The future of sex is so shiny, I just don’t want to look

On Monday, a duffel bag full of someone’s stinky clothes put downtown into a standstill bomb scare. I know–I had a bird’s eye view of the Transbay Terminal. Forgotten luggage is nothing if not apocalyptic. Then, we had a tsunami scare. Like a harbinger cherry on top of a paranoid sundae, the Great Highway closed for the formation of freakish sand dunes.

It’s like a Californian’s End of Days, but without the rumored devastating olive-oil drought, Biblical nipple-piercing virus of doom, or prophesied hair-gel sanctions from Las Vegas. (The last of which would effectively cripple local government, if not state.)

We seem to be on the edge of life itself, making it no better time than to think that like any other time when there’s a prophetic series of events leading toward world destruction, our sexually charged sci-fi future is just as close as ever. I mean, for frak’s sake, didn’t we learn anything from Battlestar? (Other than, disappointingly, Starbuck is not gay.)

The rule seems to be that if the end is nigh, someone must have had sex with a cylon and we’re reaping the consequences. Yes, the sex and tech conference Arse Elektronika 2009 Sex and Technology Festival starts tonight here in San Francisco, so it seems that we have all the symbolic signs we need. And, we might be wondering when we’re going to start having future sex already and musing about how totally amazing it will certainly be. And we’ll all be thinking the world is lame that we’re not already having hot replicant sex-on-tap right now. The closest we can manage is a good line on cheap used Victoria’s Secret mannequins (the kind with the wonderfully obscene nipples.)

The thing is, we’re already having sex in the future. Right now. It’s just not by strapping on those dorky virtual-reality goggles. Or maybe it is, you hot, pale dork.

Are we having sex in the future yet?

Maybe. Put on your tinfoil hat and think about it: as compared to sex lives in the 1960s, now we can sexually augment our bodies from ultra-realistic breast implants to a variety of sex pills, and even brain implants. It’s important to note that sexual research is not just focusing on problems anymore, but making sex better — pleasure, not dysfunction. Think online fembots, orgasms in a pill, experiments with implantation devices. It’s already here. This has a lot to do with permissiveness, thanks to communication channels like the Internet, but also because the bar for development and experimentation is lower. (However, please don’t believe the Internet videos: the Wii is not yet impermeable to moisture.) But it’s those same pervy hobbyists who will make the first orgasmatron, and they’ll buy all their equipment from Adafruit Industries kits.

The implanted sex chip is not new news, targeting the brain’s pleasure center with electrodes. Oxford University’s neurosurgery professor Tipu Aziz said of the experiment: “There is evidence that this chip will work. A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn’t like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed.”

But Oxford’s sex chip never panned out. Or maybe someone just hated fun. Morten L. Kringelbach, a researcher at Oxford who sometimes collaborated with Aziz and wrote the book, The Pleasure Center (Oxford University Press, 2008), bizarrely warned anyone who would listen that “hedonic experience” may consist of an impulse corresponding to “wanting” and another that represents “liking.” No, not that. Anything but wanting and liking. Oh, the torture. Thus proving that any good research about sex and science is worth trashing with hysterically irrelevant, moralistic value judgments — if only to get a chance to poop in someone else’s future sex Cheerios.

There is some hope in neuroscience: neuroscience is finally looking at sex. Or at least as a way to study part of the brain, though I doubt they’re seeing just how much it informs our experience. The MindHacks examination “Splintered sexuality as a window on the brain,” is an interesting, if better-late-than-never beginning.

On the neuromodulation side: last year, North Carolina anesthesiologist and pain specialist Dr. Stuart Meloy spoke out about using spinal implants to treat female patients successfully with a very intense side effect, that prompted one patient to tell him to teach her husband “how to do that.” Meloy started treating women for sexual dysfunction through neuromodulation– and had success in 10 out of 11 patients. Women who have used the device say they felt as if their genitals were actually being stimulated, to quite realistic effect. He’s angling for FDA approval and estimates the cost to be around “the price of breast implants.”

We’re still obsessed with our pleasure bots: the film “Surrogates” is the new bacon when it comes to scoring with hot robot babes. Except for their awful stripper kissy faces — just give us some old-fashioned sci-fi hookers, please. In “Surrogates” Bruce Willis, who may have had his brain implanted into a willing body, stars as Agent Greer — a police officer investigating a conspiracy to murder surrogates. h+ Magazine tells us:

Never mind your meticulously-tooled, wishful-thinking Second Life avatar — that’s so 2012. In Venditti’s world, only the real Luddite holdouts tool around the meat-space world in their real bodies: Instead, most everybody has a telepresence ticket to ride in artificial bodies called Surrogates, or ‘Surries,’ and it’s unlikely that anybody is what he or she seems. Maybe that blonde hottie club-kitten you’re guiding into the alley for a quickie is really some stubbled, beer-bellied midlifer in Des Moines. Maybe your actual, flesh-and-bone wife hasn’t come out of the ‘bed’room for a face-to-face meal in years because she’s inextricably ego-twined with her own idealized Surrie self.

In Love Thy Surrogate Self? h+ interviews “Surrogates” author Robert Venditti and he describes a deleted scene from his graphic novel where Detective Greer (Willis’ character) requests a “skin job” from a virtual sex worker. They also review the original “Surrogates” (the comic/graphic novel the film is pulled from) and in Sims of the Flesh we find out that Greer (Willis) plays surrogate sex games with his wife, “…we see Greer’s wife waiting for him at home in her new Surrogate body — a trite, stockinged-sexpot-model from a lingerie catalog. He likes it, and she likes that he likes it…” Later, Greer visits a surrogate sex club called Gandy Land. (“When you’re feeling randy, go Gandy.”)

But that’s all very terrestrial. What about sex in space?

If you can do it in six minutes, it could be a possibility within a year. NASA denies rumors about sex in space — even though NASA has no official policy banning it. This means the private space industry is where it’s at, baby. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has stated that sex is not a “priority” for Virgin’s research, but they are pretty up front that sex on a VG flight is inevitable. So skip the foreplay, maybe consider a “third dolphin,” and you may be in business. Um, what? No, it’s not some Second Life sea mammal role-play scenario, destined to be franchised by Kink.com. The going theory is that if sex in space could happen from a pragmatic perspective, a “third dolphin” would need to, er, help keep the other two dolphins from floating apart. Sorry to kill your holodeck peep-show fantasies, but I think it’s going to be like a filthy Sea World up there, kids. In the hypothetical Three Dolphin Technique, a male and female pair off while a third “dolphin” nudges the couple together to avoid dolphinus interruptus. So if your future sex is on a starship, don’t expect privacy. But do expect a threesome with Flipper.

Sex in the future will be Totally Awesome. At least, that’s what those crazy transhumanists keep telling me. Those wacky kids; I have to lock the bar every time they come over. But then they just huff all my stash of computer Dust Off. In the new Fall issue of h+ Magazine, party-animal tech-futurist Ray Kurzwell describes “sex after the singularity,” while others opine about jacking in and jacking off. Which we may or may not want to see. The primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be Awesome Sex. There will be exponentially more sex, with exponentially more interfaces, and with exponentially more measures of pleasure.” With “millions of super computer-generated sex fantasies,” one technologist concludes, “I love the future. Bring it on.”

They also mention something about “Jonthan Coulton’s Inner Squid” that should make us all a little uncomfortable. But in this Fall issue, another technologist asks “what happens when our human genitalia is gone? What will we rub instead?” There’s even a discussion about masochists of the future. (“In a world without suffering, pain may become the ultimate taboo designer experience…”) Ultimately, biological pleasure engineering could see masochists “editing out the nasty bits and enhancing the most rewarding,” while one scientist suggests, “I could make sex suck and staring at painting drying the greatest thing ever.”

There’s also an interview with Martine Rothblatt (transgender co-founder of Sirius Satellite Radio), who believes “In the future, everyone will explore countless gender possibilities along the male-female continuum.” And a report on today’s state-of-the art sex dolls, which can actually perform oral sex (and even come equipped with a G-spot), as well as possessing what one interviewee says are “the most realistic fake areolas I have ever seen.”

Wow, I can already feel the tingly awesome. Maybe we’ll see you at Arse Elektronika this weekend with all the overly excitable singularities. And if you must resist future sex, I suggest that you stop having it right now.