Mike Wilson on creating VR sexual experiences that don’t leave us feeling lonely.

In January, Holodexxx released Episode 1 of Holodexxx Home, a virtual reality experience that allows you to interact with your own customizable “Lady Euphoria” in a “cyberpunk condo” setting. 

With this inaugural episode, the virtual reality startup aims to showcase how it’s using cutting-edge technology to serve a basic human desire for connection, not just sex.

Mike Wilson, Holodexxx’s Chief Creative Officer, told Future of Sex that the project’s driving force is to offer an experience in which users can engage with their “virtual playmates both on an intimate and sexual level.”

“Holodexxx is building up our interactive systems in parallel with the features that advance the Player’s ability to truly connect with our virtual humans. Bridging the virtual with teledildonics, and the latest in AI technologies will be vital in heightening that connection,” Wilson wrote in an email. 

Wilson added this first episode lays the “groundwork” for users to build an evolving connection with the mythical Lady Euphoria, by bringing “real-time 3D technologies into the sex space, namely AI-driven chatbots, and advanced photo-scanned characters.” 

The interactive virtual reality experience features a lifelike scan of adult performer Marley Brinx as Lady Euphoria, as previously reported by Future of Sex. 

In the virtual reality episode, users can control the narrative. They can interact with their customizable model any way they like, and she will respond as best as she can using automated facial animation and lip-synching. 

Respecting models

When adult stars sign on with Holodexxx, a series of their facial expressions are recorded and then used in the Holodexx experience to react appropriately to the users’ movements or actions. 

The models involved still maintain some control over the use of their image since their likeness can’t be used to react in a way they haven’t pre-recorded.

According to a 2016 interview with Mic, Morgan Young, a Holodexxx co-founder, said the company is “casting stars and models based on their willingness and what they’re willing to do on film.” 

Mic reported that if a model is unwilling to be slapped by a VR user, for instance, Holodexxx simply won’t provide the character animation to respond to that action, a method Young said is an effort to avoid exploitation of the model’s likeness. 

Intimacy over loneliness

Holodexxx’s mission is to foster “real connection” with virtual playmates and sees a need for adult entertainment “to become more immersive, and connect with us on a deeper level,” Wilson said. 

We deserve adult content that both titillates us, and doesn’t leave us feeling alone. 

When considering how adult content is often viewed alone, by design or not, it makes sense that Holodexxx is trying to fill the intimacy gap.

“It’s not a secret that watching porn is incredible fun,” said Wilson, “but it can also feel isolating.”

That’s why chapter two of the Holodexxx Home experience, slated for release this month, tackles this challenge head-on. 

According to Wilson,  this next episode will introduce a new video viewing feature that will allow Lady Euphoria to join you while you watch the 2D/180/360 video content of your choosing. 

Providing a partner to watch with—even if she is a VR animation—brings a unique method of bonding to the VR entertainment landscape that is grounded in passivity rather than direct action or interaction. 

“Beyond physical interactions in virtual reality (which are fun on their own) only virtual reality can allow a player to feel a sense of presence with virtual characters,” Wilson said. 

He hopes that this combination of emotional and sexual connection-building through Holodexxx Home will ultimately heighten the experience for its users. 

While the Holodexxx team is “proud of our ability to bring complex systems together to create a realistic virtual character,” Wilson added, the company is working on “continuous improvements” to make her come to life, enhancing her ability to interact and connect with users. 

The technology also uses basic story-telling as a method for connection. Episode two, in addition to introducing new technological frameworks for users to engage with, will also give users more insight into Euphoria’s backstory—seemingly tracking the emotional involvement and intimacy levels that might correspond with a second date, for instance. 

You can view the preview for episode one here, and access all of Holodexxx’s content by becoming a patron on Patreon. 

Image sources: Holodexxx

The post Virtual Playmates Are Designed to Titillate and Offer Intimacy, Says Holodexxx CCO appeared first on Future of Sex.

Fallout from harmful sex trafficking legislation is getting noticed, thanks to activism on and off social media.

At the end of 2019, it seemed that American legislators were finally acknowledging and beginning to reckon with the harms that a bill package known as the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) was imposing on the sex worker community. 

On Dec. 17—the same date as the annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers—Democratic Congress members Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee, as well as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden, introduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act. 

The bill will “require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct the first national study on the health and safety of sex workers,” according to the press release. 

The proposed study comes after two years of sex workers advocating, organizing, and resisting against the impacts of FOSTA/SESTA. The ways in which sex workers pushed back against the online censorship that FOSTA/SESTA imposed on them on mainstream social media sites was the focus of my Master’s thesis research, a project I completed in the summer of 2019. 

The impact of FOSTA/SESTA

The pre-FOSTA/SESTA Internet provided space for sex workers to take control of their labor in a way that hadn’t been as possible before. Sex workers were able to vet clients in advance, control their own advertising, set their own rates, and coordinate safety measures with other sex workers (by circulating lists of known dangerous clients, for instance). 

And yet, it did not take long for sex workers to be subjected to the same stigmas and flawed codes of morality that they experience offline. FOSTA/SESTA resulted in the FBI seizure of the website Backpage.com, where sex workers had long advertised their services and connected with clients. 

It also placed an unprecedented legal onus on the hosts of sites with user-generated content (UGC)—meaning all social media platforms. Companies like Facebook were now legally responsible for any content on their platforms that could be construed as sex trafficking—and social media companies decided to cast a wide net, encompassing sex workers along the way. 

Sex workers continue to fight tooth and nail for their work to be recognized as valid on a fairly basic level, and the attempts of social media giants to eradicate them from their networks is one more reminder that sex workers are viewed as unwelcome, invalid members of society. 

While corporate social media companies and the American government may see it that way, sex workers are a group that is historically steadfast, relying on their communal strength in times of need. 

FOSTA/SESTA represents a new era of that need. As this policy brief reports, in the immediate aftermath of FOSTA/SESTA, a survey of 156 sex workers in Rhode Island suggested that 60% of them were now seeing “potentially dangerous clients” without the ability to screen them in advance online. 

Vice’s Samantha Cole also reported that “exploitative pimps” were now taking advantage of sex workers, as sex workers were forced to return to street work without access to online tools and resources. The risk of violence is much higher for a sex worker on the street in lieu of having the ability to connect with and screen clientele in advance of meeting them, from the safety of one’s home. 

Further, sex trafficking survivors report that sex trafficking victims—the group the bill was intended to protect—are no better off either, as FOSTA/SESTA serves only to push the entire industry further underground, making it more difficult to track the movements of sex traffickers.  

Sex workers making their voices heard

The harmful conflation of consensual sex work and sex trafficking that the enforcement of FOSTA/SESTA has reinforced is nothing new; luckily, neither is sex worker activism. 

Sex workers’ online organization and resistance have roots in sex workers’ long history of community organizing. The tradition of such collective efforts has been kept alive through necessity, as sex workers have faced off with society, again and again, resisting against and responding to efforts to deny them their human right to a safe work environment and their bodily autonomy. 

The sex worker community, as well as survivors of sex trafficking, have been vocal about the harms of FOSTA/SESTA since the bill package was first introduced and passed the Senate in March 2018.

Formally organized collective efforts against the legislation popped up in its wake, including the organization Survivors Against SESTA (the organization is no longer active, but its online presence, including resources, testimonials, etc. remains). 

Beyond such formal efforts, sex workers have been working to challenge individual instances of censorship against them by social media giants including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. A large part of doing so is appealing to their online communities not only for support but for action. 

Some sex workers have found that by mobilizing their followers to inundate Facebook or Instagram’s feedback forms with complaints about the censored material or in some cases, an account that has been deleted entirely, has resulted in the censored material being reinstated.

These individual acts of resistance are grounded in a history of sex workers’ collective self-help and self-reliance. In the face of a society that resents their existence, sex workers have found a great deal of power in their shared identity and experience, supporting each other when no one else would. The communal response to censorship on an individual level simply makes one aspect of this community care visible.  

Such strategies involve a lot of manpower in the form of a dedicated group of followers who are willing to fight for your continued existence on their timeline. While it may have worked in the short term for some accounts, it’s not necessarily a sustainable or long term approach to combating censorship. 

What it does do is generate noise, attention, and contributes to an unignorable (and growing) pile of evidence that FOSTA/SESTA has resulted in the censorship of a group of people because of their public identity as sex workers and the stigmatized social status that earns them.

It is only due to sex worker activism, in the form of collective organizing as well as individual instances of resistance, that the harm this government legislation has imposed is finally getting formal attention through the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act. 

For more on my research on this topic, follow me on Instagram at @sexworkerally or on Twitter at @thisischeIsea 

Image sources: juno mac, juno mac

The post In the Face of Internet Censorship: How Sex Workers Have Made Their Voices Heard appeared first on Future of Sex.

Innovation exploded and changed the way we think about human sexuality. 2020 promises to keep it coming.

Sex robots, remote sex, and more inclusive pleasure—oh my! 

This past decade has taken sex tech out of the shadows and pushed it into the mainstream more than ever before, leading to new breakthroughs and controversies alike. Here, Future of Sex looks back on a monumental decade in sex technology and takes a look at what might be making us roar in the ‘20s. 

Here are our top ten sex tech moments of the 2010s. Because sex tech has something for everyone, it’s in no particular order:

1. Harmony

Just two years ago in 2018, Forbes deemed sex robots “the most disruptive technology we didn’t see coming.” 

While silicone sex dolls have been made since the 1990s, sex robots burst onto the scene in 2017 in the form of Harmony, created by the company sex doll company RealDoll. (There have been, however, other controversial contenders who tried to enter the sexbot space earlier.)

At first, the robotic and AI function that separated Harmony from her still-life peers worked to give her a personality. Harmony remembered birthdays, interacted with her owner and, based on these interactions, learned about their likes and dislikes. 

However, it wasn’t until 2019 that Harmony’s AI expanded beyond her detachable head with the release of RealDoll’s SenseX Sex Sleeve Bluetooth Insert. Harmony can now respond to human touch, allowing an interactive and immersive sex experience in which the user can elicit a response of pleasure from Harmony as the sleeve is connected to Harmony’s head via Bluetooth. 

Harmony currently sells for a base price of $7999 USD. The SenseX Bluetooth Insert retails for an additional $499. 

Up next? 

Like most other AI, sex robots are expected to only become more advanced, more realistic, and more customizable. As the market expands, sex robots will likely become more affordable, and therefore more widespread.

2. Loving for the long-distance era

The 2010s were kind to long-distance lovers, bridging the gap between them one sex toy at a time. 

Through Bluetooth technology, Lovense’s long-distance toys communicate with each other via the Lovense app. The sex toys can be controlled remotely from anywhere, and, if both partners are using them at the same time, the way one partner uses their toy directly correlates to how their partner’s toy will move. 

This long-distance cause and effect is known as teledildonics, and the technology isn’t just for couples. Sex workers such as cam performers have also begun incorporating the two-way responsive devices into their shows, offering a new mode of income. 

Other industry leaders in teledildonics include Kiiroo and Fleshlight.  

Up next? 

Future of Sex predicts a lot more remote sex in the future. 

By 2025, the Future of Sex Report predicts the incorporation of 3D body parts of your partner, complete with sensory feedback, making long-distance sex more realistic than ever. 

It’s also safe to say that with an ever-globalizing society, more people will partake in remote sex.

3. Gender-neutral sex toys

Our conceptions of gender and sex are evolving, so why shouldn’t our sex toys keep up? 

This decade saw sex toys move beyond gender, as a new category of unisex and/or non-binary sex toys emerged. The Crescendo from MysteryVibe offers a bendable and shapeable toy that can provide pleasure for any genitalia, and has won awards for its versatility. 

Up next? 

Expect the 2020s to keep pushing back on our ideas of sex and gender, and for sex tech to respond accordingly. One way this could manifest is with sex tech turning its attention to other erogenous zones, like the simplistic yet versatile Vibe from Maude.

4. Womanizer’s ‘Pleasure air technology’

In 2013, Womanizer challenged the way we think about female sex toys by coming up with an alternative to the mainstay of sex toys—the vibrator. 

As Refinery29 writes, the development of sex tech that explores women’s pleasure in creative and innovative ways is a sign that ideas about female sexual pleasure are expanding, likely due to an influx of female-led, sex-positive sex tech endeavors. The Womanizer brings sex toys for women beyond vibration or penetration and instead uses air and suction. 

Up next? 

As sex tech expands, exploring new technological possibilities such as augmented reality or pleasure implants, standard conceptions of female sexual pleasure will be pushed.

5. Different approach to male pleasure

Made with men with erectile dysfunction or paralysis in mind, the Pulse Solo from Hot Octopuss was created in 2013.

The hands-free, wearable “Guybrator” uses oscillators instead of vibrations and expands male-focused sex tech to account for the fact that for many men, sexual pleasure may not always include an erection. 

Up next? 

Hot Octopuss showed us that sex tech companies are intent on expanding the male sex toy consumer base with creative and inclusive innovation. Expect to see more sex tech address a range of sexual needs and problems, as these issues become less taboo.

6. Sex tech breaks boundaries at CES 

In 2019, sex toy company Lora DiCarlo’s Osé—a robotic massager that combines G-spot and clitoral stimulation to provide its users with blended orgasms—won the Innovation Award in the robotics and drones category at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Controversially, the massager was deemed “obscene” and as such, apparently failed to comply with the show’s rules. 

Up next? 

After the controversy, CES decided to allow sex tech into its 2020 show, lifting a ban on such products on a trial basis. Sex tech breaking into mainstream tech spaces like CES indicates the industry is likely to continue to grow in value, reach, and innovation.

7. Wearable sex tech

While this decade saw the development of many ergonomic vibrators and sex toys that offered users a hands-free approach, the Crave Vesper necklace takes “wearable sex tech” to a literal level, offering vibrating bullets in the form of chic jewelry made of fine metals like 24 karat gold or silver.

While the innovation here comes down to the aesthetic rather than the technology, the creative new use for the vibrator helps de-mystify the use of sex toys and repurposes shame and stigma into a different kind of statement necklace. 

Up next? 

Creative and sleek, expect to see sex toys that you’ll be proud to display on your nightstand. No more hiding in the drawer—say hi to your new decor!  

8. WeVibe’s lesson in privacy 

Of course, combining intimacy with technology can be a scary thing, especially when every aspect of our online data has the potential to be sold without our knowledge or consent.

Standard Innovations—the company that owns WeVibe—should know this better than any, as they were caught up in a class-action lawsuit over their alleged secret collection of WeVibe Sync user data, including their use patterns and frequency.

The creators of the WeVibe Sync, a Bluetooth technology vibe with remote capabilities, reached a $3.75 million settlement with the plaintiffs. The company admitted no wrongdoing. 

Up next? 

Hopefully, the multi-million dollar settlement was a good enough reminder to sex tech companies of the importance of user privacy in the sex tech industry, and we’ll see staunch commitments by industry leaders to protect user data. 

9. Virtual reality porn steals the show  

While VR porn has been around since the 2000s, the 2010s was the decade where it hit its stride and proved that it has staying power in the sex tech scene.

In 2017, the AVN Awards added two new award categories: Best VR Sex Scene and Best VR Innovation, demonstrating that the industry acknowledges VR porn as a competitive adult content offering in the industry.

That year, HoloGirlsVR [NSFW]. won the innovation award. In 2018 it went to a pioneer of the industry, BadoinkVRR [NSFW] and in 2019, NaughtyAmericaVR [NSFW] (none of these sites are safe for work). 

Up next?  

Virtual reality promises further growth and innovation as an industry.

Possibilities exist for blended realities, in which holographic images of performers can be brought into an individual’s bedroom; VR sex education, in which simulated safe sex experiences are offered for instructional purposes; and you might even bring VR into your relationship.

VR combined with haptic sex devices can bring new levels of intimacy into long-distance relationships. 

10. BBC: Better birth control  

Condoms have never been thinner.

This decade saw a race to make the thinnest yet, most pleasurable condom. Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made its debut in the sex tech scene, dividing $1.1 million USD in grants equally between 11 different projects, including an air-infused female condom, a biodegradable condom, and condoms that mimic the feel of skin. 

Leading the industry in recent years, Paradise condoms and Japanese company Okamoto each won the AVN award for Best Condom Manufacturer in 2018 and 2019 respectively. 

Up next? 

While male birth control isn’t quite within our reach, the 2010s showed promising signs of development in the form of topical gels and oral contraceptives.

Could 2020 be the decade that the onus of birth control no longer falls to women in heterosexual relationships?

Image sources: RealDoll Lovense, MysteryVibe, Womanizer, Hot Octopuss, Lora DiCarlo’s Osé, Crave Vesper necklace, WeVibe, BadoinkVR [NSFW], Monik Markus

The post Sex Tech That Made the 2010s Climax appeared first on Future of Sex.

A tale of two genitalia galleries.

When you walk into the Icelandic Phallological Museum, situated in downtown Reykjavik, you are immediately shed of the notion that its founder is unaware of the gag. 

The gift shop is full of cheeky penis-themed trinkets, from penis-bottle openers to condoms featuring photos of Iceland’s most beautiful, and most phallic, natural wonders (think exploding geysers). 

Once you walk past the gift shop, however, the cheekiness gives way to an overwhelming collection of mammalian penises—284 to be exact. The collection ranges in size, housing both massive members from sperm whales to the teeniest little penis you’ve ever seen, one belonging to an Icelandic field mouse. 

The museum’s founder and original curator, Sigurður Hjartarson, has collected many of these specimens himself, a fact which is illustrated by a framed comic of Hjartarson wielding a bloody hatchet while a cartoon whale in the background frowns and holds its fins to its nether regions. 

The purpose behind the museum, according to its website, is to make it possible “for individuals to undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion.” 

The study of phallology has apparently fallen out of fashion, receiving “very little attention in Iceland, except as a borderline field of study in other academic disciplines such as history, art, psychology, literature, and other artistic fields,” reads the museum’s “About” page, an identical blurb of which is featured in the museum itself. 

While you will certainly learn about the variety of penises belonging to all of Iceland’s mammals, (and you might even learn about some of Iceland’s mythical creatures’ penises, too), the museum also leaves an impression of what the penis stands for in Western culture. 

The museum is currently in possession of three human male specimens, though it also features silicone molds of the penises of future donors; men who have signed and witnessed agreements with the museum to donate their sexual organ for display post-mortem. 

These agreements are housed in a small room off the back of the main exhibit, and some of them feature nude photographs of the owners, giving you a sneak peek of what’s to come. (Cough). 

It’s this display of male specimens and those wishing to join the collection that instills a sense of the museum’s identity that up until that point had been shrouded by the scientific manner in which many of the penises are displayed; in formaldehyde, held upright by the vertical plexiglass tubes containing them. It’s exhibitionism, and its visitors pay good money (1700 Icelandic Krona, which is about US$18) to participate as voyeurs. 

You can’t help but think of how this museum is an ode to a real-life version of a dick pic. 

There’s certainly nothing wrong with this. Personally, I was drawn to the museum out of curiosity. I really was interested in the novelty of seeing 284 penises in just one short afternoon. There is pleasure in publicly participating in such taboo voyeurism. 

The penis museum, by existing as a brick and mortar institution on one of Reykjavik’s busiest streets, has used the guise of scientific advancement to make it socially acceptable to take an interest in looking at—and showing off—dicks. 

However, the terrain of Iceland’s penis museum (large pointy peaks and valleys) is put into stark relief when compared to the new Vagina Museum housed in London, UK. 

The Vagina takes the spotlight

Having opened as a full-time institution just in November 2019, the Vagina Museum’s first exhibition is titled “Muff Busters: Vagina Myths and How to Fight Them.” 

Its website references Iceland’s penis museum as sparking the idea. The penis museum is “pretty cool,” reads the “about” page of the Vagina Museum. But, “we were pretty miffed (muffed?)” to find out there was no vaginal equivalent. Thus, the Vagina Museum was born. 

The museum’s mandate, including the goal of its inaugural exhibit, is “breaking down stigmas around the gynaecological anatomy.” 

A press handout from the Vagina Museum provides statistics: “65% of 16-25 year old women say they have a problem using the words vagina or vulva (Eve Appeal, 2016) and over a quarter (26.7%) of 25-29 year olds in Britain are too embarrassed to attend cervical screening (Jo’s Trust, 2017).” 

The Vagina Museum is concerned with destigmatizing sexual health in general, though, particularly for those with gynaecological anatomy, regardless of how they identify as gender. 

Whereas the Vagina Museum concerns itself with fostering a world “where no one is ashamed of their bodies,” Iceland’s penis museum offers a way for men to participate in the ultimate dick pic by indefinitely preserving their penis in the museum and in the minds of all who visit it.   

Iceland’s penis museum takes up a longstanding tradition of celebrating the phallus, as it presents different specimens dried out, stiff, and mounted to wooden boards. 

In contrast, London’s Vagina Museum offers a sex-positive and body-positive look at a sexual organ that women have historically been taught to associate with shame, opening an opportunity for folks of all genders to shift their perspective on and relationship with their vaginas and attached gynaecological anatomy, from periods to pregnancies. 

The difference in the way each museum frames its chosen subjects demonstrates the social standing and significance of each sexual anatomy, highlighting the ways penises are historically celebrated proudly, while vaginas find themselves lacking the attention they deserve. 

Both are finally getting their due. 

Image sources: Chelsea Nash, Angus Young 2019

The post What the Differences Between These Penis and Vagina Museums Say About Sex and Society appeared first on Future of Sex.

Your smartphone and its prudish bias against sexual language.

Try typing “vagina” with your iPhone. It will allow it if you get it right. 

But get it wrong? “Cagina” becomes “carina,” “bagina” becomes “banging,” and so on and so forth—despite the fact that “vagina” is almost certainly used with more frequency in our day-to-day lexicon than “carina”—a ridge of cartilage in the trachea. 

Autocorrect refuses to believe, or accept, that you actually meant to type “vagina” but hit the nearby “c” or “b” instead of the “v.” 

Most of us have encountered the frustration that comes with an impassioned “fuck” being changed into a much less emotionally charged “duck.” 

The man behind Apple’s autocorrect software says that autocorrect is trained to avoid swear words to prevent people from accidentally sending them, (maybe you were actually texting your mom about a duck!). 

While that may be so, it’s evident that autocorrect’s unwillingness to recognize sex-related language is the result of software programmed under the assumption that such language is bad, unwanted, and that your use of said language, even if by mistake, would be so embarrassing that your keyboard must be programmed to avoid such an error. 

Autocorrect algorithms, in particular, are praised for their ability to know our language, know our language habits, and be able to predict what it is we want to say. But when they disallow us from swearing or refuse to acknowledge that “vagina,” or “sex”  might actually be what we intended to type, they are correcting our language, too. 

The subtle way our technology encourages us to use certain language in place of language it views as socially unacceptable is, at best, frustrating and paternalistic. It’s censorship at its most subtle, and it’s grounded in historical social norms that dictate what is acceptable and what is obscene.

With Apple’s autocorrect, “sez” becomes “set” instead of “sex” despite its physical distance from both “z” and “x.” If you misspell “masturbation” as “masgerbation,” hitting the “g” instead of the nearby”t,” your iPhone will not offer any suggestions for the misspelled word. Instead, it will tell you “no results found,” as if the word for the act of self-pleasure isn’t even in the dictionary. 

That’s exactly the problem. 

Autocorrect, like its predecessor, Microsoft’s Spellcheck, are programmed with their own dictionaries. While these dictionaries appear to include words like sex, vagina, and masturbation—as these words aren’t underlined in red when they are spelled correctly—it’s clear that the dictionaries have been programmed to avoid suggesting any sex-related language, even language dealing with our sexual anatomy. 

As I type this on an Apple iPad, it refuses to correct “lacia,” “lania” or “lavia” to my intended word choice of “labia.” In fact, it would rather assume that misspelling of the word “penis” as “pdnis” be corrected to “punishment.” Punishment indeed, you naughty texter. 

This bias is certainly not limited to iPhone’s autocorrect software; there is no shortage of articles and how-tos about how to get Android keyboards to allow its users to swear or use other “obscene” language without hindrance.

The algorithms that automatically sort our e-mail, too, contain similar bias. If your email address or subject line contains the word “sex” or a word related to sex, you might find that you often have trouble emailing new clients, customers, or friends. 

That’s because the algorithm we rely on to sort our mail into the category of either “normal” or “important” versus “junk” or “spam” often determines sex-related language to be the latter.

The fact remains that our technologies’ unwillingness to accept swears and explicit sex-related language demonstrates a built-in bias in the algorithms behind the software; a bias that often makes it feel like your grandmother wrote the code. 

While autocorrect and its Android cousins’ insistence on “clean” language might seem like no more than an annoyance in the middle of your sexting session, the bias behind it is political in nature. It boils down to an age-old debate on what is considered acceptable public language versus what is considered obscene. 

For centuries, sexuality, especially female sexuality, has been considered taboo, obscene, immoral, and in some instances, it’s been criminalized as a result. 

Public speech and art began to be censored on the grounds of sexual obscenity in the mid-19th century in the United States and Britain. At the time, the legislation was controversial and very wide reaching. 

In the U.S. in particular, not only was pornography censored, but according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, so were publications giving medical advice on contraceptives and abortion. 

While obscenity law does still exist in the Western world, it has loosened up significantly over time, allowing pornography industries to flourish, for instance. However, anti-sex principles have followed us into the 21st century and influence the way we interact with our tech. 

Further evidence of this, for example, is Instagram’s insistence on removing posts it considers to be “sexually suggestive,” a policy that has resulted in the removal of pictures featuring period blood, pubic hair, and otherwise deviant representations of female and non-binary bodies. 

When we think about the censorship of sex, or sexually-related content, we typically think of how this affects public expressions of obscenity or sexuality. 

And while public expressions of obscenity and/or sexuality are indeed being actively censored on the Internet, the subtle signals the algorithms in our phones send us bring those moralizing values into some of our most private and intimate interactions. 

Image sources: Chelsea Nash, dana robinson

The post Why Autocorrect Might Be ‘Ducking Up’ Your Sext Life appeared first on Future of Sex.