The Future of Sex, by Cecilia Tan
By Cecilia Tan. Filed in Writers On Writing |
As an erotic science fiction writer, I get asked a lot about what I think the future of sex is going to look like. Interviewers don’t actually want to know what sex is going to be like in five, ten, or fifty years, though. What makes better copy is to tell them about the “futuristic” sex that people are having now. That will satisfy the prurient interest and also seem “cutting edge” at the same time. And “futuristic” really often means “using technology.”
The latest example I’ve discovered of “futuristic” sex happening right now is going on in the < buzzword>blogosphere < /buzzword>, and me being the sexual adventurer that I am, I even tried it. Actually, casting so-called journalistic objectivity and distance out the window… I haven’t just tried it, I’ve been utterly and completely sucked in.
You see, I thought bondage was the ultimate form of geek sex, especially the way a lot of my friends do it, where they engineer and build their own apparatus, and basically can’t get it on without a tool box and a slide rule. Well, get this. I am now having sex regularly that requires me to have a Thesaurus on my desk and the Harry Potter Lexicon open in a browser window.
I’ve been sucked into a Harry-Potter-based online LiveJournal role playing game, in which the “play” happens in pseudo-realtime with characters posting their moves as sequential comments. So for example, one person might post something like:
Draco closed the door behind him and breathed a sigh of relief. Alone , at last. He looked up sharply, though, at a sound from across the darkened room, lighting his wand with an unspoken Lumos.
The other person playing with them might then respond:
Severus Snape had stepped into the study for some quiet, away from the raucous celebration, but when he saw it was Draco Malfoy who intruded on his solitude he smiled. “Mr. Malfoy, we have important matters to discuss.”
You get the idea. There is a game scenario made up by the moderators. Some games have goals (in my current one, the good guys are trying to keep Lucius Malfoy from becoming the new Dark Lord), others are just kind of “let’s see what the characters do.” Of the dozen or so players in my game, every one of them is female.
And every character in the game at this point, save a few minor ones, has “hooked up” with another character. Yes, had live, online sex, though LiveJournal, while role-playing as characters from the Potterverse, via writing collaborative scenes from alternating points of view.
It’s improv acting, erotica writing, and game-playing all at once.
And it is most definitely sex. If phone sex counts as sex, then this must also.
There are tons of these RPGs on LiveJournal, GreatestJournal, and elsewhere, and they are built on every different scenario you can think of, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, et cetera. They’re an easy and engaging way for fans to participate in their favorite universes. And it costs nothing to play. Creating a LiveJournal account for your character is free, and there are no dice, no books, no game pieces to buy.
Making it one of the most creative, best uses of a new non-sexual technology by its users for getting off that I’ve ever seen.
Pardon me, now, but Severus Snape is IMing me right now, trying to suck my Draco into a thread. I must go…