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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
We test-drive the new, Internet-based, remote-controlled sex toys -- so you don't have to.
Jan 5, 2000 | In 1992, Future Sex magazine envisioned the sexual machinery of the new millennium: the CSex G-Unit, a kind of bodysuit made of sex toys including enormous electronic "simskin dildos" and stimulation helmets. These cyberdildonics suits would let lovers get it on from across the globe, according to the avant-garde publication. You would simply strap yourself into one of these form-fitting love machines and log on to the Internet, and your partner could remotely control sensations that would bring you to a mind-blowing virtual climax. No condoms required.
The story was meant in jest, but it wasn't the first time the world had been introduced to the concept of cyberdildonics. Man has long been fascinated by the idea of machine-controlled sex, from the early medical vibrators of the Victorians (designed to bring a woman to orgasm without a man's fingers) to the virtual reality sex featured in contemporary cyberpunk sci-fi. Progress in sex, as people have envisioned it over the years, seems to equal a vibrating sex toy and a network-enabled remote control.
Fast forward to 2000. Several companies have taken the Future Sex vision to heart. On the Web you can now find sites like Digital Sexsations and SafeSexPlus, which promise the first-ever cyberdildonics kits. These two companies are hawking Internet-controlled sex toys: You purchase one of a number of specially enhanced sex toys and a device that attaches them to your computer, then boot up the included software, log on to the Net and presto! It's "Real Cybersex!" One well-known porn company, Vivid Entertainment, is even building the first-ever full-body cybersex suit -- although the company did not return my phone calls asking to see it. The other two companies were thrilled to send the latest in cyberdildonics.
The boxes they arrived in were discreet: innocuous brown-and-white cardboard packages, sent anonymously and with no hint of the contents. No one would know that hidden under layers of Styrofoam peanuts and shrink-wrap were plastic vaginas and enormous purple vibrators shaped like dolphins. They are just like you'd find in any back-alley smut shop, but with an exception -- each toy is enhanced with a little white wire snaking out of the back, culminating in a plug.
The idea is that my partner and I will sit down at computers across the city from each other, log on, and manipulate various sex toys that will bring us to eye-popping orgasms. The reality is quite different. Although our carefully coordinated cybersex never quite happens, I still manage to learn a bit about the feasibility of true cyberdildonics -- and even more about the current state of the virtual sex industry.
Here, for your edification, are seven things you should know about cyberdildonics:
1. The sex industry isn't investing in fancy technology.
The SafeSexPlus kit -- designed by WebPower, a company whose multitudinous holdings include the cybersex network Internet Friends -- consists of a small beige plastic box, shoddily glued together, with suction cups on the back, two light sensors and a port for your sex toy. Boot up the included software, and it will open a Web browser with an image of a square, half white and half gray; affix the plastic box over this square using the suction cups. The idea is quite simple -- using a mouse to control the colors of that square, you will control the speed and actions of your partner's sex toy.
Who would have thought that the future of sex was a tacky little piece of plastic suction-cupped to your computer monitor?
I test out two of these little plastic boxes -- the first one was broken -- and eventually do, to my great surprise, get this makeshift-looking device to work. I turn on the "autopilot mode" and the colors on the little square fade in from black to white, and sure enough, the imitation pearls wiggle in my vibrator (the "Lotus Collection Pearl Driver," from International Supercocks) and the dolphin-shaped clitoris tickler whirs, fast then slow and then in circles, according to the colors on the screen. Then the suction cups on the plastic box slip and it falls off the monitor. I affix it again. It slowly slides down the screen.
Suction cups are not, I dare say, a high-tech or reliable way to ensure an orgasm.
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