AEBN, the makers of the RealTouch virtual sex device, have switched marketing strategy during the last year. Previously they had promoted their product as the world’s first virtual sex machine – a masturbation toy for men to use with porn instead of having real sex. Of course, this is a hard sell. There is something in male psychology which makes it near impossible to admit that jerking off is fun, and that you will spend $200 or more dollars to make more fun. There is still a taboo about enjoying masturbation in it’s own right, as a choice preferred to real sex. To the male mind, taking too much enjoyment in masturbation is akin to admitting that you ‘can’t get a girl’. This is why the female sex toy industry dwarfs its male equivalent, even though men clearly masturbate as much as women do.
Thus over the course of 2011, AEBN switched from marketing the RealTouch as a substitute for sex, to an aid to sex. They now market it as a penis developer and a stamina trainer, as much as a virtual sex toy. But shortly, there is going to be a new dimension added to the RealTouch. Not only will RealTouch users be able to use their toy in conjunction with haptic encoded porn scenes, they will be able to enjoy live virtual sex.
This will be with live females using a special RealTouch ‘input device’ rather like a dildo. Apparently, webcam perfomers will, after all, be using these devices to offer live virtual sex with RealTouch users. But currently, AEBN are marketing this new feature of their device as a aid to lovers who are having a long distance relationships and cannot have physical sex together. To highlight this in the most dramatic way they have released press releases detailing their intention to offer a thousand of their sex toys to soldiers serving in Afghanistan to enable them to enjoy virtual sex with their partners back home in the USA.
LAS VEGAS—RealTouch wants to bring teledildonics to Afghanistan. Company manager Scott Rinaldo, appearing at a CES party sponsored by porn firm Pink Visual, said he’s working on distributing “a thousand dildos for the military wives”—in this case, Internet-connected sex toys that can let families thousands of miles apart get intimate.
I’m not sure if he’s being skeezy or sweet here. Let me start with the technology. RealTouch is a slightly terrifying, synthetic orifice that lives in a plastic tube and connects to a computer. Based on data from an Internet connection, the unit warms up, lubes up, pulses and grips any item stuck into it. On the other end of a connection, a “performer”—who could be a paid “cam girl,” or the aforementioned military wife—hand-operates a sensor-covered rod to run the motors in the RealTouch.