Here’s Your Fucking Jetpack: The 00’s & the Sex Future That Wasn’t
me, 02 december 2000, 3 am
The noughties. When it seemed like a fitting moment (and a previously unblogged niche) to hold forth on the future of sex. Which I did, from 2005 to 2008, at Sexerati, and for a half-dozen episodes of a video podcast, The Future of Sex. Which I did before that, accidentally, by falling in with some of the web’s first girl-pornographers, and the first generation of online sex workers, even longer before that. This has been my decade of writing about sex online: from December 1999, when I took my first paying gig as a writer, $2/post to do scene reports on alt.culture happenings for a nascent nudie site (which was doomed from the start, I mean, really, who needed a hyphenated domain name in 1999?), to Valleywag, under Dentonian wage conditions that made living quite brokely in San Francisco and reporting on the underbelly of the web the grandest thing.
The future of sex, if you went looking for it inside of computers, was probably a total letdown. It did not come packaged as a lubricated USB dongle, and it did not come at all. Because if the past ten years of technological innovation have contributed anything to the sexual future of the blood-and-sweat human beings who wrought those advances in the first place, it will prove this: to put so much stock in the the promise of teledildonic fuckbots, we’re leaving most of the world — and ourselves — behind.
Here, then, are the three most overlooked technologies that will deliver us to the future of sex:
Online social networks. What we old school (c. 1999 – 2001) bloggers once pulled off with Notepad, some shabby HTML with hard-coded links, slow servers, and even slower dial-up connections, a new generation (and possibly a second by now) can take for granted every day. Social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace, not to mention those more widely adopted outside the US like bebo, hi5, and (who can forget the Brazilians) Orkut, move once marginal sexual conversations and displays to the next necessary step for a mass movement towards embracing sexuality in our everyday lives. Evidence of our gender identity, sexual orientation, and romantic and sexual partners trickles out in a constant stream in each status update, photo, Like, comment, and friend request we transmit. Over time, the picture of our sexual selves unfurls at a more honest and thorough clip than we could ever have reported one-on-one to the best Kinsey Institute researcher. Add to that socially-networked media sharing websites, like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter (itself defying that category) and Tumblr, and the richness with which we can tell the stories of our sexual selves outpaces our ability to hold ourselves back. And that’s the beauty of it. People who never thought they were “blogging about sex” do it every day. Death to the sex blogger. We’re all fucking on the internet now and there’s no going back.
The near-total mainstreaming of the mobile phone. Mass adoption of mobile phones, especially mobile phones with cameras and web access, has done more to drive sexual expression and the availability of sexual partners to one another, than ever before in human history. Not by way of location-aware services and GPS — just the humble text message, which has been with us since the 80’s, is enough to communicate to who, where, and how you want to fuck. Building out the mobile phone into a proper handheld computer is promising and sexy, but what about the future for those in Asia and Africa, whose 3G and 4G networks came before broadband (which is itself nearly unnecessary now)? When the mobile phone is used by health care providers in field hospitals, when the locations of sexual health clinics and surveys on HIV/AIDS transmission can be sent and tallied via SMS — and when sex workers can swap prepaid mobile minutes for session times — what will the role of the personal computer even be in the global south? If porn drove broadband prices down in the north (which it may well have), how might cell service become an emerging currency itself? Forget sexting. This is the future.
Near-to-free (and if not free, affordable and magnificent) digital cameras. What damaged the smut business more efficiently, the digital camera, or the distribution networks that moved photos and videos around from computer to computer? I’m going with the camera, as a naked girl who started out this decade scanning Polaroids onto her hard drive and hoping for an audience. If we had to go from film, where would we even be developing all those casually nude photos we all have stashed away somewhere — of ourselves, of other people, trophies and lovers and fans and ex’s and friends — and would we even take so many of them? The twin innovation of the flippable view screen on digital video cameras cinches this as the decade of autoerotic documentation. If we could put a gesture in the Smithsonian, it would be the camera-in-my-hand-30-degrees-to-the-side-and-above position for self portraiture. Now take your clothes off. Now you’ve killed pornography.
There’s nothing pneumatic or long-distance-controlled about it. No AI and no wetware. It’s as simple as what you can do with what’s already close to your warm little thigh right now.
No, the future of sex is not using MMS to send a mobile phone video of you whacking off to another mobile phone video that you ‘accidentally’ post to that Tumblr blog you forgot was auto-crossposting to Facebook and Twitter.
It’s what you do with yourself after everyone sees it.
And when someone returns the favor.
