Can the awkwardness of modern dating be escaped by moving one step further into the virtual? Not sex with someone you know, or sex with someone you don't know – but sex with someone you will never know? A site called Red Light Center has anything up to two million users. It's a massive multiplayer online reality (an MMO), like Second Life or World Of Warcraft, only with blaring hair-rock and a 1990s Vegas vibe. It is pretty crude on first examination, but is clearly working for the many people who have signed up for an online presence here.
Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays.
"There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.
The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."
Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."
Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?
Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.
"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."
Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."
On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."
Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.
"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."
This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"
Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays."There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.
The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."
Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."
Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?
Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.
"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."
Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."
On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."
Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.
"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."
This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"
by Sam Leith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sara Morris for the Guardian
