A common complaint about sex tech is that using technology reduces the human quality of a sexual interaction. This often gets framed as a factual statement (e.g. “nothing compares to being in the same room, able to reach out and touch your partner”). On the one hand, this statement is true: Nothing that is exactly like that experience. But it’s inaccurate to say that other experiences are less real or less meaningful because they are different. Consider these two interactions between you and a romantic partner:
You’re sitting in a room with your partner, lost in a book or lost in thought. He is talking to you about his day and you are listening maybe 25% of the time. Later, your partner expresses annoyance that you didn’t notice he was being flirty and tells you he was trying to let you know he wanted to have sex.You took a job overseas and have been away from your partner for 3 months. You just got back from two weeks in a rural area without telephone, mail, or Internet service. As soon as you hit a town with an Internet café, you dial your partner up via webcam to see him and talk to him, and tell him you’ve been thinking about him.
How real or meaningful is the face-to-face interaction that you were barely engaged in? What about the webcam chat? How do we evaluate what is human or real in any interaction?
It’s easy to say that it’s technology that reduces the power or immediacy of human interactions. It’s harder to talk about what makes any interactions powerful or immediate. But if we begin with that question, we can move to questioning how we can bring those elements to our tech-based communication.
It’s not that communicating through technology doesn’t have the potential to change the nature of our interactions. It does. But the assumption that tech-mediated change is a bad thing, or a less human thing, needs to be acknowledged as a value-laden assumption, not a proven one.
Just as we might use technology (like email or texting) to avoid direct communications, we can use technology to expand the possibilities for connecting sexually to others, and even connecting sexually to ourselves. But as long as we devalue the potential of that connection, we limit our own sexual possibilities.
