Pleasure in the Massage, 360, Natal, e-romance. Is this the Next Step?

The issue of sex is all around us in various forms and faces but we don’t really talk about it frankly. The vulgarization of sex has been happening for a long time and while it typically makes it in to dystopian books of the future as something horrific, it continues unabated in much the same way that race, ethnicity, and gender continue down their dark path. This quote on the subject is from http://ofsex.org

Sex in America is a subject surrounded by contradictions and biased concepts. We all know that America is a place at the same time conservative and open in many aspects, and it’s not different when it comes to sex. However, researches prove that deep and somewhat alarming changes are taking place in what refers to sex in America. The so-called sexual revolution was replaced by a constant and increasingly growing vulgarization of sex both by the media and by people in general, in their customs and practices.

Taking unintended pregnancies for instance, it’s alarming the fact that today almost half of pregnancies in America are completely unintended, representing a strong social and economical problem related with sex for the country. A similar problem refers to infections by AIDS and other potentially dangerous diseases transmitted by sex contact. Just taking genital herpes as an example, we have about 45 million people infected in America, with 1 million of new cases adding up each year. When it comes to AIDS, the situation is even worse, as the people contaminated have also to face discrimination and prejudice.

On the other side of the coin, we have the media constantly bombarding youth people in America with soft porn and a highly sex oriented content, either on television, music and magazines. Adolescents are getting the wrong picture of the sexuality in America, as they tend to understand the media giving the opposite message of what their parents and educators try to pass on. Recent researches show that 70% from the top watched TV shows depict scenes containing sexual remarks, with an average of 6,7 scenes per hour. Results may be observed inside our own houses, with our children presenting earlier sexual behavior, first sexual experience rates becoming more and more surprising and in schools, where kids regard practices such as vaginal intercourse or oral sex as common ground, in the school environment inclusive.

From her we move into video games.

Sex in Video Games has been an adolescent nightmare. Lesbians, Leisure Suit Larry, most women in games using sex to get what they want, or perverse depictions of stereotypical media images (criminal black males, addicts, prostitutes, concubines). But, moreso than that, there hasn’t really been an object of sexuality in a video game with exception of the unintentionally erotic Rez Trance Enhancer.

Now, controllers have been somewhat referred to as vibrators since they gained the ability to rumble and that is nothing new but what I wanted to talk about today was Natal, Project Natal, and two Xbox Live Community Games: Rumble Massage and A Perfect Massage. We turn now to E-love. E-Love you could just define as a romance with someone over mostly electronic means that has some sort of romantic overtone. We may never actually meet this person but there is some sort of attraction augmented by feelings of love that may never get to be expressed outside of typing and/or video/Audio chat.

You see online romances becoming more and more common in normal society. As online things have become more sophisticated we’ve been able to kill boars with our e-significant others, hang out in second life and have sex, have sex in The Sims Online, and a wide variety of other sexual experiences. The thing that has been lacking is any sort of physical contact beyond one’s own hand. With the video chat of project Natal and these two games, I have to wonder if this is going to change.

First, Project Natal.

So, video chat on a console with a massage game. Is this the next step in creating a viable, physical online romance? Further, given that:

The fact that most cyber-romantic relationships are also cyber-affairs is a result of the socio-statistic composition of the net population, in which singles are the minority. Of the 9,177 people active on the net (14% women, 86% men), who participated in Cooper, Scherer,Boies and Gordon’s (1999) WWW survey, 80% had a steady partner and approximately 50% were married, which mirrors the situation outside of the net: even today’s hi-tech nations are not “single societies”.
http://www.nicoladoering.de/publications/cyberlove_doering_2002.pdf

I have to wonder what sort of implications these new technologies will have. It’s easy to write off a ‘sexual’ relationship based on masturbation (for some people), but it is quite another thing, even with a controller, to write off an encounter that is sexual in which your partner is brought to orgasm by someone else’s hands, even if those hands never touched that person.

What do you think?