Interesting article appeared on The Observer yesterday on ‘Sex Robots, Teledildonics, and the Rise of Technosexuals During Lockdown‘. I’d recommend you read it, but here are a couple of thoughts of my own on the subject.
As somebody who markets both sex toys and VR porn (as well as 4K porn etc.), I can vouch that since the lockdowns began early this year, the ‘technosexual market’ has increased substantially, despite supply chains of both sex toys and VR porn (headsets) being disrupted. It does indeed seem that a perfect storm is brewing now, and that ‘technosexuals’ are going to feature more and more in society. One problem on the horizon is of course knee jerk legislation trying to ‘keep up’ with the new tech trends. Currently a bill in the USA is going through that will make ‘child like’ dolls and robots illegal. That in itself might be a good thing, I hear you scream, but how exactly do you define a ‘child like’ doll or robot? Anything less than 160 lbs? Similar calls for deep fake porn to be criminalized recently as a result of an AI security firm’s claims that ‘thousands of deep fake nude images of women are being shared online‘ (including, apparently minors). Now of course, this is a problem, and something that will get worse, but badly thought out legislation can and will impact the development of technologies that can be used to enrich the sexual lives of millions of people, both men and women.
Secondly, I prefer the term ‘digisexuality’ to ‘technosexuality’. Digisexuality is a term coined by the academics Dr Markie & Neil McArthur in their groundbreaking paper – ‘The rise of digisexuality‘. It will be interesting to see which term becomes established. Perhaps there is room for both, with technosexuality referring more to those who see tech as an aid to sex with real people, and digisexuality being more about those who are content to seek sexual satisfaction in purely digital ways without the need for other ‘real’ people – such as with sex robots or AI generated VR porn?
