By Eric Garland
- New technologies will promote pleasure, simulate reality, improve performance, and thwart disease.
- Waning Church Influence
- Swinging Seniors
- Television and the Internet
- Pornography and Voyeurism
- Disease Prevention
- Sex Toys
- About the Author
New technologies will promote pleasure, simulate reality, improve performance, and thwart disease.
Trends in family, religion, health, education, and technology are changing how we view and discuss sexual matters--including marriage, courtship, and the act itself--and what they mean in our lives. Though new confusions will arise from increasing freedoms, sex in 2025 will be healthier and safer than ever before. There will be less shame, more tolerance, and less violence. Sexual activity will even become widely accepted as an important aspect of healthy aging and a regular component of geriatric life.
While a great deal of published research on sex today covers pregnancy, disease, and violence, comparatively little expert literature available deals with how sex will change in coming decades, according to a 2003 white paper by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This makes sense, because these topics pose the greatest risks to health and society. Very little research shows positive trends in human interaction. Not enough understanding exists to show how the basic human function of sexual behavior will shift along with trends in society and technology.
The mainstream media cover changes in divorce and dating, but the ways in which sexuality and attitudes toward sex will change in coming decades are topics that require more investigation. Indeed, the media will cover many of these shifts, leaving fewer people to feel isolated about their natural inclinations. Unfortunately, few sexuality topics are deemed appropriate to discuss forthrightly, despite the fact that so much regarding sex is changing right under our noses.
For example, it has become acceptable and even commonplace for macho sports heroes, NFL coaches, and NASCAR drivers to talk about erectile dysfunction and hawk products like Viagra and Levitra during football broadcasts. DirecTV allows satellite television viewers to download adult movies at home instead of facing the embarrassment of renting them from 16-year-old video store clerks. Even blockbuster fiction is not exempt from profound changes in sexual attitudes and open discussion of sexual variation: Characters in the murder mystery The DaVinci Code believe in communion with God though the holy act of sex instead of through a formal church structure. Despite condemning this idea as inflammatory and heretical, religious leaders offered only a tepid response to author Dan Brown and coordinated few if any boycotts.
It is not always easy to uncover trends in sexuality; there is little to show the subtle ways sex has an impact on society. The following trends are changing the way we practice and think about sex and sexuality. To explore how sex will change, I will discuss social trends and technological trends separately.
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Without church structures to lay down rules, individuals have more choices than ever before on morality issues such as sex, and they will have even more choices in the future. Formal church structures have been telling people what they can do sexually and how they should feel about it. It is natural that sexual activity will be judged by society, as this behavior fundamentally affects the health and prosperity of social groups from the tribe to the nation-state. Historically, formal churches have dictated these rules, but their authority in modern society seems to be slipping, along with church attendance.
Generation X and the Millennial generation have not experienced organized churches having so much sway on any subject, even trivial ones, as previous generations have. A 1996 study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that 34% of Gen X believes that religion is important, compared with 44% of boomers. Furthermore, only 27% of Gen X considers themselves religious compared with 35% of boomers. Churches, especially the ones that claim premarital and extramarital sex are sins, have been powerless against the sexual revolution. Technologies such as hormone-based birth control and good old vulcanized rubber cut people free from the real consequences of sex--birth out of wedlock and disease, for example. Without the influence of the church, individuals must decide for themselves the moral and ethical consequences of their actions.
Future generations will see even less dogma from church figures over sexual issues in 2025, and will associate less guilt about sex as coming directly from recommendations of the church.
This lack of religious structure is resulting in an increase in individual spiritual structures. While church attendance is down, more people identify themselves as simply "spiritual." The desire to be close to God had not waned, but traditional structures may not fit every person. As there are more individual spiritual structures, so will there be more people deciding what in their behavior is right and wrong--especially as it pertains to sex.
One implication of this freedom is more confusion. There will be more choice, but less of the comforting feeling that we are living our personal lives the "right way." We can also expect further backlash from cultural conservatives who prefer to follow the sexual values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As more individual spiritual structures and new sexual mores pop up, we can expect fundamentalists to have plenty of reason to stay in business.
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The impact of the aging of the baby boom generation is staggering. In 2000, 35 million people were 65 years of age or older. By 2020, that number will increase to 70 million people. The United States will be remade in the image of its aging citizens.
If you only paid attention to the media, you would think that sex is only the dominion of the young--unless you count superstars like Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas, who always seem to fall in love with younger actresses both onscreen and off. The media give the impression that young people have most of the sex out there. In reality, most of the sex in the coming decades will be enjoyed by people older than 50.
Studies show that an active sex life is a normal, healthy, and essential part of healthy aging. In 1989, Judy Breitschneider and Norma McCoy conducted a study of 200 nursing-home residents with a median age of 86 to study their sexual habits. The vast majority of these seniors, both men and women, were thinking about sex regularly. A majority engaged in some sort of physical intimacy, and 66% of the men claimed to be engaged in regular intercourse.
The results of the study showed that people tend to keep having sex into advanced age if the human body is not stunted by obesity or illness, which precludes sexual activity at any age. Furthermore, the test group of the Breitschneider-McCoy study was raised in an era that was not nearly as sexually positive, having come of age just after the first World War. Future generations of elderly will have been raised with a more open attitude toward healthy sex.
People will enjoy more sex for more of their lives than anytime in history. If medical technologies extend the normal life span into the 90s or 100s, then the average person will be sexually active for 80 years. That’s a lot of time to explore sex, and many decades to explore and enjoy after the kids are out of the house.
With high rates of divorce and increasing life span, the biggest group of singles could be senior citizens. When we think of a singles bar today, an image of drunken revelers between the ages of 21 and 40 springs to mind. But when divorcees and retirees become the largest number of freewheeling swingers, there could be whole new neighborhoods devoted to the Silver Singles Scene.
Single men will be in demand. Women will outnumber men 2.5 to 1 past the age of 80. Futurist Joseph Coates has been forecasting a possible increase in geriatric lesbianism for years based on the idea that all people need intimacy, and if men are not around to provide this basic human need, then women may provide it for each other. For future generations reared in the knowledge that homosexual behavior is natural, this may not be implausible.
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Though individuals today are significantly freer to discuss sex compared to 100 years ago, openness toward erotic media is not new. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and other ancient artifacts show the prevalence of erotica on scrolls, pottery, frescos, and other media. But never in history has there been so much communication on all types of sexual subjects. Now, all kinds of information about sex is available instantly from any Internet device. Sources range from U.S. Center for Disease Control statistics on sexually transmitted disease to full-streaming video of fringe hardcore pornography.
One arbiter of loosening public attitudes toward sex is that censors are relaxing on television. Television has come a long way from the days when married characters shocked viewers by sleeping in the same double bed. Clearly, television censors now allow much more frank discussion of sexual behavior. On television these days, once-taboo topics such as homosexuality barely count as risqué: Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy camp up gay culture, while on cable, Queer As Folk shows gays in explicit situations. While these shows may push current boundaries, 15 years ago they simply would not have been possible.
Other sexual variations also see the light on readily available, popular programming. On MTV, the pioneering reality show The Real World shows bisexual group sex. On an episode of CBS’s popular detective show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a murder victim is shown to be in a community of "plushies," a group of people who enjoy sex while dressed up like stuffed animals. Never before has there been such open discussion on the fetishes, proclivities, and preferences that are part of all human diversity.
Where television leaves off, the Internet picks up. People have quickly adopted the Internet as a place to connect for sex, courtship, and marriage, and as social networks grow through online communities and relaxing morality, more people will feel comfortable exploring the more-unusual aspects of their sexual selves. Indeed, the Internet has connected fetishists in ways mainstream society never could, and there is growing consciousness that these specialist facets of human behavior are far from statistically unusual or weird. Since the workplace is usually a sensitive place to advance an interest in sadomasochism, cross dressing, or other sexual tastes, but the Internet is well suited for this type of conversation due to the anonymity it makes possible. The Internet is able to connect those with sexual interests shared by few while serving as a way to anonymously introduce one’s proclivities to an appreciative audience. As a result, fetish communities are thriving online.
Who would have thought that Adam Smith’s vision of a perfect capitalist market--many suppliers meeting customers’ demands, free and perfect information, and limited government intervention--would apply to the world of dating? On the Internet, Web sites such as Match.com and Nerve.com provide a virtual online marketplace for sex partners and potential mates. Such sites consist of databases with electronic search engines that can make it easy to find a partner. Site members and visitors can define searches by broad categories like age and locale, or more-specific predilections. The result of such ease-of-use and availability--and anonymity--is that online dating services are surging in popularity among young people comfortable with online technologies, as well as with older singles who may not benefit from social networks of single friends, local singles bars, or convenient geography.
In the future, these communities will allow people with very specific sexual preferences to find exactly what they are looking for.
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Ubiquitous broadband Internet, inexpensive displays, computing, and video cameras will definitely have their effect on sex. Specifically, there will be more pornography everywhere. For the first time, everyone will be only a click away from explicit hard-core pornography, potentially from inexpensive handheld devices that most, if not all, consumers can afford.
As wireless communication devices shrink in size and price and increase in power, young people will have access to wireless Internet through inexpensive devices by 2025, according to columnist Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet UK, an online business-technology site. Future generations will reach sexual maturity with full access to as much erotic material as they want.
Ever-tinier technology brings with it other issues. Inexpensive video cameras built into cell phones spell a bright future for voyeurism. One result of this will be that it may become harder to get away with infidelity and other types of indiscretions in a world where it is practically free to record video and audio. Motorola ran an advertisement in 2003 showing a novel use for its embedded camera phones: A young woman at a bar spies a friend’s boyfriend cheating with another woman, and she videotapes and immediately sends the evidence to the girlfriend. We can expect similar occurrences in the future as such devices proliferate.
Voyeurism is a popular theme on television today, especially since the advent of reality television shows. Consider ABC’s The Bachelor, where a man chooses among potential mates in front of millions of viewers, or Fox’s Temptation Island, where viewers peep in on the ability of couples to be monogamous in the face of sexual advances by paid models and actors. Perhaps television viewers are getting used to airing their sexual behaviors before their neighbors, and maybe this could result in more understanding of human behavior. Whatever the case, spying on other peoples’ sexual habits is becoming the norm and will continue as a popular activity in the future.
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The future of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) is key to the future of sex, as so much anxiety about sex stems from fear of disease, unwanted pregnancy, and violence. Two facts--that many people spread STDs without knowing it and that doctors and patients remain embarrassed about discussing sexual health--continue to contribute to the steady increase in the occurrence of STDs among sexually active adults. The challenge is to let more people know they have an STD without their having to make a special, embarrassing trip to the doctor and to do so inexpensively. Today, patients must go to a clinic to determine their sexual health by giving a blood, urine, or swab sample, and the sample must be sent to a lab to be centrifuged and tested. This takes days and can cost patients or insurance companies more than $100.
Telemedicine could help reduce costs and mitigate embarrassment caused by special trips to the doctor. Research is under way in the field of biomarkers--chemical entities that would identify the presence of a disease easily. The National Institutes of Health are funding a multidisciplinary effort to identify biomarkers that will allow early intervention and treatment of diseases from cancer to Alzheimer’s to STDs. The University of North Carolina has picked up on this initiative to advance its goal of improving women’s health care, and early prevention of STDs and identification of biomarkers are among its top priorities.
This research into biomarkers could dovetail with falling costs of microfluidic assays, MEMS (micro-electromechanical machines) devices, and telemedicine. Many of these technologies promise to make possible analyzing fluid samples at home and without expensive lab equipment, and if processing cannot happen in the home, samples could be analyzed and sent to a lab via a more-powerful home network.
The goal will be for lovers to become more certain about the health of their partners. One day, perhaps sex will no longer be a potential health hazard. In the far future, STDs could be eradicated, but in the meantime, the best we can do is to prevent their spread.
As pharmaceutical therapies become key to solving many health issues, sex and sexual dysfunction will see more-effective and interesting new drugs. Due to direct-to-consumer advertising of such drugs as Viagra, anyone who watches football games or nightly newscasts becomes aware that sexual dysfunction is not uncommon. Instead of being ashamed about physical shortcomings, viewers are encouraged to talk to partners and physicians about their sex lives. Pharmaceutical companies have positioned this not as weakness, but as something that strong, successful men do to solve a problem. These kinds of attitudes will lead to less shame about sex as we teach younger generations not to fear their bodies and to embrace some of the frailties of aging as well.
Erectile dysfunction medications are helping medicalize sexual problems, much in the same way we are coming to destigmatize depression and other mental illnesses. This leads me to consider the future of another myth: "Love Potion #9." With billions of dollars every year going into research into the central nervous system, we are getting closer to understanding the neurological behavior of love and lust. We may eventually find ways to influence these emotions.
We have only begun to understand the role of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin in how we perceive the world. In the last few decades, we have made major strides in understanding how these neurotransmitters affect sadness, happiness, clinical depression, or even our ability to experience paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations. Theresa L. Krenshaw’s book The Alchemy of Love and Lust: How Sex Hormones Influence our Relationships (Pocket Books, 1997) details how neurotransmitters fluctuate in the course of relationships to add to feelings of love and lust that other people inspire in us. As this research continues in the next 20 years, we will have greater insight into the biological roots of these feelings. Pharmaceutical companies might even advance drugs to help ailing relationships. A pill that gives lovers the rush of serotonin they felt when first in love might help them through rough spots in a marriage. As life spans increase and marriages last 50, 70, or even more years, a little help may be welcome.
A wild card to consider is if scientists finally discover a cure for AIDS. Reducing the threat of incapacitation and death from AIDS might result in greater sexual abandon--and an increase in pregnancy, herpes, or syphilis.
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Researchers are working hard to realize Woody Allen’s "orgasmatron" as visualized in his futuristic film Sleeper (1973). One U.S. surgeon has already patented a pacemaker-sized device implanted under the skin that triggers an orgasm, and begun a clinical trial approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As of November 2003, only one woman had completed the trial, which requires implantation of electrodes directly into the spine. The married woman claimed not to have had an orgasm in four years, but reported multiple orgasms the first day of using the new device. A full implant of the device would cost about $22,000, but imagine the market if the device’s size and price shrank due to nanoelectronics and given FDA approval.
Physical toys could improve with materials science producing substances that feel more like skin and with greater viscosity. Pornographic movies, the most popular form of sexual entertainment, will see technological improvements on two fronts: computer graphic displays and haptics or "telefeel" technology that stimulates the body to create a sensation offered by the software. Both of these approaches intend to create more-realistic simulations.
• Computer graphics and animation have gone from abstract to very lifelike in the past 30 years--consider, for example, the difference between computer graphics in 1980 and recent movies like Shrek or Toy Story. Animators have been using the increasing availability of computer processing to increase the resolution with which they can create images and effectively simulate the appearance of straight lines, curves, colors, and shadows--all the same things we see in nature. The more processing we provide, the more animators can create smooth, flowing images that fool the eye. Such developments, when applied to adult material, will result in more-realistic and consequently more-erotic images.
• Haptics, or the telecommunication of sensations using a computer interface, is another frontier in simulation. Haptic technologies allow a computer to feed sensations such as pressure, vibration, texture, and heat back to a person to simulate the physical sensations of real objects. A crude example is the joystick controller of the Sony Playstation that vibrates during certain video games when the player is struck on screen. An example of an advanced version of haptics was demonstrated at Rutgers University, where engineers designed a haptic glove to translate the experience of squeezing a ball. The glove enabled the user to perceive the texture and pressure of the virtual object as if it really existed.
Once eye-fooling graphics are combined with haptics that simulate virtual physical worlds, technicians will create software to better simulate people’s sexual fantasies, approaching the limit of fooling us into believing they are really happening. The social implications of such simulations raise some interesting questions. For instance, pornography involving children and featuring violence is illegal principally on the notion that it harms those who make the films. But if virtual reality could recreate those films without involving real people, is there harm? Will we still ban such content based on the idea that even thinking about it is bad because you may do it in real life?
Like all things pertaining to sex, this maelstrom of trends will mean different things to different people, but on the positive side, I foresee:
• Less guilt, less shame, more communication, and more sense of freedom to explore.
• Greater acceptability of sex as a regular part of healthy aging.
• Plenty of room to explore one’s desires through simulation.
• Less risk of disease.
• More communication in the mainstream media and between people, resulting in fewer hang-ups.
A healthier, more-open sex life awaits us, stretching on for decades. That is a future to want to stick around for.
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Eric Garland is a futurist and competitive intelligence expert who advises Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies about the trends in society and technology that will create the opportunities and threats of the future. When not traveling throughout the US and Europe speaking about the future, he splits his time between Washington DC and Vermont.
Originally published in the November-December 2004 issue of THE FUTURIST.
Used with permission from:
World Future Society
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Telephone: 301/656-8274
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