Call for Essays: The Future of Sex
Winter is settling across the northern hemisphere, and to mark the change in season, Futures Exchange is commissioning a series of essays that examine the most popular way of passing these long cold nights.
The Future Of Sex looks at the ways in which shifting demographics, blurring social boundaries, and advancing technology are changing both our attitudes to sex and our idea of what sex is.
The intersection of these drivers and sex is rarely out of the news. This week, British ministers rejected a call to lower the age of consent to fifteen to account for children entering puberty earlier than previous generations. And search engine giant Google and others complied with UK government demands to filter out results of 100,000 search terms associated with child abuse, even though critics argue that a majority of child pornography is shared through private dark nets. The Prime Minister has subsequently announced that the UK’s spy centre, GCHQ, would be tasked with hunting down paedophiles online, and that he would move to ban “rape-porn”.
The makers of Snapchat, a smartphone app arguably designed to facilitate the fleeting exchange of self-shot sex pics, recently turned down a $3bn offer from Facebook. And Ardenturous Labs in California release Spreadsheets, an app that promises to improve your sex life by recording every bump and grind. Do they technologies offer new ways of expressing one of our most basic behaviours? Do they allow others to confine it in their views of what sex should be?
Remember that the Future of Sex is about sex, in all its forms, but only sex. Essays about relationships and reproduction are to be saved for a future date.
Some questions to consider:
- Does the abundance of pornography really alter our impressions of sex? Who gets to decide what “real” sex is?
- Sex has been a driver for many technologies, from VHS to synthetic skin. What’s next?
- Will the rise of multiple drug-resistant strains of sexually transmitted infections provoke similar reactions to the emergence of HIV?
- Does your social web provider know who you’re sleeping with? Can they elicit this from your public data, and if so what are the consequences for privacy?
- Is a render of your naked body a nude photo? As the cost of photorealistic rendering drops, where is the line drawn between an artist’s impression and invasion of privacy?
- Do apps like Spreadsheets place undue emphasis on metrics that can be easily measured, such as physical activity, over ones which can’t, like intimacy?
Essays should be around 800 to 1,500 words.
The collection publishes throughout December.
To contribute, email futures-exchange [at] frankswain [dot] com
