Kevin has promised me that next time we’re in the same city at the same time, he’ll bring the suit and let me strap one on in the name of science.

Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex
No matter how beautiful the sex animations are in your favorite virtual playground, they can’t compete with the movement of your own body.

How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think.

Kevin Alderman, who’s already infamous for the sex animations his company Strokerz Toyz creates for Second Life, is developing a wireless, consumer-level motion-capture suit that’s expected to hit shelves in 2009.

Continued @ Wired…

From the archives

Sex Trumps Game

The Myth of Cybersexual Losers

Stroker Serpentine, Second Life’s Porn Mogul, Speaks (Q&A with Kevin Alderman)

Why do I never remember to blog my own column? Sheesh. I could have a FREE blog post every Friday if I alternated between new ones and archive ones — there are more than 200 columns hidden in the archives that many of you have never seen, I’ll betcha.

Talk Dirty, Descriptively in Porn for the Blind

Porn preview sites aren’t known for their usability. You’re familiar with the template, I’m sure. The standard design looks like someone spilled a box of dirty photos across a black laminate floor and then vandalized the result with several colors of primary paint. In all caps. With lots of misspellings and exclamation points!!!

It’s bad enough when you can see it. But what if you have a visual impairment? Your screen-reader software would probably spit out a few choice words and crash out of sheer spite.

Porn for the Blind, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., was established for the sole purpose of making the millions of free porn clips available online accessible to people with visual impairments.

Continued at Wired

Begin PSA
We’re at the end of the second week of the Rape and Incest National Network campaign, to help fund a 24 hour online crisis hotline. Have you donated yet?
End PSA

A few past columns chosen at random:

Hear, Hear for Audio Erotica (October 2005)

Makin’ Woohoo (October 2004)

Lifelong Effects of Cybersex (August 2006)

This week’s column responds to the discussion that followed an earlier column about the porn industry following, rather than leading, web 2.0:

Next-Gen Sex Gets Its Jollies From Web 2.0
For many people, any type of sex or nudity with sexual intent counts as “porn” if you do it online.

That’s a lesson I learned a few months ago, after writing that porn is scrambling to catch up with Web 2.0, not driving it. Prior to that column, I’d been thinking of “porn” as “the porn industry” — sexual content produced by people with the intention of making money.

Couples recording themselves at home and uploading the video simply to share it with other people for fun don’t qualify as porn, in my view. Neither do the platforms developed to provide those couples with a space to play, even though the technology was obviously produced with the intent of making money. continued @ Wired

On a related note, see Audacia Ray’s blog post at Waking Vixen about another way the porn industry lets us down, and why we’re taking matters into our own hands with the ease of social networking and blog tools:

Seeing straight ahead: the porn industry’s sexuality blinders
Two years ago when I started to ponder directing and producing a porno film, I knew I wanted to make bisexual movies. When I said that word, “bisexual,” to people outside the porn industry, they’d respond with confusion: “Aren’t most porn movies bisexual, what with all the girl-girl action?” In pornoland, girl-girl action is coded as straight, unless of course some of the women have short hair and present as butches, in which case the mainstream industry ignores it. Except for that one time when S.I.R. Video won Best All-Girl Feature with their Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels. That was pretty sweet. In pornoland, bisexual means that the dudes touch each other too. And that’s what I wanted my movie to be. In pornoland, bisexual films fall under the rubric of “gay,” they aren’t included in the world of AVN, they are the propriety of GAYVN. Pornoland is trying to teach us something here: you’re either straight or you’re gay. continued @ Waking Vixen

This week’s Sex Drive column:

Teachers Should Blog, Tweet and Flirt Online Like the Rest of Us
What would you do if your employer told you not to use MySpace, Match.com and Second Life because those sites are “too dangerous” and “inappropriate” for you?

If you’re a teacher in Ohio, you’d better think twice before you answer, because it’s not a hypothetical question. According to the Columbus Dispatch, the state’s teacher’s unions recommend that teachers not post profiles on social networking or online dating sites because it could lead to the appearance of improper relationships with students.

What’s next? Police officers prohibited from posting hook-up invitations on craigslist lest it appear they are hooking on the side? Firefighters advised not to enter a members-only adult community, in case some old biddy sees an episode of Primetime Live and accuses them of cyberperversions?

Continued…

And here is the rest of it — a blog exclusive. LOL

The problem is we were all so busy this week, we didn’t have time to reshape the second page of the column — to carve away the repetitive bits and strengthen the additional point I wanted to make. But I bring it to you here, naked and raw, unedited, because I really do want to address the bit about our culture wanting teachers and other “pillars of the community” to lie to youth about sex and relationships.

Last time I wrote about Ohio teachers losing their jobs over their online activities (”Sex and Nudity Aren’t Good Reasons to Fire Someone,” 04/17/07), I made the radical suggestion that we embrace the idea that sex is a good and wonderful component of life, and that sexual expression is part of that. I also noted that as technology opens doors to greater sexual expression, we are seizing the opportunities by the millions. Internet sexual exploration is not (just) the pastime of a small group of odd pioneers out there on the fringes.

It seems to me that the internet has provided teachers with safe, semi-anonymous place for them to express the desires and feelings they’ve always had, because they’re people, but were not encouraged or allowed to express, because they’re role models and we don’t want teenagers acting with the same sexual freedom as adults until they are adults.

Yet if teachers are expected to pretend to be celibate, or to conform to a rigid standard about sex and relationships that our technological and social evolution have made obsolete, they’re no longer serving as good role models. Instead they are lying to young people about their futures as lovers, partners and parents.

Keeping educators away from social networking also perpetuates the message that adults who meet a “higher standard” are adults who don’t have sex.

We need to live in the same world that young people do, and that means helping teachers and students develop skills that will serve them in the future. We cannot expect teachers to communicate with teenagers if we attempt to increase the digital divide between the generations rather than bridge it.

A teacher who has the life experience to make smart decisions and the online communication skills to demonstrate that in a blog without preaching, who has strong social networking skills and who exhibits good judgment about what to make public and what to reserve for a private community — that’s a real role model for the next generation. If that teacher also meets her partner online, or maintains a healthy long-distance relationship through the internet, or plays in Second Life on the weekends, that does no harm to the young people in her charge.

And that’s the teacher young people will respect and turn to for help and support. That’s the adult who will open students’ eyes to other ways of online interaction beyond bragging about exploits they may or may not have actually done but that they think makes them sound cool.

Besides, if teachers really are the cream of the American crop, held up as role models and meeting the highest possible standards for ethical, rational and responsible behavior, we should not deprive all the other internet citizens of their company.

Let the teacher romances begin.

For more sex-tech commentary:

Visit the Sex Drive page at Wired

Subscribe to the feed

Join the Sex Drive forum

A new Sex Drive column is up:

Court Does Right by Social Sex Sites
Just three business days after my last column explained the futility of subjecting adult social-networking websites to the same record-keeping requirements as porn productions, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a slip opinion agreeing with me.

No, I don’t feel smug, why do you ask?

Also, I wrote the cover story for this month’s AVNOnline, about what the adult industry needs to be thinking about as 3D virtual space becomes a reality.

AVN Online NSFW

AVN has the most annoying, obnoxious online format of any publication I’ve ever seen. Even if it loaded instantly, which it doesn’t, who thought we’d want to “read a magazine” online like we do iin print?

Anyway.

If you want to read the piece, follow the link above and then enter “70″ in the page number field in the toolbar at the top. On the other hand, if you’ve read Sex Drive for a while, I probably didn’t say anything you don’t already know. (But there’s a hot picture of Kevin Alderman in the sidebar, where you can see he looks exactly like his avatar Stroker Serptentine.)

You might be more interested in my colleague Tom Johansmeyer’s piece about the military police confiscating dildos in Iraq, which starts on page 80. About the article, he says “The army’s ban on porn is widely known. But, my story covers a unique angle. Two women had sex toys confiscated in the course of an improper search. They almost lost their jobs. But, military legal advisors explained to the Command Sergeant Major that dildos are not porn…. It is important that the taxpaying public understand where are money is going. We may not be able to find WMDs, but at least we’re keeping Iraq safe from orgasm.”

Hooray! Gee, I wonder if they read the latest Sex Drive (Proposed Law Could Be Cold Shower for YouPorn) and made up their minds real fast? Heh heh.

6th Circuit Court of Appeals Rules 2257 Unconstitutional
CINCINNATI - The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled today in the case of Connection Distributing Co. et. al. v. Keisler that the federal 2257 record-keeping statute is unconstitutional and overbroad.

“This is huge, huge news for the entire industry,” attorney J. Michael Murray told AVN. “It means that the statute has been declared unconstitutional in its entirety, at least in the 6th Circuit. This is the result we’ve all been aiming for; it’s a monumental victory. We’ve been fighting this battle for twelve long years, and this is the third time I argued the case on the 6th Circuit. Finally, we got a court to agree with us.”

A sister company to Cleveland-based video distributor GVA-TWN, the now-defunct Connection published approximately a dozen swinger’s magazines with personal ads containing sexually explicit photographs.

[snip]

“For the first time time in at least a dozen years, we have judges that are digging deep to look at the fundamentals of section 2257,” Lee noted. “And as we have always thought, when they do so, they will find them wanting. When the analysis gets down to the level that these judges assess 2257 on, we’re beyond the particulars of swingers magazines vs. videos vs. internet – this is a very fundamental level, and it’s holding that the statute is flawed in the way it imposes burdens on everybody that has anything to do with this type of expression.”

Although the ruling applies only in the 6th Circuit (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee), Lee feels the case sets an important and gratifying precedent in the battle against 2257.

“The government says that its interest behind 2257 is in combating child porn,” Lee explained. “The problem is that virtually all of what 2257 applies to is not child porn. Each of the [three judges’] opinions today holds that 2257 is not narrowly tailored to an interest in suppressing child porn, because it applies to so much that is not child porn. This has been one of the fundamental objections to section 2257 all along.”

This week’s column is up.

Someone at Wired not only has a sense of humor around headlines, they know one of my favorite southern fried rock songs … LOL

Chaste Home, Alabama, Where You Can’t Buy a Dildo

Oh, Alabama. What has been done to thee?

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to have anything to do with the infamous Williams v. Alabama case, which has been wending its way through the court system for nine years. In that case, adult retailer Sherri Williams challenged the constitutionality of a state law banning the sale and distribution of any device intended for the purpose of stimulating the human genitals. This week a federal judge is expected to lift the injunction that has prevented the law from being enforced since 1998.

The law was originally intended to shut down certain adult establishments, like strip clubs, so that children wouldn’t have to walk past them on the way to malt shops and sock hops. The sex-toy thing got thrown in so minors wouldn’t be exposed to adult retail shops either, and that’s the part that got national attention. No one outside the local community cares if a strip club gets shut down; start telling women they can’t buy vibrators, and the angry murmurs begin.

Continued…

This week’s column:

Don’t Dismiss Online Relationships as Fantasy
Last month, three unrelated stories challenged the idea that internet relationships are just fantasy and therefore less important, less powerful and less real than offline relationships.

They aren’t.

First, I read the Wired magazine piece about Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two in New York state. Montgomery invented two alternate identities and got both of them involved online with the 17-year-old girl persona of Mary, a forty-something married woman in West Virginia, whom he met at the games site, Pogo.com. He then became so jealous that she was also seeing his co-worker online, that he shot the guy dead in the parking lot after work.

In real life. Where you can’t just get a snack, go pee and log back in.

Continued at Wired.com

Today’s column:

Online Therapy: Like a Diary That Writes Back
Earlier this year, I became so mired in personal crisis I couldn’t see any way out. I struggled against depression and desperation and barely managed to produce columns, much less keep up with my day job or my book.

My distress peaked one night and I found myself frantically searching the web for some kind of drop-in crisis counseling chat. I wasn’t suicidal, so I didn’t want to call a suicide hotline and tie up a volunteer who could be helping someone on the verge of ultimate despair. Yet I felt I would implode if I didn’t immediately talk to someone neutral and anonymous.

You know how you can be ensnared by inertia? I’m not sure why I didn’t call a counselor during regular business hours; it wasn’t as if the trouble happened only that one night, without warning. Yet there I was, staring at Samaritans, a U.K. site, wondering if they would talk to me if I used Skype and pretended I was in England — and still not clicking the number.

Continued…

About as naked as it gets.

This week’s Sex Drive column:

Master’s Student Demonstrates Thesis Project in Her Underwear
I’ve noticed a wonderful trend happening at universities these past few years: projects that integrate sex and technology in innovative ways to improve human health and well-being.

Students interested in how technology and sexuality fit together — who take technology’s role in sexual development for granted — are naturally drawn to fields like interactive telecommunications, human-computer interaction and affective computing. It’s a multidisciplinary movement that inspires collaboration among engineers, artists, psychologists and sociologists — and in these studies, sex comes first. Tech is merely a catalyst.

Continued…

Past Sex Drives

Sex Drive column RSS feed

Tired of reading all those lists about geek stereotypes? Me too, so I wrote a rebuttal.

The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers

Scroll down the page for our new reddit-style widget that lets you rank the reasons and add your own.

Matt said it was okay to blog this. I don’t normally go public with “hey look someone said something nice about my work!” but I was feeling down and this brightened my day, so I’m sharing it.

Re: Pornography Is Not the Decider

As always, great column. The timing on this one happened to be
perfect for me, since I’m in the middle of a strategic analysis of
Blu-Ray market viability for a project in my MBA Program. Last night
we had a long discussion about the idea that porn is moving out of
the living room and onto the computer, and even when it does stay in
the living room, it hides on the DVR or the TIVO. Consensus in the
group was that this was crazy talk and that the adult film industry
was (again) going to make or break the format standard. Small minded
fools!

I emailed everyone in the group a copy of your article this morning.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re a subject matter expert in this
domain. Case closed.

Hey look! Another column! This one’s a profile of some cool folks doing cool things:

Wired News: Animated Porn Makes Moves
Imagine what you could do with erotic entertainment if you weren’t bound by the laws of physics or 18 U.S.C. 2257.

By physics, of course, I mean the limitations of gravity, proportion, body mass. And by 18 U.S.C. 2257, I mean the federal law that requires every node in the pornography network to maintain records on every performer appearing in an adult film, including their real names, addresses and the probable sex of their first born.

At the moment, producers do not need to worry about either of those laws if their performers are computer-generated. And since illustration is the oldest form of pornography NSFW, it strikes me as ironic that despite the photographic and video capabilities of the digital age, drawing might prove to be the foundation of the Next Big Thing in entertainment.

continued at wired.com

I didn’t do a podcast this week due to Thanksgiving holidays, but here’s the column:

Wired News: Check Your Judgments, Eh?
CALGARY, Alberta — You’ve heard people say that if you wouldn’t want your boss, your spouse or your mother to know what you’re doing online, you shouldn’t be doing it. Or that you should consider what would happen if what you are about to say on the internet appeared on the front page of The New York Times; if that would be bad, keep it to yourself.

For that matter, you’ve probably heard Ben Franklin’s quip: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

It’s no secret that nothing is secret anymore. If I learned anything at the Lexi.net: Your Online Identity conference, it’s that our internet reputation is as slippery as Astroglide and just as difficult to put back into the bottle if it spills where we least want it.

Continued…

A serious topic this week, but one with a hopeful bent: a new site makes it easy to get screened for sexually transmitted infections — and to share your negative results with potential lovers, or to get personal attention and references if you have a positive test result:

Wired News: Stop Sex Infections the Smart Way

In the podcast, the CEO of the service talks about how eventually it will be able to help reduce the number of sexual assaults that occur. And on the blog, more details about how the service protects your privacy.