Things are getting even hotter for the coupling of sex and technology. Adult video games are taking off. Intricate online multiplayer worlds that revolve around sex are blossoming.
“We’re looking at the market and saying there’s a whole lot of violence, and not much sex,” says Brad Abram, president of xStream3D.com, the developer of VirtuallyJenna.com, an online “game” revolving around sex and porn star Jenna Jameson. “I look at it and say, sex is the last frontier in video games. They’ve done shooting to death. You can’t make tennis or hockey much better. Now everyone is trying to do sex.”
The commercial promise is so alluring – and the interest so high – that the industry held its first Sex in Video Games conference in June, in San Francisco.
This new horizon, though, stretches beyond video games and online worlds.
Sex toys, computers and cellphones have formed fresh bonds that thrust the “sextechs” to new heights of carnal ecstasy. Tiring of just chatting in chat rooms? Stimulate your partner – or some anonymous person – from afar, using keyboard commands and sex toys. Want to give your girlfriend a little something extra with that text message? You can.
At Highjoy.com, “You can do everything there you can do at traditional dating sites – put up pictures, search by attributes and locations,” says Amir Vatan, founder and president of the Westlake Village, Calif., company. You also can use video and audio on the site.
But Highjoy.com takes online chatting a step – or maybe a few steps – further. If you buy the sex toys designed for the site, and pay for the service, when you chat with others at Highjoy.com, “you can see them, hear them and have sex with them over the Internet,” Vatan says.
A sex toy – a vibrating “bullet” for women, and a moving “sleeve” for men – attached to one person’s body in Denver can be controlled by another person sitting in front of a computer in Milwaukee, London or even Iraq. Military personnel, says Vatan, are among Highjoy.com’s thousands of customers.
When a woman wears “The Toy,” a small, concealable and wearable device for self-stimulation, her boyfriend can pleasure her by sending text messages. The device has 72 modes of movement.
“It’s designed to connect two lovers, regardless of distance, so they can expand their relationship,” says George Pilkington, sales director for Cool & Groovy Toy Co. Ltd. in Swinford, England. “All of us are apart from our lovers at least some of the time, and we designed it so people would have more fun, smile more, have a better relationship and have more sex.”
Internet trouble
The march of technology – from online pornography to sex games – into American relationships has boosted Lisa Thomas’ Greenwood Village sex-therapy practice, much of which centers on couples.
Internet pornography in particular, she says, “has become a third party in everybody’s home.”
“People satisfy themselves sexually and are doing away with their sexual relationships with their partners, so what I see is a lot of couples who come to me who are in trouble. They haven’t been sexual for a while – weeks, months or years – and now they have to try to become reacquainted with being sexual,” says Thomas during an interview in her warm, softly lit, couch-happy office. “The Internet thing is running rampant and people don’t know how to bounce back from it.”
She’s counseled people who have lost jobs for looking at pornography, and people whose pornography obsessions escalated to exhibitionist acts, like public masturbation. Obsession with virtual erotic worlds could fatten her practice even more.
She used to tell people to unplug the computer, but that doesn’t work anymore because it has become integral to the house. Many clients, she says, must be online for work while they are at home.
One thing Thomas sees increasingly is low desire, she says. She thinks it’s yoked to the Internet.
“I think all of the pornography has created unrealistic expectations,” she says. “They’ve seen all of this stuff that isn’t real.”
But Thomas doesn’t think pornography is entirely bad. The biggest relationship problems stem from stifled communications, not online sex. “It can help couples,” she says. “It can open up their eyes to things to try.”
At Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, pornography enjoys no on-the-other-hand qualifiers.
Douglas Weiss, the psychologist who started the center, says in 17 years of counseling he’s never seen pornography help a couple.
The international success of his center – Weiss is frequently interviewed by media around the world, and appears on shows such as Oprah Winfrey’s – can be tied to the rise of Internet porn, he says.
Weiss, a big, bluff guy from northeastern Pennsylvania’s scrappy steel belt, calls people deep into Internet pornography “sexual anorexics.”
“It’s an epidemic, and hopefully there will be a shift back to sex in a relationship, sex with meaning,” says Weiss during an interview in his office, decorated with an enormous sword and a dramatic painting of horses. “This sex without meaning is really damaging.”
People from around the world come to his squat, off-the-highway beige box to sit with counselors and learn about pornography and addictions. In addition to traditional psychological methods, the centers uses faith-based approaches to minister to people struggling with compulsive sexual behaviors.
“We’re seeing a lot more people getting (hooked on porn) through the ‘Net than ever before,” he says. “It can be their dirty little secret and nobody even knows.”
Even as America flirts more openly with sex and sexuality, however, it still trails behind other industrialized nations, especially in Europe, where the mainstream has “more liberal attitudes toward sex and pornography, and less sex crimes, far fewer crimes,” says Frederick Lane, an author and lawyer in Vermont who writes about the pornography industry.
“The national obscenity laws have been a real disservice,” he says.
Lane’s happy waltz with pornography is common, but it obviously doesn’t describe everybody’s approach to adult entertainment. For as many people like Lane who trumpet pornography’s enlarging role in American culture, others are appalled.
“What’s going to happen if we allow it to continue, unabated?” asks Ellis Allen, a Denver psychotherapist and minister who works with sex abusers. “We are looking at a deeper and more sexualized culture than now, and that is absolutely scary.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
