Last month I prepared my L.A. house to rent out and moved to northern California in 17 days. (The other 10ish were spent out of town working full time onsite hours for day job clients.) Suffice it to say, I’m crawling back to blogging somewhat battered and bruised, but landed in the new place with the DSL set up.
If I were still writing Sex Drive for Wired, I would have written about this story for this week:
Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences
…the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.
A year ago, scientists achieved the illusion of an out-of-body experience in subjects, using virtual reality. The new research manipulates the brain even further - out of itself and into another body.
[snip]
The object of the projects was to learn more about how the brain constructs an internal image of the body and how we come to feel like we are located inside our bodies, a concept called embodiment. The new experiments, the first to move beyond experiments on just a single limb, show that matching of our multisensory and motor signals from the first-person perspective is sufficient for producing the experience of owning one’s entire body…
I have dreamed, and I have deliberately imagined, what it feels like to be in a male body, doing various things male bodies can do with themselves and others. How cool to think that in my lifetime it might become possible to don another body as a matter of course. Because, you know, I’ll be fabulously wealthy and able to afford whatever setup this will require….
It’s the kind of cool techie research that has obvious and multiple implications for sex, but that people won’t want to admit is sexual. The closest they will get is how such technology will help people with disabilities, spinal cord injuries, and the like experience greater sexual engagement — which is important and good and right and I don’t want to belittle it by any means. Yet somehow presenting this kind of research with “oh yeah and it’s gonna be really cool for sex, both cyber and physical!” seems to drive away both funding and respect.
It’s too bad, as sex is a universal human experience that involves mental, emotional, spiritual and physical elements (in varying degrees at various times). The sexual applications of this kind of research should be acknowledged, encouraged and celebrated, if you ask me.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Nobilis // Dec 7, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Speaking as the husband of a disabled woman, I’d like to say that being able to have my partner step into a surrogate body would be one hell of a turn-on as well. It’s one of the reasons that transformations figure so prominently in my stories.
A friend of mine, Steve Eley, wrote a little story about body-swap sex that was done in audio:
http://www.airoutmyshorts.com/shorts/episode75.mp3
http://www.airoutmyshorts.com/shorts/episode76.mp3
Of course, the fact that it was read for Air Out My Shorts has a tendency to drain it of just a bit of gravitas, but I think you can get the point.
2 Niko // Dec 11, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Interesting idea. I’m sure I’m not the first fella to have thought how wonderful it would be to be in a woman’s body for a while. But it occurred to me reading the article that fellas can sort of duplicate the sexual sensations a woman feels, but a woman isn’t likely to get close to to sensation of penetrating a paramour’s body with genitals. Hmm…oh well. The Second Life simulation will have to do for now.
Tried a gender/avi swap with my real life partner to find out what’s it’s like to be a woman in a sex dungeon and see if fellas are as impolite and pushy as often complained about. The hilarious outcome was that I was looking at my avi (being played by my female RL partner) and next thing found a couple of lasses all over my partner’s female avi. Not a sign of “do you mind?” “Can we…?” Too funny.
3 DapperAnarchist // Dec 14, 2008 at 9:26 am
I don’t know about it taking a long long time for this to become cheap enough - it could go the way of airflight, expensive if you want a really personalised experience, suiting you perfectly (private plane), cheap if you’re ok with a one-size-fits-all experience… Actually… Anyone else think this could well be a cheaper, more effecient way of attending meetings etc? Like that guy in Japan, the roboticist who attends meetings via his robot twin.
4 regina lynn // Dec 15, 2008 at 12:04 am
Now there’s a comment after my own heart … seeing the telecommute possibilities in sex-tech.
5 DapperAnarchist // Dec 15, 2008 at 9:35 am
Tragically… I was thinking more of the business and journalistic possibilities, ala Spider Jerusalems “telefactoring” in Transmetropolitan. A lot of work would be needed to get over uncanny valley for sextech, while business tech just needs a screen for the face and I, Robot style bodies… But yeah, telecommuting sextech would be fantastic for so many people.
6 justjss // Jan 5, 2009 at 6:58 pm
My longest-held sexual fantasy, dating back 32 years, to my first lover, has been to truly know what she (or anyone since) felt like — exactly. It doesn’t matter how intimate I am with someone — there’s always that “I’ll never really know” …
I’ve learned to live with it.