VICE magazine with the most extensive article on the Fleshlight and it’s history that I’ve ever read. And it is quite a read, but very worth it. What is even more interesting for followers of future sextech, is that also delves into what the evolution of the Fleshlight could portend for the future of male sex toys and sex in general.
It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.
If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.
Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.
Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.
Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.
“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”
She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.
As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.
Read the entire article at : https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5vx8/history-of-the-fleshlight-future-of-sex
