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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
It's a consumer group that's apparently jonesing for Internet-enabled sex toys. According to the Sinulator's makers, 75 percent of the devices are now sold to individuals wanting to use them with lovers or Internet friends. The company says that many customers are men who claim they operate their wives' sex toys from their desks at work.
But do American singles really want to have sex with potential mates in front of a computer? We've gotten pretty comfortable with the idea of falling in love at a virtual distance -- sussing out every little detail about a person before meeting them -- so perhaps test-driving people's bed skills before doing it in the flesh isn't such a reach. Could nothaving online sex with a potential date be considered bizarre one day?
"It's a way to practice your skills, especially for people who are trying to better understand their sexuality," Vatan says. "What's more, it's very safe sex. It's as safe as it comes."
HighJoy, which costs $7.95 a month to join, seems to be gambling that overlapping a socially acceptable technological relationship-building tool (online dating) with one that feels a little more on the dirty side will lend a veneer of OK-ness to the latter. So far, the evidence suggests that it's going to take more time for online daters to jump on the teledildonics bandwagon. Although more than 10,000 members currently use the site, far fewer HighJoy-enabled sex toys have been purchased. A quick search of the site reveals 30 profiles of men with toys and about half as many women. But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of eager test-drivers out there -- you don't need to own a toy in order to tweak someone else's.
After my tutorial from Vatan, I decided to boldly jump into the HighJoy chat forum.
A speedy go-through of the profiles shows a wide variety of people, from swinging middle-aged couples (who blurred out their faces in their photos) to normal-looking women in their 30s sitting at desks, to men proudly baring stiff body parts. Some admitted to being virgins. Others wore crotchless chaps. Each profile has a "back door" -- an optional page where people can describe their sexual tastes: positions, toys, fantasies, etc.
Aside from height and age, my profile had no photo or information in it. All it said was that I was a HighJoy-enabled female. I guess that said a lot, however, because within 24 hours I was bombarded with e-mails from men whose screen names contained words like "stud" and "rock hard." They were all eager to schedule "dates" to help me test my toy.
Before answering, I had to figure out if having virtual sex with a virtual stranger was really something I could do -- even though I'd already told my editor it was. Truth be told, my initial response to teledildonics was unbridled smirking.
An unscientific survey of my female friends confirmed my suspicion that, like most porn, anonymous online mutual masturbation is probably more of a guy thing. Yet I had respect for the online dating pioneers who were using HighJoy to meet and hook up.
Take Greg, 31, an L.A. poet who joined HighJoy after a recent breakup.
"I was looking for something a little different. I felt like I'd already done the whole normal dating-site thing. You chat, you get coffee, you find out they don't look like their photo. It got old. So I went on Google and found HighJoy," he says. "The video, the audio, the sex toys -- it had all the normal dating-site stuff, but then it had those extras and that really intrigued me."
In the last four months, Greg says he's had sex with five women he met on HighJoy. However, none were completely random encounters -- each conquest was preceded by a day, if not weeks, of "getting to know you" conversations, either in private chat forums or over a computer videophone. He even wrote erotic poetry for one of them.
"It's like being at a bar," he says. "You feed off some stuff in their profiles, or you talk about their photos. Then you talk about how you like having sex. I'll usually explain how to use the toy, since I'm kind of a veteran now."
Once Greg has seduced a partner, he sets a scene. "I put on music. I'll dim the lights and put flowers in a spot she can see. I want to create something nice for her," he says. "I want her to feel like it's sexy, not dirty. This isn't pornography to me at all. It's kinky and erotic, but it's also clean and good and safe."
