Review of the Sexual Interactions Workshop at CHI 2006, continued

Throughout the workshop many of the most interesting questions and challenges came from the workshop organizers who did an excellent job of teasing out some of the denser issues in a way that allowed for more conversation among participants. One of the organizers pointed out that Chris’ project (which in its first incarnation failed completely) is a perfect example of what happens when a designer works from preconceived notions, and doesn’t take the end user and the social environment the technology is being used in, into account. In this case, Chris wanted to design a tool that would monitor physiological data from the bottom, allowing the top to “better” gauge the safety of a scene.

The problems with the project were many, but Chris’ approach was one of openness and flexibility, and he is going to continue to work away at the project in one form or another. For me Chris’ paper raised several issues:

• First I saw it as a good example of how a designer’s sexual values are imposed on the work they do. In this case, Chris was concerned about edge play a relative was engaging in, which he saw as dangerous.
• I was also very interested in the practice of taking galvanic skin response as one form of data that could be collected and then transmitted to a sexual partner. In Chris’ paper he writes that “galvanic skin response is tied to emotional excitement.” I didn’t have a chance to raise the issue of “body betrayal” in the workshop, but certainly this made me think of it. Body betrayal, in this context refers to the fact that someone who is being forced to engage in sexual activity against their will may still experience physiological response like orgasm. The term “body betrayal” is used to distinguish when a body responds as a result of consent and pleasure versus when it is responding without the subjective experience of consent and pleasure. People who have this experience sometimes believe that if their body responded to abuse they must be implicated in some way. This belief is completely false. Body betrayal is a good example of how the body may respond in a way that is completely contrary to someone’s subjective experience at the time.
• Finally, I think Chris’ paper can provide an excellent start to a conversation about how technology can begin to deal with consent. Issues of consent, which are not only salient to conversations about BDSM, are complicated and thorny. I would love to think more about what the perspective of HCI can bring to the generally simplistic conversations about consent that happen in sex studies.

Discussion:
One of the most interesting discussions to come out of this first panel related to a question from the group about youth accessing teledildonic software and hardware. The discussion raised several interesting points:

• Are youth accessing more than just porn on line?
• Are any designers considering this as they create systems for sexual exploration on line?
• We also began to talk about the fact that there is now a generation whose first sexual experiences may be virtual. I would suggest that for most people their first sexual experiences are masturbatory behaviors or fantasies that take place in real life and real time, but clearly for many youth their first interactive sexual experiences may be happening on line. What sort of impact will this have on sexual development? It raises several questions for me as a sex educator as to how virtual realities can both encourage and confound the crucial stages of sexual development.

Panel 2: Pornography

Next Anand Agarawala presented an interface design perspective on browsing porn. The paper, which is really just scratching the surface of the issues and takes an admittedly narrow user starting point (basically the “typical” straight male user browsing for free porn on line) is interesting on several counts.

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