Way back when, pornography was difficult to come by, limited in scope, and a potentially reputation-destroying discovery should it be made by someone else. Today, sexual entertainment is everywhere, almost literally. Music, movies, advertising, health and wellness, and pretty much any other commodity you can name can be associated with sex and utilize eroticism (or the suggestion thereof) to sell product. As online marketplaces continue to grow with no signs of slowing down or stumbling, and as virtual commodities like NFTs enter the capitalist marketplace in their own way, sex tech and adult entertainment will undoubtedly become even more entwined while moving its remaining foot from the physical world to the digital one.
The unprecedented success and ubiquity of streaming porn services, the rampant dissemination of porn on social media, and the resulting likelihood that a sizable chunk of the people you know are, to some degree, amateur pornographers themselves have all altered how erotic and sexual entertainment is viewed.
After the torrenting boom and its piracy issues somewhat subsided post-2015, paid subscriptions to adult services started showing more appeal. With Netflix, Hulu, and other major streaming services redefining the ways we are entertained, subscription services were back in vogue. This boded well for the adult arena, its struggles to maintain a paying audience dissipating with the new entertainment normal.
Performers took notice of this changing industry state and leapt at the chance to perform on paid and tipped live webcam broadcasts or produce media for release via independent creator platforms like ManyVids and OnlyFans. The porn world would soon be seeing its first genuine megastars born out of this independent end of the business. Before long, direct-to-fan content delivery became just as much a part of being a professional adult performer as shooting for a big-name studio or promoting oneself via titty pics on Twitter.
Expanding the Network
How a star can leverage their personality and popularity for financial and professional gain has become crucially important – sex tech will reflect that in many ways. Get ready for Beyonce-level celebrity for a select few sex-stars – and not the porn performers you’re used to. With the advent of streaming media and indie product platforms, the diversification of porn productions, budget levels and expanding attitudes towards performers of all genders, orientations, and identities, the greater human-sexual network is expanding greatly and opening more and more angles from which to view sexual experience.
As Apple’s iPod became a ubiquitous music-listening device, everyone will soon carry on their person a tool offering observations about their physical state, connected to a network for instant information transfer and feedback. Though many of us already use such tools, their proliferation opens doors to a new style of arousing oneself. A low-level stimulation could be provided to each user according to how successfully they can maintain a given physical and mental state. Wander near a group of people and discover that someone is gently buzzing just like you, someone who’s state and yours are aligned. Whether used for actual social introduction or just a feeling of communal warmth, such tools offer new ways to understand sexual pleasure and erotic needs.
Virtual pornography currently provides the most direct access to VR eroticism and pleasure. Sure, users are largely left to pleasure themselves while enjoying an immersive, often overwhelming experience but the impact of a virtual partner can be long lasting, deeply felt, and, quite frankly, reality-altering. As leading virtual porn site VRPorn.com shows, this form of adult entertainment continues to grow, develop new means of getting viewers off, and strengthening the link between virtual smut and real sex.
The Physical
Bringing loving couples together over significant distances has long been an aim of sex toy creators. Allowing one partner to use a connected toy or tool to stimulate the other doesn’t just give long distance relationships a more physical element but allows for safe physical exchanges with people you’d normally consider a total stranger. If wanking over WiFi doesn’t strike you as particularly sexy, there’s always alternative kinds of partners. Real Dolls shot to notoriety in the mid-2000s, called both a cruel joke on developing minds and a boon to any sexually, romantically, or socially frustrated person looking for companionship. Though Real Dolls and their equivalents still enjoy a level of popularity, the unnerving “uncanny valley” effect can leave some prospective buyers feeling a bit ill at ease. For those, there are myriad other, less confounding options.
Human hearing may involve plenty of psychology, our perceptions of certain sounds tied to preconceived or established mental concepts, but it is primarily a physical phenomenon. Without diving into too much detail about how hearing works, it should suffice to say that each and every one of your stereocilia is responding to stimuli and informing you of how to feel, how to react. Provide these audio receptors with sounds found in the world of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) and many will feel tingles. Provide them with a seductive line from an attractive potential partner and a user’s arousal is basically guaranteed. The value of compelling, accomplished audio in immersive erotic experiences is not to be dismissed. More adult applications will place a heightened importance on audio to bring users a greater feeling of satisfaction and intimacy.
Coupled with an accomplished chat bot like Replika, a companion AI developed by San Francisco-based Luka, and given a distinct audio voiceprint, this kind of audio-enhanced communication could do wonders for maintaining an intimate relationship with an AI during daily activities. In his 2013 cinematic love story Her, Spike Jonze created a character, an AI operating system named Samantha, whose voice was crucial to her effectiveness and acceptance.
The Virtual
Stepping into VR to meet a sexual partner may sound far-fetched and doomed to disappoint – but things are changing. Virtual conversation partners, online flirting and sex chat with non-human intelligences are not only becoming more commonplace but harder to distinguish from interactions with genuine human operators. Virtual chat rooms proliferate with many offering an adults-only arena in. which to meet, converse, and play. With customizable avatars at the center of these environments, users can manifest their ideal or fantasy self and let it loose on a virtual social scene. This is not a great leap from any more mainstream use of avatars and chat rooms or apps, but it does highlight how mainstream entertainment and adult-use entertainment remain forever entwined.
Meet Me in the Metaverse
With Facebook’s recent conversion to Meta Platforms and refocus on creating a “metaverse” offering users a wide, theoretically limitless range of virtual experiences absolutely helps lay out the groundwork for an adults-only version of the same. Sure, Meta is notoriously anti-porn and won’t be launching an 18-and-over metaverse anytime soon… but someone else will. Whether your next partner appears from such a virtual world, crosses over into yours by pleasuring you physically, and negates your need for real human contact remains to be seen.
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