Once robots become more like humans actual humans will start falling in love with them
Another year another $12 billion in profits from “adult entertainment” in North America. Here are some of the sex trends of note from 2007.
The Fall of Traditional Porn
At its peak the porn industry put out about 11000 new titles a year more than all the Hollywood studios combined. This year however some of the major players in the business like Vivid Video say sales have plummeted by 50 per cent as more and more people turn to making their own porn often sharing it via the Internet. And instead of buying or renting porn in the old-fashioned way people “file-share” porn clips or post them to sites like YouPorn.com (an X-rated version of youtube.com) which gets an estimated 15 million visitors a month making it the 51st most popular website of any kind according to a recent story at thefirstpost.co.uk. As evidence of this growing trend this month Vivid Video filed suit against the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network accusing the company of allowing users to post Vivid’s copyrighted materials on its PornoTube.com website.
Alongside homemade porn the rise of alternative porn is further proof that traditional porn viewing is on the outs. Comstock Films (comstockfilms.com) for example is an erotic movie company that makes in-depth erotic documentaries that focus on one couple and their relationship.
Christian Sex
According to XXXchurch the self-proclaimed No. 1 porn site for Christians (a site dedicated to saving us from porn) 70 per cent of Christians admitted to struggling with porn in their daily lives. Which might explain why Christian sex toy sites like mybelovedsgarden.net and boo22.com and whollylove.co.uk have popped up. Of course as they readily admit on mybelovedsgarden.net there is no such thing as “Christian sex toys” — “they are just sex toys that we are offering to the Body of Christ without all the bad stuff that can and does go along with it in stores and other sites.” The “bad stuff” being of course “the promotion of premarital sex and homosexuality.” But as Cory Silverberg writes in an article about this new trend for about.com “It’s quite possible that the last people a practising Christian would want to buy sex toys from is another Christian.”
Modesty
While Christians are getting dirtier the rest of America seems to be getting tamer. Now that they’re parents Julia Roberts Cindy Crawford and even Brad Pitt have said they won’t do nudity anymore. And this year Wendy Shalit came out in Girls Gone Mild a followup to her 1999 book “A Return to Modesty.” While I agree that young girls today should challenge the images and messages they get about sex and not necessarily try to fit into the sexually liberated “bad girl” image if it doesn’t feel right there is something unsettling about how we continue to make young girls our moral compass when it comes to sex. And why do they have to choose between “good” or “bad” — “naughty” or “nice?” As I said a couple weeks ago can’t we be both? Thank goodness for the likes of Posh Spice who has agreed to appear naked on charity T-shirts designed by Marc Jacobs.
Non-human partners
Ryan Gosling has a relationship with a Real Doll in the movie Lars and the Real Girl and Winona Ryder falls in love with and is seen simulating sex with a ventriloquist’s dummy in the alternative comedy The Ten. Non-human partners were big this year and they’re about to get bigger if you believe David Levy’s forecasts about the future of human-robot relationships in his PhD thesis entitled “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners.” The scholar of artificial intelligence and author of Robots Unlimited (and international computer chess master) argues that current trends in robotics and artificial intelligence mean the leap to humans and robots forming relationships is not far away. In an article this fall in London’s Daily Mail Levy says “robots will soon appear so like humans in the way they look and act in their personality and how they express emotions that many people will fall in love with them.”
Green sex
Don’t want to toss that old vibrator into a landfill? The folks at lovehoney.co.uk will recycle whatever they can of it and donate £1 to a green charity. Given my arsenal of used toys (when you review them for a living they build up) I was thrilled to find a place to recycle them until I discovered the service is only offered in the U.K. (it would kind of defeat the “green” goal flying used toys across the Atlantic). But there are other ways to make your sex life “greener.” VegPorn.com prides itself on being “the first and only adult site made by and for plant-eaters.” For $12 per month visitors can become a member of the site and gain access to more than 3400 pictures of the site’s 34 models chosen not for their looks but for their lifestyle choices of “vegetarianism and veganism.” They also sell all-natural lubricants and books on the subject of environmentally friendly sex. The Norway-based porn website fuckforforest.com uses revenue from members of the site to protect the environment like buying up forestland in Costa Rica to protect it from development.
