How the sextech of today could reshape tomorrow’s pleasures

It’s pretty darned fun trying to imagine what life might be like 10, 20, or even 50 years from now.

It’s even more exciting to imagine what sex would be like in the future.

So here, based on current technological innovations and social changes, is a playful look at what tomorrow might be like—especially when it comes to the ageless playground of human sexuality.

It’s a new dawn

After a perfect night’s rest—your implanted medications guaranteeing it, customized as they are to your own unique genetic structure—you awake bright and eager for a new day.

Using sensors built into its structure, your home detects your emotional state and either warms or cools your environment to meet your needs. It then preps your morning beverage of choice, perhaps even assembling a breakfast suggestion based on what’s in the fridge.

Your shelves are never really bare, food often being delivered by drones and stocked by your faithful home robot. That is when you don’t want to personally shop at the nearest farmer’s market. If you’re not in the mood to cook, your kitchen can do a lot of it for you: 3D printing a pretty complete meal at a moment’s notice.

To people living a few decades prior, your home might appear both remarkably small as well as starkly minimalistic. Your bed’s sheets are nanofabric, and so stain and scent resistant. Your kitchen is clean and smoothly efficient—as is your bathroom.

There might be art, some lovingly handcrafted items from friends. But most of the walls are bare, because for most of the day you won’t be looking at them.

You’re feeling good

From your nightstand you collect your augmented reality (AR) glasses. French Colonial today, or maybe something Japanese? Your choice: what you want your space to look like will be projected into your vision through the glasses. Sitting down in your smart chair, that automatically adjusts to your body, you greet the day: projected images, streams of text, video chat windows all beamed into your sight.

But today your mind is wonderfully distracted so you reach out into your world of friends—and more than friends. Some are close by, so assignations are just a short bike or autonomous vehicle ride away. Is your or their space too small? There are love hotel spaces available all over. Just pick a style you both enjoy and make a date.

Freedom is yours

Alas, your circle of playmates are all busy this morning. But you get a flirty nibble from someone in Johannesburg; you and their sexual compatibility fluidly compared. Smoothly you learn all you need to about this person’s needs, concerns, and desires.

Consent is asked and received, both of you agreeing for your time together to be monitored by a neutral software package.

So many wonderful choices: perhaps you are your morning playmate would like to share direct neural stimulation? Or maybe you just want to have fun the slightly old-fashioned way? If the former, it’s just matter of activating your neural interface: every sense, including touch, being subsequently delivered directly into your brain

Or perhaps a more physical kind of play? You have the suitable hardware, and what you don’t have you can just make in your personal 3D printer, and when you’re done whatever isn’t needed can just be broken down and recycled.

It’s a new world

You don’t have to go out if you don’t want to—over the net or meeting up with a physical playmate in the area. Your personal android, after all, has all kinds of attachments and can please you in all kinds of ways.

And play doesn’t have to be just play: perhaps you want to work on your relationship skills, or your physical lovemaking techniques? Your bot ? can become whatever you sexually want—but also what you emotionally need.

When your house system reads your emotions, it can do more than just dim the lights or turn on the heat. Stress, depression, anxiety—your android will do everything from rub your shoulders to reach out to others when you need help.

Change your mind, change your body

After your lovely morning romp you decide that a shower is in order. Your house, reading your jubilant mood, tweaks the environment with scents and sounds and maybe even slight enhancements to your augmented reality view of your space.

Your body is whatever you want it to be. Through genetic engineering and various implants your body perfectly reflects your true self. Your health is monitored and carefully—and unobtrusively—maintained by your home and your personal digital assistants. Your body is yours to do with whatever you desire.

Evidence of this is your lunch: guided by your software friends, it is perfectly healthy and balanced just for you—and it tastes wonderful.

Afterward you spend a bit of time working. A little creative work, assisting some artificial intelligence somewhere, or remotely operating some piece of hardware.

Then there’s either your garden or the community one, for when you want to get some dirt under your nails. A friend’s birthday is coming up, as well: so perhaps some time creating something handcrafted to mark the occasion.

Social time as well, and like sexual play, it can either be a short trip away or immediate through your AR glasses. Your circles are varied and vast, from your chess club to those you share your sexual interests. Whatever you decide, it is always a safe space because it is one you have selected that fits exactly who you are. No longer do you have to find a circle of people and hope that it works out. Your agents and home know you so well they can locate just the right place for you.

Be who you are

Night is coming—maybe sleep, maybe more sexual play, maybe more work, maybe anything: it is your choice.

You are not just who you want to be physically. The world is all about self-definition: your sexual orientation, your gender, your beliefs, they are all for you to choose—or change.

The structure of society is equally flexible. Some are married, others are not. Some live communally, others solitary. There are polyamorous households with many, or a few, sharing their lives together. There are BDSM communities with members consensually owning, or being owned, by others. There are those in relationships with their androids or their virtual assistants.

The respect and tolerance is common: treating others the way you would like to be treated. You have to right to live your life but not to tell others how to live theirs,though consent is always clear and respected.

The world has become both vast with possibilities and beautifully intimate through a newfound deep understanding of human wants and needs.

Yes, sleep: dreams of what else might come in even a farther future. But for now it was a good day–with pleasure experienced and shared.

And who knows what the next day will bring?

Image sources: Depositphotos

The post A Day to Come: Imaging What Your Sexlife Might Be Like in the Not-To-Distant Future appeared first on Future of Sex.

When it comes to pleasure, we’ve been and will always be astoundingly creative

As the old saying goes—for the British as well as the rest of humanity—put two or more people together, and they’ll inevitably form a club.  Or, in the case of what we’ll be discussing shortly, an entirely new sexual subculture.  

Taking a page from already-existing erotic fandoms such as MILF fanciers, not forgetting the kink scene’s array of often very specific turn-ons, let’s imagine what sexual subcultures might arise in the coming decades 

Sexbots, artificial companions, erobots, and the iDollators who love them 

It seems only a few years have passed since iDollators went from a few dedicated aficionados to what could now be described as a world-spanning movement.  

Based on its rapidly increasing popularity, it’s easy to picture it branching off into all sorts of unique interests, akin to present-day model train fans. Tomorrow’s sexbot subcultures might be centered on a single manufacturer or a particular design aesthetic. 

Also, like today’s hobbyists, they could congregate at yearly events to share their passions, buy and sell parts, learn how to repair or modify their playmates, or maybe even jump into a full-blown human/artificial companions orgy.

That said, this subculture’s biggest development would be acceptance, a time when iDollators—or digisexuals, as in those who may perfer software rather than hardware partners—are as common and openingly accepted as any other sexual orientation. 

Sexfluencers

Riffing off the latest social media celebrities, we may see the same popularity extended to adult performers—without, that is, the sexual stigma many in the industry still face.  

It might be what we’re already seeing on camsites or when top-tier adult entertainers market their own pleasure devices, though to a much greater degree.

RECOMMENDED READ: Future Love: The Rise of Digital Polyamory

Think trending sex advice experts but without the need to stay hidden behind a puritanical curtain, combined with the encouragement of a physical fitness guru: a subculture devoted to learning everything there is to know about sex—then use that knowledge to then teach others.

Retrosexuals

Analogous to how some enjoy their music on vinyl, cassettes, or 19th-century phonograph cylinders, we could see a subculture of people who prefer sex the old-fashioned way.

I’m not talking about social conservatism but a stylistic predilection for life before virtual and augmented reality, artificial companions, or artificial intelligences—a time that, for them, is aesthetically and erotically stimulating.

As modern-day retro-communities may listen to Taylor Swift on period-accurate gramophones bought on the Internet, they could marry classical sexuality with VR/AR/MR, sexbots, or AI to perfect an illusion of sex before those technologies existed.

The 100 Mile High Club

As the first photographers almost immediately began snapping shots of people in (ahem) the throws of passion and the earliest aeronauts instantly started bragging to their friends about fooling around while a hundred feet off the ground, be prepared to say hello to a higher altitude, and a far steeper-price tag, version of the Mile High Club.

While initially something only true thrill seekers might attempt—without getting caught, that is—if the companies providing suborbital flights or low-earth-orbit hotel accommodations had any smarts, they’d actually support this subculture: Come—and come see the stars!

The Year Of The Sex Olympics 

While the 1968 telefilm of the same name was noticeably dystopic, we might witness the emergence of a subculture that puts a far more positive spin on the idea.

Echoing back to how a large number of fan communities organize races, contests, pagents, and competitions, why shouldn’t it be the same for intimate activities?  

Not sex should ever be thought of as something to be given, taken, won, or lost, but perhaps our erotic olympians would rather emphasize perfecting negotiation skills, respecting personal limits, expanding sexual horizons, and the effective use of birth control.

The best is always yet to come

Whether we like it or not, there’s a chance the sexual pendulum might swing the opposite direction, away from freedom to consensually love and play with whoever or, talking artificial companions, whatever we want towards a world dominated by bigotry, shame, and guilt.

Don’t forget, if history has taught us anything, sexual subcultures can also help drive positive social change.  So don’t automatically assume there’s no way back from the brink. 

Instead, dare to dream of creative, determined, and especially passionate people banded together to oppose intolerance, ignorance, and hate—using their various subcultures to show that consensual pleasure can be beautiful, transformative, and most of all, fun!

Image Sources: Depositphotos

The post Fans of the Future: Envisioning Tomorrow’s Sexual Subcultures appeared first on Future of Sex.

For humanity’s sake it should be a question of not if but when

On the Scientific American Science, Quickly podcast, Kinsey Institute research psychologist Simon Dubé and Shawna Pandya from the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences shared their thoughts on what may have kept researchers from exploring the pros and cons of sex in space.

Something Dubé and Pandya point out is essential to understand if humanity ever hopes to travel to other worlds—and the stars beyond.

A Disney approach

“I think there must have been this rumor floating around NASA for the longest time,” Pandya said when asked why investigating the possible effects of spaceflight on human sexuality is never even discussed, “that if they discussed sex in space, they would go blind or something like that—because, historically speaking, NASA very much took a Disney approach.”

Adding, “There’s stories of proposed research that was quashed, careers that were ruined, because it wasn’t deemed a priority, and it was deemed to be actually quite salacious.”

Thanks for all the fish

Agreeing on the issue is due to space exploration being primarily a governmental and/or military purview, Dubé notes. Technically, space sex has already occurred- albeit with medaka fish aboard the 1994 Columbia space shuttle.

RECOMMENDED READ: Why Do We Need to Research Sex in Space?

As for urban legends of certain astronauts engaging in freefall sexual activities, as far as anyone knows, it never happened.  

“Mark Lee and Jan Davis,” Dubé mentions the most common candidates with the caveat that, “I think I would be hearing from lawyers if I put forth that rumor that it was humans,” then clarifying that sex in space, to date, has so far been limited to those Japanese fish.

Not want, but need to understand

Dubéand Pandya equally advocates the necessity of studying off-world human sexuality and reproductive biology; as Pandya said, though some work has been done, there’s a lot left to understand “because in some cases, gravitational exposure causes, interferes with neurodevelopment, and we observe challenges with development even in mammals, in mice and rats.”

She continues, “In other cases, that is transient. In certain cases, there is a higher rate of offspring death, so we saw that in one of the Biosatellite experiments when wasps were flown to space.”

Dubé believes we should expand our research further, as in “Gynecology, reproductive health, population diversity, having children, raising children, evolution, sexual rights, sexual rights, including pleasure and intersectionality, social justice issue, our sexual responses and behavior.”

A question of logistics

When it comes to actually doing it in freefall, Pandya and Dubé say it may take some getting used to—particularly as Newton’s Third Law might require amorous astronauts to rethink many of our terrestrial love-making basics or risk potentially painfully bouncing around their spacecraft.

On the subject, Pandya put forth Vanna Bonta’s 2suit, which, by holding our couple together, might help prevent such accidental collisions. Inspired by dolphins, astronaut Walter Ulrich proposed the introduction of a third person. As Pandya suggested, “Why doesn’t an astronaut take one for the team so they can all do it dolphin-style in the name of the greater good, so we can copulate in space.”

Ironically, achiving and maintaining an erection in freefall may not turn out to be an issue.  In astronaut Mike Mullane’s book, Riding Rockets, he writes that—for him at least—it acted like space viagra.

Adding my own thoughts, new volumes of the Kama Sutra might have to be written, packed with positions, or perhaps involving a range of specifically designed and engineered pleasure devices based on microgravity physics. 

Maybe one of the biggest changes from earthly pleasures will be not treating freefall sex as a problem to be overcome or adapted to but rather a whole new branch of human sexuality all on its own.

Space is the place

While entertaining to speculate about, the question of sex in space continues to be ignored—as long as the stigma around it persists.  

Which, as Pandya mentions, may soon change: “We’ve seen the rise of the civilian astronaut movement. And so we’re democratizing access to space. And so more and more people are going to want to go to space for fun, for leisure and for pleasure.”

All of which will likely lead to a space exploration milestone, “Someone is going to want to be the first. So we need to think about how we approach sexuality, sexual health, reproduction space in a way that is very considered, mindful, inclusive and ethical.”

Stars our destination

Pleasure is one thing, an extremely big thing, depending on who you ask, but more than anything else, researching human sexuality and reproduction in space could mean the difference between remaining trapped by earthly gravity and loving out among the stars.

As Dubé says, “If we wanna settle another world or establish ourselves and travel long distances and become a spacefaring civilization, we need to deal with reproduction, obviously, but we also need to deal with sex, with falling in love, with the challenges and complexity of human eroticism beyond Earth.”

Image Sources: Depositphotos

The post Out Of This World: When Will Space Sex Finally Lift Off? appeared first on Future of Sex.