What's the Future of Sex?

I’ve thought a lot about the past of human sexuality, but a few years ago, a German magazine (The European) asked me for my thoughts on the future of sex. What follows is adapted from that piece, with some current tinkering. I hope my thoughts provoke some of your own on this fascinating question.

CPR

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When I ponder the future, my thinking immediately parts into streams flowing away from one another, like an indecisive river split by an immovable island. How will things be in a century? It depends, like everything else, on whether or not Homo sapiens find a way to abandon our worship of the false material gods of consumption, exploitation, and profit, and turn the trajectory of civilization away from the self-destruction such gods invite. Honestly, I’m not very hopeful, but I do my best to find a bright side. Perhaps there’s advantage to apocalypse. Some major drama may well be the necessary precursor to our species deciding to live lightly on this planet — or what’s left of it once we’ve finally learned the most obvious lessons. To understand how I can feel essentially optimistic about a post-apocalyptic world, let’s first consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so without the dubious benefits of cataclysm.

First Scenario

An actual sex doll ad featuring our book. Apparently, he reads.

Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will grow ever more sophisticated — even if the subject matter of porn itself remains as primal as ever. There will be three-dimensional holographic images of people doing what people have always done, seemingly right there in the room with the viewer. The fusion of sex toys and the internet will continue, making today’s mutual masturbation over Skype or Zoom seem as innocent and primitive as old issues of Penthouse magazine. Lovers on opposite sides of the world will control each other’s pleasure with the click of a mouse and bring new meaning to “joystick.”

More importantly, sex doll technology will advance rapidly, producing robotic lovers programmed to say the all right things and share the right kinks. Many women and men already find their vibrators and artificial vaginas preferable to the emotional complications, health risks, and financial costs of interacting with an actual human being. As the technology improves and societies continue to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things.

As our advancing technology renders sexuality ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking pleasure in the most efficient, reliable ways possible. Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same increasingly overpowering commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 20th century saw many friendships replaced by Facebook, much of nature supplanted by parks, ocean fisheries decimated by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely resold as tanning salon passes, sexual interaction will be reduced to machined pleasure as human beings become ever more adapted to the mechanistic thought processes that may be corrosive to our species, but which are preferred by our AI overlords.

Gender identity will fade increasingly rapidly as we grow less dependent upon binary encounters with other humans. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.

Reproduction will continue its drift away from the bedroom and into the laboratory. As human fertility continues its precipitous decline, fewer children will be conceived in utero or delivered vaginally. Virgin birth, formerly miraculous, will become increasingly commonplace as intercourse becomes unrelated to pregnancy.

Second Scenario

If this vision of the future strikes you as being a little dark, consider an arguably more positive scenario: major global meltdown. Utter catastrophe. Whether provoked by melting glaciers, nuclear or biological war, economic collapse, asteroid strike, the Ebola virus, the continued popularity of Dancing with the Stars, or a combination of these and other factors, the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for the sexual lives of those who survive it.

Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than power, and a sexuality of intimacy and joy rather than alienation and efficiency. Of course, I cannot bring myself to wish for such a collapse, but if you believe, as I do, that the train we’re on is headed toward a cliff, anything — even derailment — would be better than staying on track.