It’s been seven years since academics Neil McArthur and Markie L.C. Twist published their seminal paper on ‘The rise of digisexuality‘. The pair introduced the notion of digisexuality as an emerging new form of sexual identity that was linked to the increasing pervasiveness of digital technology. The first wave of digisexuality had already been established when the authors published their paper in 2017. This they defined as the widespread use of technology to access sexual pleasure through dating apps, webcam girls, and suchlike. Around this time we had the first stories from Japan of men marrying their sex dolls, or in the case of Akihiko Kondo, famously marrying the holographic anime celebrity Hatsune Miku. According to McArthur and Twist, what we were seeing was the emergence of the second wave of digisexuality, where humans were not necessary for a romantic or sexual experience, and an increasing number of individuals saw their sexual identity rooted in technology, rather than flesh and blood partners.
In the years since 2017, we have seen spectacular advances in sex tech. Whilst VR porn hasn’t taken off as many expected, it’s still here, including all the top studios from back then. We’ve also seen the emergence of augmented reality porn, and in particular in its bastardized VR form of ‘passthrough porn’. But the biggest development in the immediate years after 2017 was the growth in sophistication and popularity of haptic sex toys, that allow you to have remote sex with partners or webcam girls, or that synch with porn movies. Sex robots themselves still haven’t appeared, though this may change soon. This is because of the rapid advances in AI over the last couple of years, that have already revolutionized AI sex chat bots, as well as given rise to AI porn.
Yet despite the advances in AI that have led to chatbot companion apps such as Replika becoming massively popular and even mainstream, I see little evidence of ‘digisexuality’ as a self-conscious sexual identity emerging. The second wave of digisexuality is truly upon us, in the sense that there are now hundreds of thousands of individuals, or even millions, who at least partly lead their sexual and romantic lives through technology rather than real people. But evidence of any adoption of a digisexual, or a ‘technosexual’, or similar self-identity seems to be lacking, as well as any kind of visible community that might be necessary for such an identity to emerge within it.
That’s not to say that there aren’t now large communities online devoted to particular sex-related tech. For example, a subreddit dedicated to Replika has 79K members. But there is no comparable subreddit dedicated to AI companions in general. Another subreddit devoted to sexdolls has been popular for a long time, and has a similar number of members to /Replika. This very active community is full of people (mainly men) who appear to be largely gaining their sexual and even romantic satisfaction from sex dolls alone. Likewise with the equally popular dollforum.com, which has close to 100K members. But even in these communities, there seems to be little or no collective sense of identification among their members of being ‘different’. Nor is there any (that I have observed) discussion of ‘activism’, despite sex dolls being subjected to legal scrutiny in recent years, with laws against both ‘child sex dolls’ and ‘sex doll brothels’ being passed or proposed in many places. Further, there is very little conversation outside of the topic of sex dolls. Are men who ‘love’ sex dolls more likely to also use AI girlfriend services, as might be expected? You certainly wouldn’t know from browsing these communities.
Despite the advancement of these major sex tech areas, including VR porn, AI girlfriends, haptic porn toys, and even the promise that AI could soon make sex robots a reality, there seems very little sign of a ‘sex tech community’ forming, let alone digisexuals becoming a new sexual minority. Immersive Porn is one of three major sex tech blogs, the others being FutureOfSex.net and SexTechGuide.com. I enabled commenting on articles a few months ago, but since then I’ve only had a handful of genuine reader comments. I do, however, have to wade through literally dozens of spam comments every day. The same appears to be true for SexTechGuide, whilst FutureOfSex does not allow comments at all.
It’s a similar story on Reddit. I launched two subreddits several years ago, r/ImmersivePorn and r/digisexuals. As of today, the former has just 803 members, and the latter a measly 516. Hardly anybody posts except myself, and very rarely are there member comments. Contrast this with r/fictosexual, a subreddit I came across recently that is ‘a community for people who find themselves intensely and lastingly attracted to fictional characters’. And it’s a thriving community too, with 5.9K members, and regular posts from various members, all of which attract numerous comments and lively conversation.
Such niche and often oddball communities are everywhere on Reddit. Its seems very puzzling to me why ‘fictosexuals’ should be so more numerous than ‘digisexuals’, when hundreds of thousands of people are falling in love with their AI companions. Perhaps it is partly my lack of marketing skills to promote r/digisexuals, but that wouldn’t stop somebody else setting up a successful digisexual subreddit.
Things may be a little more promising in South East Asia, which might be expected given that Japan was certainly ahead of the curve when it came to embracing sex tech, and in China, which not only produces most of the sex dolls sold worldwide, purchases over half-of-them too, and where AI companions are even more popular than in the West. Take for example this popular Chinese online community titled – ‘Love between man and machine‘. It is clearly thriving, and the seriousness and variety of the discussions held there mean that it’s perhaps currently the closest to a true digisexual community, although the members do not appear to identify in this way to any noticeable extent.
As it stands, however, it’s clearly the case that digisexuality remains solely an academic’s description of an increasingly common behavior, rather than an emerging new sexual identity or self-conscious sexual minority.
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