The Scent of Sexual Sweat
One in three sexual encounters now take place online.
It includes sexting, video or webcam sex, and explicit
Snapchat images. A fifth prefer ‘digital’ sex because
it’s less embarrassing than regular sex.
Almost 60% admitted to have digital sexual encounters
with people they weren’t in a relationship with .
Over 70% of digital encounters took place at home,
but 8% were at work.
The fact that one in three sexual encounters are now
digital was surprising, and perhaps a little telling
about how people approach sex nowadays.
No longer do we have to be in the same room, or
even the same country to have a sexual encounter.
Now we can have sex round the world-wide web.
Digital Porn Doesn’t
Match the Real Thing
Men my age watch so much porn
Young women have to put up with it.
Sex has become depersonalized.
It’s as if we’re watching ourselves
acting the part in a porn clip.
The Sexual Frontier
There’s a growing chorus of laments over what’s happening on the sexual frontier, a state of confusion that reflects post-feminist power dynamics and our digital culture and virtual fixations.
Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex that’s an awkward emotional fit?
Various cultural cues preach that women should approach sex in an ostensibly “empowered” way. You hear young women say ‘Why can’t I have sex without emotion?’
There’s a biological reason why men and women feel differently about sex. It’s not as simple as divesting yourself of your gender roles.
The web confuses things further, unfurling a seemingly infinite cosmos of ready possibility and lightning-fast connections.
Several popular apps give someone with a sudden whim for a date wcan exchange images and physical proximity of inclined prospects. An meeting may be no more than 10 minutes and a few streets away.
The Web also fosters a misleading sense of familiarity between people who have shared nothing more than keystrokes.
All sorts of promiscuity don’t feel like promiscuity. But a month of text messages doesn’t make a personal connection. Many have fallen victim to the sensation that we understand some guy’s essence when we’ve really just read 15 of his tweets.
There’s an emerging literature of complaint from young men and women alike about the impact of free or cheap online pornography.
One guy, who admitted faking an orgasm with a real live woman, learned that other men had done so as well and wondered if a “tsunami of porn” was to blame.
A young woman writing under a pseudonym cited her and her friends’ experiences to assert that for more and more men, “the buffet of fetishistic porn available 24/7” had created very particular and sometimes very peculiar, ratcheted-up desires.
Lust in the Age
of Digital Reproduction
