
Psychoanalysts believe desire follows specific laws and follows predictable patterns, while queer theorists argue that laws have exceptions and advocate for a more creative view of sexuality.
My research proposes an information theory of desire that straddles the line these two groups by arguing we should consider the object of our desire as information.
Psychoanalysis can help us understand how this particular kind of information is stored, while queer theory can help us understand how this information is organized and re-organized internally.
Birth of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, originally trained as a physician, believed in the scientific basis of sexuality. He was the first to regard sex as the subject of a serious discussion. Starting in 1902, colleagues gathered every Wednesday in his apartment to discuss the psychoanalytic practice he established.
“The source of its vitality does not lie in any hazy mixture of science and sectarianism, but in having adopted as a fundamental principle that which is the highest principle of all scientific activity. I mean honesty.”
Though Freud retained Andreas-Salomé’s loyalty until the end, he didn’t share her optimism about the uniting power of honesty and thought divisions at the heart of his movement would delegitimize it.
In France, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan urged his colleagues to return to Freud’s methods. Consumer culture silenced similar voices in North America.
Psychotherapy lost its scientific motto — the pursuit of truth — and became a matter of pursuing happiness. Keenly aware how the big screen dumbed down Freud’s psychology, Marilyn Monroe — a serious reader of psychoanalysis — turned down starring in a movie about him out of respect.
Despite the politically correct turn away from “why gay?” to “how gay?” in post–1970s clinical research, and the anti-psychological turn in feminism known as the Freud Wars of the 1980s, the prospect of a science of sexuality almost vanished until queer theorists made its case again in the 1990s.
This disconnect between what we see and the meaning we give it is a chance for sexuality to break with habit and become unpredictable.
The challenge of our current moment
Nowadays, many regard sexuality as too complicated or too subjective to become a science. Freud’s theories are often dismissed as pseudoscience.
But this outlook is dangerous to the pursuit of science. According to Elizabeth Young–Bruehl, a queer psychoanalyst who practised in Toronto until her death in 2009, we have abandoned Freud’s depth psychology and his theory of the unconscious and promoted instead superficial psychological theories.
Homophobia and caricatures of psychoanalysis originated with our relationship to science, not Freud’s. Though he was keen on establishing a science of sexuality, he regarded that science as historical rather than experimental.
Historical sciences aim to reconstruct past events and favour the uniqueness of detail and individual cases. Experimental sciences, on the other hand, are concerned with the future and whether an event will repeat itself.
Information theory of desire
Why do individuals come out as gay or bisexual at a particular point in their lives, but not earlier? Why do some first same-sex experiences shape a queer identity while others do not?
An information theory of desire might offer insights into these questions. When queer people talk about the defining moment when they came out to themselves, it can be useful to think of self-acceptance as a kind of computing command — an input that demands a radical re-organization of someone’s information network or identity.
Life events become inputs, and sexual orientations and gender identities become information networks. Certain same-sex experiences may only result in partial changes to the information network, while others may lead to the complete re-configuring of someone’s identity.
What can we discover with a science of sexuality? Freud’s loyal friend Andreas-Salomé was right to regard honesty as the highest principle of any scientific activity. Without it, we would be dealing with incorrect inputs or information networks viewed upside down.
Pride Month is not just a celebration of sexuality — it’s also a celebration of science.
‘In a cultural moment where liberalised attitudes towards sex and sexuality have destigmatised so many forms of sexual behaviour, younger generations appear to be growing less sexually intimate.’
The allure of digital relationships that can be curated and controlled comes at the expense of mutual vulnerability
The western drift away from seeking moral instruction from the church is understandable; the morality plays staged every day on Reddit’s infamous “Am I the Asshole?” threads are far more entertaining.
A few weeks ago, a post went viral in which the author seeks a public verdict on the question “AITA for asking my roommates to remove their dildos from the bathroom mirror in a way that was not kind?” The young poster had responded to the presence of newly washed sex toys in a shared space with a disgusted hostility and the dildo-owning flatmate complained the poster should have requested the removal more politely.
This brash – and now VERY public – story of objects once unlikely to be mentioned outside (ahem) the most personal of circumstances appears at the same time US magazine the Atlantic has been discussing “America’s intimacy problem”.
Researchers in the US have noticed a decline in secure attachments between individuals. Growing numbers of Americans find themselves either avoiding or incapable of maintaining intimate social relationships, with the consequence being loneliness and isolation. Psychologists report that even when their clients do want the security and comfort of meaningful connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there”.
In a cultural moment where liberalised attitudes towards sex and sexuality have destigmatised so many forms of sexual behaviour, younger generations appear to be growing less sexually intimate.
It’s not an exclusively American problem. In Australia, younger generations have also been in a “sex recession” for years. Figures compiled in 2020 revealed 40% of people in the 18-24 age bracket had never had a sexual partner. Disturbingly, some of those who know sexual contact may not necessarily know it with intimacy, but with coercion.
Sociologists and other researchers have speculated that social media is driving this. From chat to porn, the new networks provide on-demand experiences of connection that resemble in-person interactions without sharing the awkward, human rhythms of the real-world thing. The digital allure is of relationships that can be curated, controlled and contained.
Simultaneously, the portability of image-capture technology has facilitated an era of relentless self-surveillance. Powerful forces incentivise the exploitation of the personal, from the monetisation of the influencer to the desperate social competition for online attention.
The digital paradigm has come to contain us. To admit one is messy, inexperienced, scared, human-shaped or in any way truly vulnerable is an act of trust before another person and we’ve all learned by now to never trust anything pretending to be a person on the internet. Maybe the culture of mistrust fostered on the internet is what’s bleeding into our external lives? The relentless exposure of it renders any revelation of frailty a dangerous prospect.
Meanwhile, experiments such as Arthur Aron’s “36 questions that lead to love” established that it’s the mutual revelation of vulnerability that creates our most intimate bonds.
The terror is valid. The personal cost is incalculable.
Recently I received the sad news that an old theatre friend had passed away, and far too young. We lived on separate continents and had not been in touch for quite some time.
This news of his death, though, has shattered me. The memory that replays itself dates from 19 years ago; we’d stumbled into my apartment to crash after an all-night drunken adventure, and in his besozzlement he found himself unable to remove his contact lenses. He asked for help. My careful fingers peeled the plastic droplets from the eyeballs of my prone-on-the-spare-bed, fully clothed friend and it remains one of the most intimate experiences I’ve had with another human being. It changed the channel of our relationship – not into anything romantic, but into another kind of closeness that remains tricky to explain.
The pain of loss I’m feeling now is the price humans pay for the intensity of these connections.
Restless and raging at the sky in the wake of too many recent deaths, I’m yet to be convinced that the worst flatmate or view-aggregating Tokfluencer doesn’t yearn for the intimacy of a profound friendship, or a loving family, or true romantic love.
For those who may find themselves insecurely attached and sad about it, some gentle guidance: it’s not our social performances that leave an indelible impression behind us – it’s the risk taken to trust someone else when we are in our greatest vulnerability. It’s in these moments we become immortal to each other.
— Teens weigh in on evolving definitions — and habits
By JOCELYN GECKER
Situationships. “Sneaky links.” The “talking stage,” the flirtatious getting-to-know-you phase — typically done via text — that can lead to a hookup.
High school students are having less sexual intercourse. That’s what the studies say. But that doesn’t mean they’re having less sex.
The language of young love and lust, and the actions behind it, are evolving. And the shift is not being adequately captured in national studies, experts say.
For years, studies have shown a decline in the rates of American high school students having sex. That trend continued, not surprisingly, in the first years of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study found that 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.
The Associated Press took the findings to teenagers and experts around the country to ask for their interpretation. Parents: Some of the answers may surprise you.
THE MEANING OF SEX: DEPENDS WHO YOU ASK
For starters, what is the definition of sex?
“Hmm. That’s a good question,” says Rose, 17, a junior at a New England high school.
She thought about it for 20 seconds, then listed a range of possibilities for heterosexual sex, oral sex and relations between same-sex or LGBTQ partners. On her campus, short-term hookups — known as “situationships” — are typically low commitment and high risk from both health and emotional perspectives.
There are also “sneaky links” — when you hook up in secret and don’t tell your friends. “I have a feeling a lot more people are quote unquote having sex — just not necessarily between a man and a woman.”
For teens today, the conversation about sexuality is moving from a binary situation to a spectrum and so are the kinds of sex people are having. And while the vocabulary around sex is shifting, the main question on the CDC survey has been worded the same way since the government agency began its biannual study in 1991: Have you “ever had sexual intercourse?”
“Honestly, that question is a little laughable,” says Kay, 18, who identifies as queer and attends a public high school near Lansing, Michigan. “There’s probably a lot of teenagers who are like, ‘No, I’ve never had sexual intercourse, but I’ve had other kinds of sex.’”
The AP agreed to use teenagers’ first or middle names for this article because of a common concern they expressed about backlash at school, at home and on social media for speaking about their peers’ sex lives and LGBTQ+ relations.
SEXUAL IDENTITY IS EVOLVING
Several experts say the CDC findings could signal a shift in how teen sexuality is evolving, with gender fluidity becoming more common along with a decrease in stigma about identifying as not heterosexual.
They point to another finding in this year’s study that found the proportion of high school kids who identify as heterosexual dropped to about 75%, down from about 89% in 2015, when the CDC began asking about sexual orientation. Meanwhile, the share who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual rose to 15%, up from 8% in 2015.
“I just wonder, if youth were in the room when the questions were being created, how they would be worded differently,” said Taryn Gal, executive director of the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health.
Sex is just one of the topics covered by the CDC study, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. One of the main sources of national data about high school students on a range of behaviors, it is conducted every two years and asks about 100 questions on topics including smoking, drinking, drug use, bullying, carrying guns and sex. More than 17,000 students at 152 public and private high schools across the country responded to the 2021 survey.
“It’s a fine line we have to try to walk,” says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which leads the study.
From a methodological standpoint, changing a question would make it harder to compare trends over time. The goal is to take a national snapshot of teenage behavior, with the understanding that questions might not capture all the nuance. “It doesn’t allow us to go as in depth in some areas as we would like,” Ethier says.
The national survey, for example, does not ask about oral sex, which carries the risk of spreading sexually transmitted infections. As for “sexual intercourse,” Ethier says, “We try to use a term that we know young people understand, realizing that it may not encompass all the ways young people would define sex.”
IS LESS TEEN SEX GOOD NEWS?
Beyond semantics, there are a multitude of theories on why the reported rates of high school sex have steadily declined — and what it might say about American society.
“I imagine some parents are rejoicing and some are concerned, and I think there is probably good cause for both,” says Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland. Health officials like to see trends that result in fewer teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
“But what we don’t know is what this means for the trajectory of young people,” Hoover says.
This year’s decrease, the sharpest drop ever recorded, clearly had a lot to do with the pandemic, which kept kids isolated, cut off from friends and immersed in social media. Even when life started returning to normal, many kids felt uncomfortable with face-to-face interaction and found their skills in verbal communication had declined, Hoover said.
The survey was conducted in the fall of 2021, just as many K-12 students returned to in-person classrooms after a year of online school.
Several teens interviewed said that when schools reopened, they returned with intense social anxiety compounded by fears of catching COVID. That added a new layer to pre-pandemic concerns about sexual relations like getting pregnant or catching STIs.
“I remember thinking, ‘What if I get sick? What if I get a disease? What if I don’t have the people skills for this?’” said Kay, the 18-year-old from Michigan. “All those ‘what ifs’ definitely affected my personal relationships, and how I interacted with strangers or personal partners.”
Another fear is the prying eyes of parents, says college student Abby Tow, who wonders if helicopter parenting has played a role in what she calls the “baby-fication of our generation.” A senior at the University of Oklahoma, Tow knows students in college whose parents monitor their whereabouts using tracking apps.
“Parents would get push notifications when their students left dorms and returned home to dorms,” says Tow, 22, majoring in social work and gender studies.
Tow also notices a “general sense of disillusionment” in her generation. She cites statistics that fewer teenagers today are getting driver’s licenses. “I think,” she says, “there is a correlation between students being able to drive and students having sex.”
Another cause for declining sex rates could be easy access to online porn, experts say. By the age of 17, three-quarters of teenagers have viewed pornography online, with the average age of first exposure at 12, according to a report earlier this year by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit child advocacy group.
“Porn is becoming sex ed for young people,” says Justine Fonte, a New York-based sex education teacher. She says pornography shapes and skews adolescent ideas about sexual acts, power and intimacy. “You can rewind, fast forward, play as much as you want. It doesn’t require you to think about how the person is feeling.”
IS THERE AN EVOLVING DEFINITION OF CONSENT?
Several experts said they hoped the decline could be partly attributed to a broader understanding of consent and an increase in “comprehensive” sex education being taught in many schools, which has become a target in ongoing culture wars.
Unlike abstinence-only programs, the lessons include discussion on understanding healthy relationships, gender identity, sexual orientation and preventing unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Contrary to what critics think, she said, young people are more likely to delay the onset of sexual activity if they have access to sex education.
Some schools and organizations supplement sex education with peer counseling, where teens are trained to speak to each other about relationships and other topics that young people might feel uncomfortable raising with adults.
Annika, 14, is a peer ambassador trained by Planned Parenthood and a high school freshman in Southern California. She’s offered guidance to friends in toxic relationships and worries about the ubiquity of porn among her peers, especially male friends. It’s clear to her that the pandemic stunted sex lives.
The CDC’s 2023 survey, which is currently underway, will show if the decline was temporary. Annika suspects it will show a spike. In her school, at least, students seem to be making up for lost time.
“People lost those two years so they’re craving it more,” she said. She has often been in a school bathroom where couples in stalls next to her are engaged in sexual activities.
Again, the definition of sex? “Any sexual act,” Annika says. “And sexual intercourse is one type of act.”
To get a truly accurate reading of teen sexuality, the evolution of language needs to be taken into account, says Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor who specializes in adolescent sexuality.
“The word intercourse used to have another meaning,” he points out. “Intercourse used to just mean talking.”
Alfred C. Kinsey is questioned by Hazel Markel, left, president of the Women’s National Press Club, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, actress and writer, in Washington on Sept. 2, 1953.
By Justin R. Garcia
At the entrance to the Kinsey Institute, at Indiana University, there’s a plaque with a famous quote from its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.”
That ethos is at the heart of all the institute’s research.
For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shined a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence. In a time of divisive politics and disinformation, it is more imperative than ever to preserve and defend the right of such academic institutions to illuminate the unfolding frontiers of science — even, and especially, research that might challenge us as it advances our understanding of ourselves.
Thus it is tremendously disappointing that Indiana lawmakers voted late last month to approve a budget that specifically blocks Indiana University from using state funding to support the Kinsey Institute, and that last week Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into state law. This is an unprecedented action that takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom.
The Kinsey Institute, where I serve as the executive director and a senior scientist, is the leading sex research institute in the world. We publish dozens of scientific and academic articles each year, across multiple disciplines. Our faculty are internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists and demographers. We house the world’s largest library and research collection of sexuality-related materials, and scholars from across the globe visit us to study these materials and to train in our research theories and methods.
Our unbiased, apolitical, scientific approach to human sexuality makes the Kinsey Institute unique. It is also what makes the work we do so controversial.
Since its founding in 1947, the institute has been the target of disinformation and attacks. The original “Kinsey reports” (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953) drew data from the most thorough sexological study ever conducted. Both books were instant bestsellers, and Kinsey went from scientist to celebrity.
Yet the reports were also met with shock and moral panic — especially following the second volume, which documented the real sexual lives of America’s wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. So much controversy ensued that the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its sex research funding for the institute in 1954
In 1950, a U.S. customs officer seized a shipment of sexually explicit images and other materials being mailed to the institute’s research collection on the basis of their being “obscene.” The federal court case that followed, United States v. 31 Photographs, resulted in a historic ruling in favor of the institute’s right to collect materials and data for sex research, which has profoundly shaped our understanding of academic freedom from censorship.
Another wave of attacks came in the 1980s, whipped up by conspiracy theories that Kinsey’s research had unleashed the sexual revolution and, with it, a moral decay on America.
As Kinsey wrote in 1956: “It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”
Yet, Kinsey and his researchers persisted. And three-quarters of a century after the institute’s founding, the contribution of sex research to our understanding of sexuality, relationships and well-being is clear.
We know that one of the biggest predictors of relationship satisfaction is sexual satisfaction, and that one’s sex life affects the trajectory of relationships and marriages. That comprehensive sex education, including understanding consent and identifying interpersonal abuse, is associated with positive psychological and health outcomes — from prevention of unintended pregnancy to protecting against sexually transmitted infections.
We also know many questions still need to be answered. The complex associations between sexual activity and fertility outcomes. The long-term effects of covid-19 on people’s relationships and sexual lives. How the loneliness epidemic is affecting mental health across demographics. How new social technologies are changing the concept of intimacy and redefining sexual behavior. Why 1 in 4 women in the United States still experience attempted or completed rape.
Given these major unknowns, why do attacks on our research continue? The state representative who first proposed this recent legislation parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university and outside experts have repeatedly refuted. Indiana state Rep. Matt Pierce described these conspiracy theories as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.” The legislature still acted on this disturbing, easily debunked misinformation.
Indiana is not alone. Across the country, legislation is being passed that affects millions of lives, restricting reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity and basic sex education. The people passing this legislation are fundamentally failing to leverage scientific evidence as a guide through these complex issues
I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on. While this recently passed legislation stings, the majority of the institute’s funding comes from outside the university, from research grants and contracts, as well as philanthropic donations. But I worry what the future will look like, for our institute and others — and for the students and researchers who rely on us — should state legislatures continue to act on misinformation around sexuality.
Some years ago, an Indiana University alum shared with me why the Kinsey Institute was so important to him. He was a gay man in his late 60s, and he recalled how as a student in the 1970s he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. At times, he felt so confused and isolated, he wasn’t sure he would ever find his way through that dark time. He was too afraid, he told me, to set foot inside the Kinsey Institute back then, but “just knowing it existed, that someone was out there searching for answers, saved my life.”
His words took on new resonance last week. I think about this story often, and I’m reminded what’s at stake when we limit the right to even ask questions.
Samantha Cole has been a journalist for over 10 years, spending the last five reporting on tech, sexuality, gender, and the adult industry. She is a senior editor of Motherboard, the science and technology outlet for VICE.
Early modes of internet communication were predicated on, and popularized by, a desire for sex and romance. Bulletin Board Systems, the digital equivalent of public cork boards, were quickly popularized as places to access porn online. With names like SleazeNet, ThrobNet, and Pleasure Dome, many subscription-based bulletin boards were for trading images scanned from porn magazines or photos uploaded by amateurs.
But they weren’t all just for smut; they were also hubs of harm reduction, especially during the AIDs crisis and as a way for queer and marginalized people to find community and care in a time when coming out was even more dangerous than it is today.
On Usenet, a decentralized messaging system, people debated concepts of safe spaces and moderation. They fought over whether men should be permitted in women’s-only threads, and kept long-running threads about everything from politics to how have sex on a scuba dive.
In text-based multi-user domains, or MUDs people roleplayed as fantasy versions of themselves, and found love and loss. In one classic MUD legend, someone playing as an evil clown sexually assaulted other members of the chat, which threw the entire community into chaos.
“People fell deeply in love within these online spaces, met in person, got married, or got their hearts broken.”
In these systems, people grappled with how to define consent, abuse, and harassment. People fell deeply in love within these online spaces, met in person, got married, or got their hearts broken. Ex-lovers emailed administrators to ask to be removed from the chats, since seeing their former partners even through a screen was too emotionally charged. The desire to be seen and understood permeated these earliest predecessors of social media, and naturally, they often turned to the sexual.
2. The tech we take for granted was pioneered by sex.
Much of the technology used today was developed to build an internet devoted to sex and sex work. Browser cookies and user tracking were developed by online dating entrepreneurs and porn webmasters who wanted to keep track of who visited their sites so that they could advertise more effectively. Affiliate marketing, which makes a lot of the internet run today, was popularized by porn site owners who needed to make money from the thousands of people visiting their sites every day.
The JPEG was developed using a photo of a playboy centerfold named Lena, and her photograph was used as the test to standardize image processing for decades.
Webcams and web conferencing software were popularized by the earliest generations of cam models, who set up sites to sell a peek inside their bedrooms. Lifestreamers, who streamed their lives 24/7, no censorship, paved the way for today’s Twitch and Tiktok stars. Tech that was once used mostly for sexual intrigue we now use for business calls every day.
“Online sex tech pioneers are still crafting new ways to express themselves and capitalize on the internet’s insatiable desires.”
The founder of Web Personals, which was one of the very first online dating websites, claims to have invented the shopping cart and the tech that tracks users from page to page within a site.
Site subscriptions, members-only content, online credit card transactions, and advertising models—the list goes on, and online sex tech pioneers are still crafting new ways to express themselves and capitalize on the internet’s insatiable desires.
3. The internet transformed the porn industry.
The adult industry used to work very differently. Pre-internet, it was based on a studio system, where you typically had to have an agent, know a producer, or be located somewhere like LA or the San Fernando Valley. The production companies or the studios owned the rights to your images as well as all the video you shot with them.
This system also meant that buying porn required finding a store, browsing the shelves, and buying or renting a tape or magazine. These shops were very male-dominated spaces.
All of that changed with the internet and inventions like the webcam and user-generated content platforms like clip and cam sites. Suddenly anyone could break out and carve their own niche, retain ownership of their own content, vet clients through safer means, and work on their own terms, often without leaving home.
4. The internet transformed the sex toy industry.
The 70’s saw a revolution in women’s pleasure: people like Dell Williams, the founder of Eve’s Garden in New York City, and sex educator Joani Blank pioneered the notion of sex toys and orgasms as something healthy and worthwhile. Hitachi magic wands were sold at Macy’s and buying one is what inspired Dell Williams to open her own shop.
“More people than ever could safely browse, comparison shop, read reviews and chat about their interests, kinks, and fetishes.”
But when the World Wide Web came along in the late 80’s, the internet did for sex toys what it had done for porn: took an experience previously isolated to socially stigmatized spaces (like sex shops or adult video stores) and brought the shopping experience home. A wider variety of people could now access sex toys that were once out of their grasp. More people than ever could safely browse, comparison shop, read reviews and chat about their interests, kinks, and fetishes.
There has been a big destigmatizing effect as well. It’s a lot less awkward than it used to be to buy a sex toy, and it’s a lot less weird to talk to strangers about your kinks.
5. The future of sex online depends on us.
On the modern-day internet, sexual speech—including sex work, sex education, and expressions of sexuality outside of the heteronormative—are increasingly suppressed. Bad legislation like FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) or SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), which passed into law in 2018 and conflated all sexual speech as trafficking, made it harder for anyone working in these industries or trying to build communities around sexual identity to exist online. Anti-sex groups are pushing for increased censorship and discrimination by mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, under the guise of saving women and children from exploitation. Demonizing sex doesn’t solve abuse online—it makes it worse.
The pessimistic view is that things will continue to get more sterilized and censored online. The reality is that things aren’t getting more welcoming to sex, they’re getting more hostile.
If we want a future where sexuality, innovation, and safety co-exist, then we have to stand against discrimination of sex workers and marginalized people, and take control of how we want to exist online.
Virtual sex includes things like steamy texts, nude pics, or mutual masturbation via phone or video.
Swapping sexy photos and messages can add novelty and intimacy to any type of relationship.
After checking with your partner, you can start by sending a flirty photo or describing a fantasy.
Technology plays an increasing role in nearly every aspect of everyday life, and sex is no exception.
Virtual sex aka cybersex, which includes any kind of sexual activity via your phone, computer, or another digital device, has become more popular — particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to research from the Kinsey Institute, an organization that focuses on the study of human sexuality, people can feel both physically and emotionally connected to their partners during virtual sex. Feeling more connected to your partner may, in turn, help strengthen your relationship.
A few other reasons why you might consider virtual sex, according to Jess O’Reilly, PhD, a sexologist and relationship expert:
If you don’t choose to stick with virtual sex for any particular reason, O’Reilly says you still might try it just to add some variety to your sex life — especially if sex has started to feel monotonous or stale.
Even if you and your partner live together, you can still build anticipation and excitement via texting while out of the house during the day, or even when in separate rooms at home, says Suzannah Weiss, certified sex educator and resident sexologist for Biird.
Tips and tricks
Whether you’re trying virtual sex for the first time with a willing and eager partner or trying to figure out how to bring up the option to your significant other, these expert tips can help.
1. Gauge your partner’s interest
If you and your partner have never tried virtual sex before, it’s natural to feel a little awkward or self-conscious about bringing it up — but approaching the subject with curiosity can help.
One way to ease into the conversation, O’Reilly says, is to use popular culture as a reference.
For example, you might say: “I saw this [phone sex, video sex] scene in [XYZ movie or show] and I thought that might be fun,” and then follow up with, “Have you ever done that before?” or “How do you feel about that? Is it something you might be interested in trying?”
If your partner is open to trying virtual sex, O’Reilly suggests digging deeper into the specifics of their desires. For instance, you could ask:
“Do you prefer phone sex or video sex?”
“Are there certain things you’d like to see or hear?”
“How do you feel about receiving sexy images over text?”
These questions can then lead to a deeper discussion about their interests — and boundaries — around virtual sex.
2. Start with texts or voice notes
Being on camera can make you feel vulnerable or self-conscious. That’s why Frye-Nekrasova and O’Reilly advise starting with texts or voice notes to help you get more comfortable with the idea of virtual sex.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
“I can’t stop thinking about that time we…”
“Later tonight, I’d love to try…”
“How’d you like to see a photo of what I’m (not) wearing?”
You can also try recording and sending your partner flirty voice notes, O’Reilly says, to get more comfortable talking about your fantasies or desires.
A bonus is that with phone sex, you may have an easier time relaxing and enjoying the experience without as much pressure to perform.
3. Consider planning virtual sex ahead of time
While spontaneously having virtual sex can be exciting, you might want to try scheduling it ahead of time when you’re first starting out. Suwinyattichaiporn says this can help you mentally, emotionally, and physically prepare — however you need to.
For example, if you know in advance that you and your partner plan to have phone sex on a particular evening, you can try meditating, taking a warm bath, or listening to soothing soundscapes beforehand to help you relax and get in the mood.
4. Avoid setting lofty expectations
Frye-Nekrasova advises going into the experience simply with the objective of experiencing something new, instead of expecting something specific, like having an orgasm.
“When we approach things with the goal being fun, it automatically reduces pressure,” she says.
Things to keep in mind
Virtual sex may not work for everyone. O’Reilly advises being honest with your partner if you decide it’s not for you.
It’s also a good idea to be specific about the kinds of acts you aren’t comfortable with right from the start. At the same time, feel free to share the things that do excite or interest you. For example, you might decide to skip video or phone sex but continue sexting and sending sexy photos.
It’s also important to consider your trust level in your partner when digitally exchanging sexual photos and videos, Suwinyattichaiporn says. Even if you trust your partner not to share this digital content, there’s a possibility hackers could gain access to it.
To ensure your security and privacy:
Weiss recommends using an encrypted app like Telegram or Signal to exchange messages
Frye-Nekrasova advises using a passcode-protected app to store photos and videos.
You may also want to consider setting some guidelines with your partner around saving or destroying shared content after viewing.
Insider’s takeaway
Virtual sex offers the opportunity to build and maintain intimacy — even from a distance. Whether you and your partner decide to try phone sex, mutual masturbation over video chat, or exchanging sexy texts and photos, virtual sex can bring some variety and novelty to relationships of all kinds and stages.
Although virtual sex does eliminate the risk of unwanted pregnancy and STIs, it does come with a few privacy and security risks.
Be sure you trust your partner before sharing explicit photos and videos, and when possible, consider using encrypted apps to exchange content.
Remember: Virtual sex isn’t for everyone. While exploring this approach to intimacy, maintain an open line of communication with your partner about what you do and don’t enjoy, so you can figure out what’s comfortable and satisfying for both of you.
In 2022, Dictionary.com and the Oxford English Dictionary added 23 words to describe gender and sexuality concepts.
New gender-related words include “enby,” “nounself pronoun,” and “pangender.”
New sex and sexuality words include “throuple,” “sixty nine,” and “simp.”
As people’s understandings of gender and sexuality shift, whether due to cultural changes or scientific findings, so do the words we use to describe them.
This year, Dictionary.com and Oxford English Dictionaryadded new gender and sexuality words and phrases to their pages, giving readers more options to describe who they are, what they desire, and how they show up in the world.
Words that are already popular slang, like “simp,” made the cut, as did the verb form of “sixty nine.”
Oxford English Dictionary additions include ‘TERF,’ ‘stealthing,’ and ‘sixty nine’
Anti-gay (adjective): Opposed or hostile to homosexual people (sometimes specifically gay men) or homosexuality
Condomize (verb): To put on a condom; to use a condom during sexual intercourse, either as a contraceptive or to protect against infections
Demisexual (adjective, noun): Involving ambiguous or amorphous sexual characteristics or activity
Enby (adjective, noun): A person who has a non-binary gender identity; non-binary
Hypersexualize (verb): To make (a person or thing) pervasively, excessively, or inappropriately sexual; to imbue or permeate with intense sexual or erotic
Multisexual (adjective): Characterized by sexual or romantic attraction to, or sexual activity with, people of different sexes or gender identities
Pangender (adjective): Designating a non-binary person whose gender identity encompasses multiple genders, which may be experienced simultaneously or in a fluid way
Sixty nine (verb): To engage with a partner in simultaneous mutual oral stimulation of the genitals for sexual pleasure; to participate in a sixty-nine”
Stealthing (noun): The action or practice of removing one’s condom during sex (or occasionally of intentionally damaging it prior to sex) without the knowledge and consent of a partner
TERF (noun): Transgender-exclusionary radical feminist; typically derogatory term for a feminist whose advocacy of women’s rights excludes (or is thought to exclude) the rights of transgender women
Dictionary.com added ‘simp,’ ‘aromantic,’ and ‘throuple’
Aromantic (adjective): Noting or relating to a person who experiences little or no romantic attraction to other people
Bachelorx party (noun): An inclusive pre-wedding party, often on the night before or in the days leading up to the wedding, and ranging from a night of drinking to a destination vacation (used in contrast to bachelor party and bachelorette party, and intended to be welcoming for wedding participants and guests of any gender)
Demisexual (adjective): Noting or relating to a person who is sexually attracted only to people with whom they already have an emotional bond
Feminine of center (adjective): Noting or relating to a person, especially an LGBTQ+ person, who is more feminine than masculine on a spectrum of gender expression
Hegemonic masculinity (noun): A socially constructed masculine ideal, defined chiefly in contrast to or as the opposite of femininity, and held up as the most prestigious form of manliness in a heteropatriarchy
Heteropatriarchy (noun): A hierarchical society or culture dominated by heterosexual males whose characteristic bias is unfavorable to gay people and females in general
Masculine of center (adjective): Noting or relating to a person, especially an LGBTQ+ person, who is more masculine than feminine on a spectrum of gender expression
Neopronoun (noun): A type of gender-neutral pronoun, coined after 1800, and used especially by nonbinary and genderqueer people, as in English ze/hir/hirs,e/em/eirs, or xe/xem/xyrs
Nounself pronoun (noun): A type of invented gender-neutral pronoun used by some nonbinary and genderqueer people in place of gendered pronouns such as he/himself or she/herself to express a spiritual or personal connection to a specific concept: the nounself pronoun is derived from a word, usually a noun, that is linked to that concept, such as the use of star/starself by people who feel a connection to celestial objects or bun/bunself, derived from bunny, by people who feel a connection to rabbits
Simp (noun, verb): A person, especially a man, who is excessively attentive or submissive to an object of sexual attraction; To be excessively attentive or submissive, especially to an object of sexual attraction
Sologamy (noun): The practice or state of marriage to one’s self
Throuple (noun): Three people who are engaged or married to one another, or involved as romantic partners
Unlabeled (adjective): Noting or relating to a person who does not name their gender or sexuality
From the very beginning, people on the internet have been obsessed with sex.
That’s the argument laid out in a new book by journalist Samantha Cole, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex. Cole digs through early internet history to show how sexual content and communities were part of the internet from its earliest days and had a profound effect on how the online space deals with identity, community, and consent. From identity play on early bulletin board sites to the rise of online pornography as an industry unto itself, Cole makes the case that you can’t make sense of the internet without sex — even if today’s major platform companies would like to.
Content note: This interview describes multiple sexual practices in straightforward language. Readers who are uncomfortable with these topics should use discretion.
The book makes the case that sex was a fundamental part of the internet from the very beginning. Why do you think that is?
It’s just such a part of human nature to want to connect as deeply as possible to other people, whether it’s online or not — and the internet opened up a new venue for that. Suddenly people could be whoever they wanted to be. They could take on these personas that were different from who they were away from the keyboard. They could express themselves in a way they never had before. For a lot of people, that branches out into sexuality almost immediately.
“What level of reality do you want to experience through the internet?”
It’s interesting reading those old message boards where people describe themselves as mythological creators or blobs or whatever they wanted to be. Then they would have these really deep, interesting, philosophical conversations about love and sex and relationships. In many cases, they would meet up and go on dates after that. Sometimes they got married and had kids. I say in the book, there are real people walking around who only exist because these bulletin board systems connected their parents.
There’s an immediate security concern there because you have people adopting pseudonyms to share information that’s otherwise really private. But it seems like, at this stage, the internet didn’t have a ton of tools for keeping your identity private.
Right — just to get in the door of a BBS like this, you had to call someone on the phone and give them your name and credit card info. So it was tangibly personal between you and the admin. Once you were inside, a lot of them would let you use whatever name you wanted, but there were other communities that would demand you use your name. Others would have you put your email address at the end of every post so people could contact you directly. It’s an interesting divide: what level of reality do you want to experience through the internet? But the more sexualized communities really emerged when people were using the internet to pretend to be something they wished they were or wanted to try.
How much does this change when you get into the contemporary internet, built on companies like Google and Facebook that are able to treat sexual content very differently?
It gets really complicated when you go from a single person running their hobbyist bulletin board scanning Playboy pictures to this huge machine of moderators making decisions. People can get really frustrated not having a central person to talk to about what’s happening on this platform that is a big part of their life. So that definitely has been a huge shift. We have these huge monopolies that are just running the show for us now, and it’s hard not to feel like you don’t have any of that control left.
“The conversation is getting more heated because everyone has a stake in it.”
At the same time, these companies are now beholden to payment processors and banks, and so they have to push all of this stuff off of their platform, in many cases, because of those financial obligations. So just seeing that change, it’s hard not to imagine the internet is going to keep getting more sanitized and less sexual.
You describe a lot of early moments of sex panic in a way that seems very similar to what we see now — but then, in other places, the internet seems to have made people more accepting. Do you think the conversation over moderating sexual content is changing?
People are definitely more aware of the legal landscape. If you asked the average person in the late ’90s if they knew about something like the Communications Decency Act, they would have no idea what you were talking about. But now, lots of people have real opinions about Section 230 and are really read up on this stuff. It’s all a lot more visible, and the conversation is getting more heated because everyone has a stake in it. You have so many more people relying on the internet for their jobs, sexual or not. So people are paying attention now in a way that they haven’t been in previous decades
What about the second part of the title, how the internet changed sex? All through the book, you can see people getting turned on to new things or exploring themselves in ways that wouldn’t have been possible offline. Do you think the internet has made our sex lives more specific or extreme?
I think having access to communities of like-minded people can really be world-changing. I researched a lot about fetish and kink communities, and for a lot of people, before they found those communities, they thought they were the only ones. So it’s been really interesting to see that grow up with the internet. Suddenly, you have thousands and thousands of people reading forums about their specific fetish and talking about what they’re into and why they’re into it.
One thing that really surprised me was these forums about how to suck your own dick. People were just trading tips and advice about how to do it, exercises to do. You would never have access to that kind of information without the internet because, first of all, you would never say it out loud to someone, just hoping they were into it. But suddenly, you have access to all these people all over the world who are like, “Yes, I want to trade advice about how to suck my own dick.”
That one was actually too vulgar for the book.
Do you think the internet is creating these desires or just making it safe to express them?
It can be hard to tell. You can definitely discover something new that you didn’t know you were into. Or you might realize you were into it all along, and you didn’t know it.
One of the stories I wrote recently was about people who were into blueberries and blueberrification. A lot of them were into this because they had watched Charlie & the Chocolate Factory when they were kids and said, “Oh, that made me feel a way,” and carried that with them for years without telling anyone. Then they get online, and they see there are a lot of people who also feel this way. That’s a transformational change. It’s not just, “I found this thing I didn’t know I was into,” but also “Now I can really express myself and buy a blueberry suit because I see other people are doing it, too.”
Having that community makes you feel less weird. It’s less isolating. I think that’s a huge part of why people have so much shame about their sexuality and their porn use. They feel like they’re the only one who wants this. When you find out you’re not the only one, that can be revolutionary.
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