16 replies to this topic

[EVanimations]

I didn't see this as a topic that has already been discussed so I apologize if it's already a thing. If it's not, I'm honestly a little surprised, seeing as how sexual preferences and kinks play a major part of one's psyche and what makes us unique.

So, I saw the Total Recall remake late last night with my friends. That scene with the three-boobed chick? It got me thinking about sexuality in the future. And I'm pretty sure I was the only one in that theater actually thinking...

Quite a lot of movies and literature set in the future portray technologies such as full-immersion VR and genetic engineering as basically giving birth to countless industries based around the sexual fantasies. A couple months ago on Newgrounds there was this flash movie called LUCKY DAY FOREVER that portrays a post-Singularity world in which the ruling upper class's entire civilization is based around fulfilling sexual fantasies. Thought-provoking stuff.

How will the nature of sexual deviancy and pornography evolve in the future? It's already changed tremendously since the advent of the internet. Now, weird people can find entire communities of other weird people with the push of a button and discuss their weirdness together and just be generally weird, and I've got no beef with that unless their weirdness is dangerous.

And sometimes the weirdness is very disturbing and in some cases extremely dangerous to themselves and/or others. (things having to do with murder, suicide, pedophilia, rape, etc.)

Would technologies like full-immersion VR give people a place to vent their sexual deviancy, so to speak, effectively rendering them satisfied as long as they've had their fix?

Or will it leave them lustful monsters whose lives become consumed by their fantasies, like followers of Slaanesh from... ah, whatever. I'll just let that reference hang there.

Could research in psychology eventually lead to a way to rid or cure people of fantasies that disturb them? Would people with destructive fantasies be forced into it?

What about the post-singularity world? Will sexuality be eliminated altogether?

Just some thoughts.

TL;DR: How will the nature of sexual fantasies, perversions, fetishes, etc. change in the future?

[hellgorama]

Alot of the sexual activity will move into the VR realm. There used to be a time when porn came in magazines, the most famou sbeing playboy. Now the internet has rendered such pornography obsolete and it went into cyberspace with pornography being soo accessible that it became ridiculous to charge money for it except for actually physical experience of sex. Trust me you will find the wildest most fucked-up (pun intended) porn in the interwebz that no porn mag could ever HOPE to match.

[EVanimations]

That's what I'm talking about. VR will likely take pornography to the next level when it's publicly available.

Since people are actually able to customize their porn, and feel it, it would bring the ultimate satisfaction to many people. I could imagine people spending their entire lives inside an incredibly fucked-up (ha there it is again) dream.

But what would be the consequences?

[hellgorama]

Well the consequence would be fewer cases of real offline physical sex. Long-term relationships will become a rarity, with the most common arrangement being friends-with-benefits. However, we might start to come across even more cases of mental illness . Heck even a similar situations to the movie "inception" may occur. Like where Dicaprio go to mombasa and the old guy says "people don;t come here to dream they come here to wake up" or when Mal thinks reality is fake and kills herself. Similar cases will occur and might even result in regulation demanding VR have some indicator to indicate that it is virtual and hence fake, or may even get banned outright.

[EVanimations]

This thread wasn't intended to be so much about relationships as it was how untamed sexual perversions (harmless or harmful) will affect futuristic society, and furthermore how said society would encourage them (porn industry, full-immersion VR) or discourage them (therapy, measures taken against sexual predators).

We've talked a lot about how technology will affect people's relationships in the future, just not how it will affect the deep, dark corners of human desire.

Just sayin'.

[kjaggard]

Your likely to get a broader spectrum of malformed ideas about sexual relations that come out. As much as we like to pretend that giving a safe forum for expression of socially unacceptable behaviors eases the urges, what it often does is decrease the self regulation behaviors that tell us that we need to not do that and find other ways of working through the original issues. And they introduce deviance to people who wouldn't have otherwise thought to try that.

Being able to blow the head off zombies in a game might seem a harmless venting, but it's got undertones of training a casual acceptance of guns and puts them in correlation to venting aggression and stress. So while they don't make you shoot people in the head, the idea of somebody shot in the head or shooting when upset is something you become accustomed to.

And then it becomes something harmless, because it's just a game or fiction, and therefore others can watch or participate who might not have had the urge before but they too become accustomed to it. And those types of situations highten stress responses and encourage that sort of stresssing oneself to an excited state and then dumping the stress by killing. It becomes trained behavior.

The reason I mention that is we will likely see it happen with sexual deviants. Frustration, both emotional and sexual, being relieved it deviant ways makes it 'just a simulation' and so they let people tear down the barriers that the need in daily lives to restrain cruel thoughts or bizarre lustful thoughts, and they become permeable 'morals'. Instead of finding resolutions to lonliness, or reasoning out why young looking people appeal more and working out ways to change those patterns it trivializes the issue and allows it uninterrupted access to the human psyche.

And it allows it to spread. Because Toms got this great VR sim of ___ that gets your heart racing when you ___. And when you do this wrong thing... nothing happens, nobody is hurt, tomorrow will be just like yesterday and nobody even cares... accept you got really excited by it. You want to do it again and again. And you do, and you don't feel the moment of apprehension before hand and the worry during and the worry after anymore. And you'd have no issue handing it off to a school friend like a dirty magazine that you snuck into school. It's all fantasy anyway. and when it happens for real it won't be shocking or horrifying, just somebody who got a little carried away.

But I'll make it specific that I'm talking about nonconsentual acts that tend to center around one individuals pleasure and if they ackowledge the other as anything other than a tool it because they want to cause it suffering or fear.

Middle aged women seeking 80 lesbians doesn't really count. It's not most peoples cup of tea, but it's not nonconsentual and it's not abusive. I'm not sure this sort of 'deviance' will change much if at all. It may be that it only allows people to shake their fear of judgment by others and accept their feelings enough to help them engage it meaningful and happy relationships, rather than choosing the next best thing because you don't want your family to know who actually would make you happy.

There's a lot that seems like cross over and just reprasing the same thing, but they are not the same. One is predatory and self serving, the other is better understanding youself and finding companionship.

but theres also just Kink some times. I'd rank that up with silly costumes, and captain kirk meets the alien woman. That's the games played and not the act itself and is mostly harmless. But it can blur the lines if there is an underlying deviance that it disguises as just play, and allows it to become no big deal to do something you know you shouldn't or you should work out in less deviant ways.

It's a complex issue I guess.

[hellgorama]

Your likely to get a broader spectrum of malformed ideas about sexual relations that come out. As much as we like to pretend that giving a safe forum for expression of socially unacceptable behaviors eases the urges, what it often does is decrease the self regulation behaviors that tell us that we need to not do that and find other ways of working through the original issues. And they introduce deviance to people who wouldn't have otherwise thought to try that.

Being able to blow the head off zombies in a game might seem a harmless venting, but it's got undertones of training a casual acceptance of guns and puts them in correlation to venting aggression and stress. So while they don't make you shoot people in the head, the idea of somebody shot in the head or shooting when upset is something you become accustomed to.

And then it becomes something harmless, because it's just a game or fiction, and therefore others can watch or participate who might not have had the urge before but they too become accustomed to it. And those types of situations highten stress responses and encourage that sort of stresssing oneself to an excited state and then dumping the stress by killing. It becomes trained behavior.

The reason I mention that is we will likely see it happen with sexual deviants. Frustration, both emotional and sexual, being relieved it deviant ways makes it 'just a simulation' and so they let people tear down the barriers that the need in daily lives to restrain cruel thoughts or bizarre lustful thoughts, and they become permeable 'morals'. Instead of finding resolutions to lonliness, or reasoning out why young looking people appeal more and working out ways to change those patterns it trivializes the issue and allows it uninterrupted access to the human psyche.

And it allows it to spread. Because Toms got this great VR sim of ___ that gets your heart racing when you ___. And when you do this wrong thing... nothing happens, nobody is hurt, tomorrow will be just like yesterday and nobody even cares... accept you got really excited by it. You want to do it again and again. And you do, and you don't feel the moment of apprehension before hand and the worry during and the worry after anymore. And you'd have no issue handing it off to a school friend like a dirty magazine that you snuck into school. It's all fantasy anyway. and when it happens for real it won't be shocking or horrifying, just somebody who got a little carried away.

But I'll make it specific that I'm talking about nonconsentual acts that tend to center around one individuals pleasure and if they ackowledge the other as anything other than a tool it because they want to cause it suffering or fear.

Middle aged women seeking 80 lesbians doesn't really count. It's not most peoples cup of tea, but it's not nonconsentual and it's not abusive. I'm not sure this sort of 'deviance' will change much if at all. It may be that it only allows people to shake their fear of judgment by others and accept their feelings enough to help them engage it meaningful and happy relationships, rather than choosing the next best thing because you don't want your family to know who actually would make you happy.

There's a lot that seems like cross over and just reprasing the same thing, but they are not the same. One is predatory and self serving, the other is better understanding youself and finding companionship.

but theres also just Kink some times. I'd rank that up with silly costumes, and captain kirk meets the alien woman. That's the games played and not the act itself and is mostly harmless. But it can blur the lines if there is an underlying deviance that it disguises as just play, and allows it to become no big deal to do something you know you shouldn't or you should work out in less deviant ways.

It's a complex issue I guess.

well put. But if VR sex was simply restricted to matchmaking (IE consensual sex with another real person except the sex takes place in VR) would that not reduce the problem. People will still be forced to respect their sexual partner's consent no matter the environment.

[SG-1]

Yeah but people would have AI. Or be able to record a session and post it online for someone to experience.

[Zeitgeist123]

i dont think sex will ever become obsolete in the future, even if we already have the technology to decide when we reproduce or not reproduce. sex will be here to stay, if not enhanced so much that sex addiction will become truly real.

[Alric]

I think the issue here is that you have some sense of sexual deviancy that doesn't actually exist in the real world. What you call deviancy, I would just call individuality. The sense that there is acceptable sexual practices and everything outside of it is weird, is a social pressure to try and force everyone to conform. That social pressure doesn't like individuality and so tries to remove it from society.

I see all of this as a great thing and it promotes people to express their desires and individuality. The reason you can go online and find groups all over that all share the same fetishes is because there are a lot of people who hold those fetishes. If so many people hold the same fetishes then obviously it isn't unusual or weird.

The claim that say foot fetishes are weird is the equivalent of saying people who like field hockey is weird. Okay, maybe field hockey isn't as popular as ice hockey, but that hardly makes it weird or a less legitimate sport. Its an Olympic sport after all, what gives you the right to claim its weird because its less popular in our country? It the same thing when it comes to a fetish. A breast fetish is consider popular and cool but a foot one is weird. Who are you to judge that breasts are acceptable but feet are not? Its entirely arbitrarily based on what society happens to think at any given moment and it often changes with time.

I would say being open about your feeling and desires is far more healthy that repressing everything and pretending they don't exist. If someone has some dangerous fantasy I would rather them be open about it and talk with others and play it out, instead of hiding in the closet and repressing their feelings. Which causes them undue stress, and misery and also destroys their self confidence because they begin to see them self as weird and subhuman.

A stressed out person with poor self esteem who is suffering from society judging them is far more dangerous than a person who is happy and open and full of self confidence. Heck if you are not fearing that people will judge you, you are far more likely to openly tell people of your fantasy. If it really is something bad, then others will know and you can talk it out. If you are forced to hide your feelings no one will ever know until it is to late, and even if you wanted to get help you couldn't because others would terrorize you for trying to get help.

My hope is that in the future we will all be a lot more open with our individuality, our feelings and emotions and everyone will be far more healthy because of it. I think removing the unneeded taboo from sex, and making it into just an every day part of life will greatly improve our lives. I think the idea that people will do nothing but have sex all the time is silly. Most people enjoy doing other things as well, and they will keep doing them. Most people don't have sex at every possible chance. Though if some do, who cares? They are not hurting anyone by having sex for 8 hours straight every day.

Edited by Alric, 20 August 2012 - 09:09 AM.

[EVanimations]

I think most of the reason people keep their fantasies secret for the first several months of knowing somebody is because everyone's first reaction is to make a face and say, "People are into that?! Odd." Whoever said that could have preferences just as strange as the person who confided in them, or stranger...but they're just different.

"I don't find X sexy, why should anyone else? That's weird." -Everyone's reaction to anyone else's fetish. Admit it.

If we can get past this initial reaction of shock and perplexion in the future, maybe people will become more open about their unique preferences and we could move relationships along at LIGHTENING SPEED!!! As well, people with more dangerous and disturbing fantasies would be more willing to seek help.

I think that's what it boils down to.

[MarcusAurelius]

My prediction is that sexual perversions will become more widespread or more widely experimented. But I think perversion or deviancy is a social term to describing something alittle off base or out of step with your chosen social culture. That itself will be challenged completely in coming decades. And I like Alric's take on that its merely an expression of individuality. Much like what art style you embrace or what musical tastes you have.

However Virtual Reality and the constant shrinking of computers and computing power has the potential to drive things more underground. Just think about it. If you are with someone and you are wishing to snoop on what their hidden sexual preferences are, it might be as simple as spying on their computer files or checking their smartphone or what have you. In the future as machines become smaller and smaller and computing becomes ubiquitous, with e-paper and embedded computers in biology, it will make knowing what the other person has hidden alot more difficult to discover. There is a scene in H+ The digital series available on youtube...that touches on this. He is looking blankly into the parking lot ahead of him while his woman is nagging him to get a move on. However he has a momentary lapse because he was busy seeing the game through his Augmented Reality contact lenses. He could of easily just been watching some BDSM movie. Or whats worse a self created world of complete perverted debauchery where only he is privy and can fill it with content of his choosing and authorship.

In todays world sex is a very touchy subject because it often involves two people of generally differing viewpoints having to reach a compromise on how they will navigate around each others sexual leanings. And because it takes at least two to explore sexuality it will always be a charged and sensitive subject. This will be an obsolete consideration when VR and human level AI hits the scene. After that point in our history people will have no compelling reason to have to wait for a potential partner to explore sexuality or "deviant" interests. It will be as easy as donning VR goggles and just going off at your own perusal. Which is why I think relationships will decline in the future, because the sexual motivators will be absent for most people to engage with others. VR will offer more tantalizing opportunities and relationships will become redefined to have a completely different role in society of the future. But I think in a good way because if you remove the sexual motives for entering a relationship then you find yourself a more sane and balanced person for it. In this instance I welcome VR as a gender levelling tool. Whereby men won't be chasing women for solely sexual interests. And women will no longer be able to use sex as leverage in a relationship. Only good things can come from this new social dynamics.

[kjaggard]

I like to open mindedness and tolerance angle too, but there is just some stuff that's bee sexualized by some people that needs to remain taboo and to be caught and fixed.

I've encountered some people who were entirely too open with shit that will haunt me till I die. I'm no delicate flower here, kink away. But things involving force, perminant disfiguring of an unwilling target, explosive devices inserted, blades in the back of the skull ect for the thrill of somebody dieing or suffering while you use them. That shits out there and it'll start to get expressed more and more, and if we aren't there saying that's not even okay to pretend and it's a problem in mindset thatt needs to be adressed before it ruins lives... then we are fucked and there won't be any utopian future or even tolerable one. We'll all be cenobytes from hellraiser before too long as constant exposure begins to eat away at us, shock and horrors warp minds and patterns of neurosis become ingrained norms.

[EVanimations]

That's my primary concern here though.

Violent, destructive, lust-driven monsters eventually being prevalent enough to be a detriment to society.

Again, the hope here is that if people have fantasies that involve them maiming or killing themselves or others, that they will recognize that help is needed, and help will be encouraged.

Which brings me to another point: if someone has an extremely destructive fantasy, what if they could cure themselves of it and replace it with something less harmful, be it through hypnosis or electronically tinkering with the brain? Or at least take therapy to find the roots of their behavior and keep it under control?

I think more research in psychological fields would certainly help.

[Alric]

I know a psychology professor at the collage I go to, who thinks when we get brain implants in the next 10-20 years, that we will be able to cure all psychological disorders. He believes that so much, that he basically tells people who take his class that there is no point is studying psychology from a career perspective unless your goal is to learn the history of psychology before it becomes obsolete.

I think people have a misunderstanding though, in that they believe having a fantasy means you want to do something. It doesn't. You can fantasy about sleeping with another woman, but that doesn't mean you want to cheat on your wife. There is two separate groups of people. People who fantasy about doing something, because something interests them about it, and people who feel some need to actually go out and do harmful things.

People tend to think, that you view some thing a lot you start to like it, and if you keep viewing it then you will want to do it. That is an overly simplistic view and there isn't actually evidence to support that. It is kind of like people who claim if you play violent video games, you will become violent yourself. However there is no connection.

Unless something is extremely traumatic, tons of low level bad stuff doesn't really effect people. If you think about it, that should be pretty clear since tons of people play violent games, and watch violent movies yet never do anything even remotely violent.

[MarcusAurelius]

I think its an apt comparison Alric. As I say too, violent videogames won't necessarily make violent people. If you are a sane rational person who just wants to explore a different side of yourself its not going to be devestating to your psyche. Remember knowledge is power, and sheilding oneself from new experiences just for the sake of a more conservative society is not necessarily a wise thing either.

I am a firm believer that being of a mature and sound judgement should allow any one person to make their own choices in life, and that includes the cornucopia that will be available in virtual life. A society that shuns VR or tries to limit it is no better than those who shunned science in the middle ages, or who find the statue of David an affront to the senses, or any nude sculpture or painting. Just a few years ago there was a case in Australia about a famous artist who did a piece on this young 14yo girl, she had the consent of her parents and it was done tastefully. But the Australian public were outraged, calling it closet pedophilia. And wanted all images removed. This kind of reaction is laughable in more understanding cultures like Italy or Spain. But it just reminds me that society needs to take things into context too.

In the future VR and AI will allow questionable tastes like pedophilia to go unchecked. Is this a good thing? A bad things? There will be no limits on what a machine coupled with the power of a few million human brains can do. Creating such worlds that would make bestiality look rather tame in comparison. But I digress. People just ought to respect each others right to choose. This is paramount I think, as long as we can keep our fantasies seperate from our productive lives then we are good to go.

[kjaggard]

No a violent video game doesn't make you commit violence, and the people who think that was the argument are not understanding. A violent videogame itself allows a person to let down inhibitions against behaviors they spend their time holding back. It's dependant on how much the person adapts to having those filters down and not bothering to restrain impulses that becomes an issue. And it's also an issue in the sense that some people use it as a sort of self medication. Just like alcohol doesn't make drunken assaults happen, but people who drown frustrations and bitterness in alcohol do assault people. The same is true with people who rather than being self assertive at work or working out other means of resolving anger or disillusionment instead self medicate their feelings by participating in fantasy violence. And no matter how much people like to claim it's not real and isn't the same thing as doing it for real, the distinction is usually too subtle for the subconscious mind to make. That's why you heart races when one of those things jumps out and gets you in a game, or while watching a movie. It's all playing on your instincts.

A simple class in sociology and advertising techniques will make you start to realize some things about repetition and habit and ingrained patterns of behavior. Or even just take a martial arts class. Where you perform the same motions over and over and over so that when the time comes you don't have to think 'raise right arm to shoulder level and sweep to the right to block while turning at the waist and using the torso shift to drive a forward punch from the waist by my left hand.' you just respond in a conditioned way under the situation.

That applies to repeated trainings of the mind to respond to stress by destroying or attacking.

Nobody is saying that they think having a fantasy is the same as doing that thing, but what is being said is if your fantasy is to beat somebody so badly that their face swells up because swollen lips would feel so good giving you... then the person who said that has problems. Not because they are doing it, but because the idea pleases them. They are excited by ideas of brutality and cruelty for self pleasure without respecting others.

The fact that somebody has that fantasy at all is the issue because it indicates ways of thinking about things that cross pleasure with violence and doesn't experiance the avoidance that neurotypical brains usually do.

And as far as desensatizing goes, there is evidence for that as well, as you watch early horror movies and compare them to todays. Older ones seem rather tame compared to the gore splattering terrors now. The first friday the thirteenth movie was shockingly brutal and was a legitimate horror movie. It looks like a joke next to things like Saw or similar movies. And we are getting to the point where people can go to see a Saw movie and not be shocked or disturbed. What once was culturally shocking is just casually accepted or even something to laugh at.

Yeah yeah it doesn't mean they are doing those things. That's not the point. It's a destinct change in thought processes that becomes ingrained in our 'personal program'. You've gone from a person who goes about an ordinary life, to a person going about an ordinary life and thinks that a spring loaded steel trap screwed into a persons jaw and set to rip their face in half is funny.

Those patterns of how we vent stress and what we will laugh at become factors when encountering stimulus that eliscite similar sensory input. Laughing at injuries and abusive behaviors toward those that frustrate you are not as bad as the original source... so that makes it okay because it's not as bad. and it's something your brain has encountered hundreds of times before get mad, react; see pain, laugh. It's literarlly in your subconscious memories more often than the alternatives, and this is the first several returns on our google search of our brains about how to handle the situation before us. and generally thats happening in a time and place where the first instinct is the one we go with because we don't have time to weigh the options and question why that occurs to us first.

And add to that the influance of peer groups on unconscious behaviors, and the very real fact that victims of abuse often become abusers themselves without intervention. and that severe trauma and psychological stressors can lead to a psychosis developing as the mind tries to deal with the unacceptable input.

That's why I get pretty serious when it comes to people who dismiss social conditioning as just passive fantasy. A lot of people don't realise the level of social conditioning they carry with them and that while most of it is harmless it can also take take the form of behaviors that negatively affect our lives.

Heres a simple example for you. How many girls have you known in your life that go from one selfish jerk who leaves her hurt and devestated only to go for the exact same jerk in a new skin, over and over and over again. In many cases if you look at the first relationship, or the way the father figure behaved you can see the establishment of thought processes that lead to the instinct of 'oh, I like him, he's what I need.' because having that type of person there in their life is part of their self identity. It's not a logical or conscious thing it's a 'feeling of something being off' thing until you find the peice that completes how your life patterns are used to being.

And if your life patterns are about mugging hookers with tire irons to get money in a game because that's some compensation for your inability to get ahead in the real world... eventually you will find that your frustrations in the real world will go unresolved because your pattern isn't complete and so you feel not quite right and you have impulse control issues.