What they foresaw, didn’t see coming, and what might be yet to come

More than half a century ago, while visiting a San Francisco Bay Area Science Fiction convention, the adult magazine Sexscope [NSFW] asked a panel of highly respected writers to share their thoughts on how social and technological changes might change the face of sex and human intimacy in the years ahead.

Though many of the writers’ forecasts were less-than-optimistic—reflecting the tumult of the 1970s sexual revolution—Sexscope’s editor however points out that, “Surprisingly enough, our panel came to the conclusion that sex, while a perennial source of trouble, has a great future.” 

“A mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation”

Opening with the above quote from the late Alvin Toffler’s, Future Shock on science fiction’s role in society, Sexscope introduces our experts:

• Robert Silverberg, a Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inductee, genre Grandmaster, and winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards.
• Jean Marie Stine whose underground work of “antipornography,” Season of the Witch, was hailed when it appeared as the first mature blending of science fiction and eroticism. 
• Jack Jardine, whose Agent of Terra books, written under the byline Larry Maddock, were the best-selling science fiction series of their time. 
• Jane Gallion, the feminist literary rebel who wrote Biker, Stoned, and Why Get Married, former editor of the Feminine Response, and a contributor to a number of alternative publications over the years. 
• William Rotsler, a legendary cartoonist, filmmaker, and science fiction writer whose work appeared in Adam, Knight, Galaxy, and many other publications has become legendary.
• Paul Turner, a former ordnance engineer for ballistic missiles, photographer, who also contributed to numerous adult magazines.

“Not the old rules at all”

Though many of the  issues the panelists discussed have become commonplace, this was a time when frank talk was on the rise and a lot of “firsts” were happening.”

After discussing how relationships have begun moving away from traditional gender roles of men working while women raise children. The panelists then began speculating about the shift towards the science of sex and its current and future discoveries:

STINE: Masters and Johnson are finally discovering exactly what goes on during the sex act, which no one ever knew before, physiologically speaking. And as a result of this they’ve gone a long way toward defining what healthy sexuality is, and what impairs it or causes sexual dysfunction, as well as how to cure it. Now there is hope for all those frustrated, suffering millions whose marriages have been one long sexual failure. And freedom from guilt, too—something not to be discounted. They can be free to enjoy their sex lives now instead of later on in life when, if they’re lucky, they get their heads straightened out about sex and get over a lot of their conditioned hang-ups. Because until now, the sad truth is, most people have never gotten their heads together about this, and probably less than one in every fifty is really satisfying or pleasurable to them.

JARDINE: The new people are growing up in an entirely different universe. 

TURNER: The rules are all different today. They’re not the old rules at all. So they’re not going to have to overcome all those hang-ups, because they’re not acquiring them. They don’t have to—they have the means, chemical and mechanical, to avoid having to go through all those traumas.

SEXSCOPE: What do you mean: chemical and mechanical?

TURNER: Contraception. Universal contraception.

RECOMMENDED READ: Futurologist’s 2015 Sexbot Prediction: Laughably off Base or Surprisingly Accurate?

SILVERBERG: The sexual revolution now is something qualitatively different from the sexual revolution of the 1920’s or the1930’s. For the first time there is an absolute separation between sex and reproduction, and that is taking the consequences out of sex, turning it into merely a meeting of bodies, which it has never been before. I don’t mean merely a meeting of bodies, but that anybody, at any given time, is free to do as he pleases without fear of the result. This is something brand new and it is having explosive consequences.

“Sex as media”

Pirouetting away from reproduction, birth control, and how they might fuel sexual liberation in the future, the panels pondered what might happen if the social pendulum should swing the other way:

JARDINE: Somebody had a story a few years ago, “Coming of Age Day,’ by Jorgenson, in which there was an appliance, a living tissue that each person was given on his thirteenth birthday and wore on the genitals from then on, The appliance gave each person a satisfying sex life of his own so there was no need for interaction or contact with other people.

GALLION: Sounds downright unnatural to me. Besides, a thing like that would completely eliminate the aspect of sex as media.

STINE: What does sex have to do with media?

GALLION: It’s a communications device. It’s like words.

JARDINE: Sex is much more than playing skillfully with each other’s genitals.

GALLION: That’s why all these studies, like Masters and Johnson, can only go so far. They teach sex just as mechanics.

STINE: Oh, no. There’s much more to it than that. In the first program they used that approach, but only because no one else had ever investigated it thoroughly

enough to have a clear idea of what really went on. After all, without knowing what it is, there’s no way to start making it better. In the second program, the treatment program, their stated goal was to treat it as communication and to improve the communications system. They sat down with people who had a block against sexual communication in their relationship, and tried to help them learn to communicate on that level. They don’t try to cure the people, they try to cure the relationship. That’s what they say the patient is, not the people.

STINE: I think that one of the taboos we can foresee will be against having more than a certain number of children, and this could be one of the big ones. A guy who fathers six or seven kids could become as much of a social outcast as someone who displays his genitals publicly today. Another future taboo could be that it may become very socially unacceptable not to keep your clap shots up. People may become hung up about venereal disease in a whole new way.

SILVERBERG: That’s not really a hang-up; it’s more like brushing your teeth; it’s a matter of common courtesy. Common courtesy is not a hang-up.

STINE: But what starts out as common courtesy often ends up as a taboo. Don’t forget that in ancient Egypt they had signs warning, “Don’t piss in the streets. That’s what animals do, not what men do.” And it’s no longer just common courtesy not to piss in public anymore, it’s a taboo. And it hangs some men up so bad they can’t even piss in a public john unless they are hidden in a booth. There’s even a specific name for the psychological disorder.

“Exclusive anything is generally a bit pathological”

The panelists next offered thoughts on the evolution of gender and sexual attraction:

JARDINE: There seems to be a trend in the counter-culture towards increasing bisexual behavior. And I think one of the keynotes in the future of sex will be a less gender-oriented sex drive.

STINE: Well, once you take it out of the area of reproduction, you open it up wide because it really doesn’t matter any more who or what or how or why, merely whether or not it feels good.

SILVERBERG: As you move toward a concept of sex as body communication, the more bodies of all sorts that you can communicate with the greater will be the amount of information you take in; and arbitrarily to cut off fifty percent of the possible information flow is something that I think is going to die out when our present hang-ups in that direction, which are very powerful, begin to eliminate themselves. It may become unusual to be exclusively heterosexual.

JARDINE: Exclusive anything is generally a bit pathological. Society itself seems to be becoming less goal oriented than I recall it having been fifteen, twenty years ago… and I suspect that this is slopping over onto sex, Sexual participation is probably increasingly less orgasm-oriented, less looking forward to the con- summation and more concerned with what’s actually happening right now, whenever now is. I agree with Jane, it’s a form of communication, a highly important form of communication. If you really want to get to know someone, that’s almost a necessity, to totally know them, because it’s a form of communication that can’t be done in any other way.

STINE: All of these people enjoying sex, not just having it, not just going through the ritual, but enjoying it and communicating and being close to other human beings, is going to have such an effect on their heads. People are gonna walk up to each other and they’re not going to feel as threatened or frightened anymore.

“Well, we’re living in the future”

Even with fifty four years separating us, it’s fascinating to see the importance of trying to stay positive about the human sexuality’s future:

SILVERBERG: Everything we’ve been discussing so far is really just a small part of what’s going on in the future, right?

JARDINE: Mainly; what’s going on now?

STINE: Well, we’re living in the future, as Dave McDaniel or George Clayton Johnson would say.

TURNER: It’s simply a small part of what’s happening, and sex is going to be affected even further by the technological phenomenon that we’re living in now. A sexual experience is communication at a most basic level. I just don’t see any way to really anticipate that completely. Where we’re at now is the beginning of all that. We’re at the beginning of a complete and total change in all aspects of our lives—sex just happens to be one of them—but it’s really impossible to say what’s going to happen in the future. All we’ve been talking about is what’s happening now, at the moment.

STINE: I think inevitably if we’re going to see increasing sexual activity, we’re going to see increasing combinations, you know, the whole concept of group sex.

It’s not gonna be just little swing parties out in the suburbs, it’s gonna be like four or five people are going to be living together, and one afternoon they’re all going to be sitting down and somebody’s gonna say, “Let’s all go have sex.” Then it’s gonna be this whole writhing pile of bodies, all of whom are communicating seriously and deliberately to each other, and all of them feeling good about it when it’s happening, no guilt, no hang-ups, no inhibitions.

SILVERBERG: That’s a hard act to follow.

TURNER: I’ll drink to that, but not with this water.

SILVERBERG: Even the future of water is deteriorating.

JARDINE: The future of everything is deteriorating, except sex, which seems to be looking up. 

Image Sources: Depositphots

The post Flashbacks & Flashforwards: Legendary Science Fiction Authors Predicted Sex’s Far Future—In 1971 appeared first on Future of Sex.

Surprising what they did—and didn’t—accurately foresee

We’ve always been fascinated by what could be: looking at the present and thinking, “If this keeps up what’s tomorrow going to be like?” And, naturally, more than a few people have gazed off toward the horizon and thought to themselves, “If sex is like it is now, what could it be like in a few years… or a few hundred years?”

Lots of folks love to see what the past thought the future would become, otherwise known as Retrofuturism. The great PaleoFuture’s has done great legwork compiling not just what people tried to predict for technology and society, but also for sex.

So we at Future of Sex thought it could be fun to look at some of these past projections and see which ones were wildly wrong—or even close to being right.

Sexbot marriage by the mid-1990s

Back in the bygone years of the early 1980s—1982 to be exact—Stephanie Mansfield penned a piece called “Android Love of the Future.” She described how hot and passionate android love wouldn’t just be common, but we’d become emotionally and legally connected to robots.

“He comes home every night, grabs a beer and falls asleep in front of the television. You might as well be married to a robot, you say. Well, by the year 2000, you could be,” she wrote.

Arthur Harkins of the University of Minnesota is quoted in Mansfield’s article saying that while there might be a few—to put it mildly—challenges to the idea of human/android marriage, falling in love with your artificial sexbot is simply a matter of time.

He also predicted that relationships between humans and machines could be viewed similar to common law marriages, but unions would not be legal.

Sixteen years later, it’s pretty obvious that we don’t have android lovers or common-law partners. Though looking at the current state of artificial intelligence and robotics, we may be tying the mechanical knot in just a few more years.

That people can become emotionally and especially sexually connected to technology is nothing new. But these days, what with the sensuality being designed into all kinds of devices, it’s not a big leap to envision people preferring artificial over natural ones.

Chatbots, software that can mimic human interaction, are getting better and better at their job practically every day—to the point where the legendary Turing Test for artificial intelligence will more than likely have to be rethought.

Named after computer scientist Alan Turing, an artificial Intelligence passes the test when it cannot be distinguished from a human. According to the BBC, a program created by Vladimir Veselov may have already done this by convincing a wide range of people of its “humanity.”

So while we may not be walking down an electronic aisle with our sexbot partners quite yet, Mansfield’s New York Post piece may not be that far off base. Time will tell, though, if the marriages will be legal or just common law… and who will get custody of the kids.

Civilized adultery by 2000

Sex was on everyone’s mind in the 1970s: the pill, women’s liberation, the birth of gay rights, experimental communes, as well as experiments in sexual group dynamics.

It’s kind of natural then that in 1970 Albert Ellis would have crystal gazed when writing in the book Prophecy for the Year 2000 about a future where polyamory was commonplace:

What I call civilized adultery will exist a great deal more in the 21st century. People will agree with each other, husbands and wives, to have adulterous affairs from time to time quite above board instead of having them secretly behind each other’s backs. They will not get upset about these any more than lots of people in other societies in the past, and present, do not get upset about adulterous affairs.

While polyamory, which according to Wikipedia is “the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships involving more than two people, with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved,” isn’t widely accepted, it is seriously on the rise. Psychology Today (back in 2014) reported that while it’s tough to be precise, there could be as many as ten million polyamorous groups in the U.S. alone.

Recognizing the growing popularity of consensually loving more than one person at a time, quite a few social media venues have started to offer polyamory as an option. The online dating site OKCupid, for instance, now gives members a choice of all kinds of relationship statuses, including polyamory.

Meanwhile, a staggering amount of poly-specific dating sites has also sprung up, including Polymatchmaker,Beyond Two.

So while polyamory hasn’t yet achieved a “people next door” status, we have to give Ellis a very high score on this one. Ten million people, after all, more than qualifies as “a great deal” in anyone’s book.

Arthur C. Clarke on Sex in 2019

Also in the 80’s—though this time in 1986—science-fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke put down his thoughts on the future of sexuality in July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century

Clarke is no slouch when it comes to predictions. Known for scientific realism in his fiction, and thoughtful insights in his non-fiction, it should come as no surprise that quite a few of his visions of 2019 aren’t that far off.

In one part of his book, Clarke describes a sexual personal ad:

Married white female, 40, seeks well-endowed SWM, 18-28, for 3-month intimate companionship. My husband’s hormone treatments (he’s 6 months pregnant) have put him out of commission temporarily. You take care of me; I’ll take care of you. Electrostimulation okay; as is drug-enhanced orgasm, but prefer partner with original equipment rather than implant. Send photo and vaccination certification to Box 2238.
—Personal ad, The Village Voice (July 20, 2019)

Sure, Clarke didn’t get the medium right, as his ad was printed in a paper magazine not the Internet where personal ads more commonly spring up nowadays. But the message in his faux ad is actually pretty accurate—if we allow ourselves some flexibility.

Gender, for example, for many has become less a matter of genitalia and more a form of self-identification. Transgender individuals, choosing to live the gender they should have been born with, have redefined the concept of male, female, or any preferred combination.

Clarke’s pregnant male, therefore, could be seen as a near-miss, prediction-wise: that born-male individuals haven’t yet been able to become pregnant, but male-identified persons with female anatomy certainly have.

Off a bit more are his thoughts of electrostimulation and pharmacologically induced sexual pleasure. Sure, we are getting very close to having direct neuroelectrical orgasms. In fact, Future of Sex has some fascinating articles on the very subject here and here—and researchers are working on drugs that can intentionally generate orgasms, but having both reliably deliver is still years ahead, and most likely to happen after 2019.

The future is yet to come

In the end, we have to give these predictions a close—in some cases very close—but no cigar.

That doesn’t mean, though, that they eventually won’t come to pass. Just not in the timeframe the authors foresaw.

True, we haven’t legalized robot marriage. But we are rapidly coming to a time when software will be indistinguishable from “real” humans. Yes, polyamory isn’t totally widespread. But it isn’t totally rare either. Absolutely, we don’t have biological men becoming pregnant but we do have a wide range of gender options.

Which brings up an interesting point: even though we may not, exactly, be living in what these people thought of as the world of tomorrow, what are the real technologies, social changes, and options that’ll be coming in our sexual future?

Time will definitely tell—and sex will also definitely be there.

Image sources: Depositphotos

The post Looking Forward From the Past: What We Thought Sex Would Be Like in the Future appeared first on Future of Sex.