What’s next for sex?

UPDATE: Dispatches from the Canvas8 HQ

In Fiona Duncan’s ‘Who Needs A Body To Have Sex?’, she opens with an excerpt from a G-chat with an online date: “Now, tell me what you want deep down, right now if you could have it.” Duncan rebuts the assumption that what’s screen-based is alienating. “Physicality is ever-abundant in New York,” she writes, “but intimacy and sensuality are still elusive; those things require attention, imagination, presence.”

In the fourth in a series of talks from Future Artefacts and Dazed and Confused, ‘Future Morality’ asked what’s next for sex? And, when it comes to the erotics of crossing the physical-virtual divide, do we get the tech we deserve? Stephanie Alys, chief pleasure officer of London-based sex toy company MysteryVibe, Badoink CEO Todd Glider, and journalist and activist Nichi Hodgson discussed how VR, AR, and AI will affect our most private lives.

Much porn is still centred around the male gaze, and current VR offerings aren’t much different, says Glider. But the market potential for female-centric porn is vast. “Not many industries can say they still have 50% of their market yet untapped,” says Hodgson. Now a $15 billion industry, sex toys have always been about female pleasure; Alys showcased Crescendo, a new adaptive vibrator which hinted at a future where tech would accommodate our bodies and not the other way around. The vibe comes with an app which tracks setting preferences, and Alys envisions sexual data collection as a way to improve seduction. Full integration with a smart home, for example, could anticipate your favourite music, lighting, and devices, making fumbling to set the mood a quaint awkwardness of the past.

The idea of sentient sex robots can make people (understandably) nervous, but a fear of the unknown is a story old as time; when the printing press was invented, people worried that an overabundance of data would be ‘confusing and harmful’ to the mind. IRL contact is resilient; more than making it obsolete, Glider hopes his work will bring people back to healthy, physical sex lives. VR porn can help people experiment without unruly feelings, like post-threesome jealousy or pre-sex party nerves. Currently, 14% of women and 70% of men like to watch sex acts they wouldn’t do in real life, and the success of instructional sites like OMGYes (an ‘encyclopaedia of clitoral touching’) shows how sex tech can be both hot and educational. As new possibilities hit the mainstream, the hope is for increasing openness, bringing acceptance to the centre of how we understand sexuality.

See how businesses are applying insights like this at Canvas8.com

Written by Alex Quicho, behavioural analyst at Canvas8