Virtual Porn Encounters A Real-World Problem

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women and Couples

For years now, we’ve been hearing about how amazing and revolutionary virtual reality (“VR”) porn is going to be, once the technology catches up with our expectations for it.

Invoking in my mind a sexually-charged hybrid of Star Trek’s “holodeck” and the “Danger Room” from the X-Men comic book series, the idea of truly immersive 3D porn both excites and slightly terrifies me, the latter response owing a lot to my youth as a sci-fi novel-devouring nerd girl who has read too many stories about sentient machines rising up and overthrowing their human creators/overlords.

Read on…

Of course, the initial problems with VR porn probably won’t involve a self-aware pocket pussy attacking New York, or the rise of a militant class of sex worker androids. The first issues the technology faces will be more mundane, like lag time, irritating digital artifacts which break the fiction of the viewers’ experience and other technical bugs more annoying than existentially threatening.

One problem I didn’t see coming for VR porn, admittedly, was the challenge of overcrowding, something Japan just smacked into head-on during its first attempt at a VR porn festival.

I’m Trying To Get Some Head Here; Would You Please Move Your Foot?

Granted, the overcrowding experienced in Japan was the literal, physical sort, not an issue of too many naked avatars trying to pack onto the same California King mattress, but I could easily see how the same problem could impact virtual worlds, if we don’t manage access to them carefully.

Obviously, if a single viewer is watching a VR porn production, presumably overcrowding won’t be a problem – unless what you’re watching happens to be Terry Gilliam’s first shot at VR porn, in which he’s liable to recreate some of the massive crowd scenes from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, substituting dildo-waving pornstars for agitated peasants and pissed-off theatergoers.

Virtual worlds, however, will need to keep a close eye on their population numbers, lest their virtual residents run out of private spots in which to knock pixel-boots. Imagine meeting a particularly sexy Klingon/Wookie hybrid, for example, but not being able to get it on because he’s shy about being watched, and a bunch of voyeuristic Na’vi are hanging around expecting a sex show.

Frustrating, right? Now, further imagine you never the see the Wookie again, leaving you with that crucial, burning question still unanswered: Do Wookies even have penises?

Can A Guy With Real-World ED Still Get Virtual Wood?

This is kind of a change in subject (just deal with it; my husband manages and he lives with this shit every day), but I think it’s important enough a question to warrant a bit of sidebar here: Are virtual erections dependent on real-world ones?

I realize this won’t be an issue if the character with whom I’m having virtual sex with exists only in digital form, or merely as a digital capture of an actor who did his part months earlier, but in a real-time virtual sex encounter with another actual person at the other end of the connection, if my partner can’t get it up on his end, will his avatar still sport a raging stiffy? Or am I going to be stuck sitting there, maybe in outer space, maybe in a Victorian mansion, maybe in an airport bathroom, but either way left to my own devices because one of my partners ‘devices’ has malfunctioned?

I have to assume the answer is no, because what good is having virtual sex if I still have to put up with real world sex problems? If I were in charge of the VR scenario imagined above, I would find a way to enable the technology to detect erection difficulties, and then automatically swap in a purely digital “stunt cock” cypher to stand in for the real-world male in such a scenario.

Sure, it might get tricky if the male avatar in question is expected to say anything, as it might be difficult for programmers to anticipate whether the guy is more of an “Oh god yes!” or a “Suck it, bitch!” kind of dirty talker. This won’t be an issue for me either way, though, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be more of a “Just shut up and fuck me, you useless digital meat puppet!” VR porn-partner, anyway.

Not Now Honey; I Have A Virtual Headache

Another thing I worry about with VR porn is it might give my husband too good an option to turn to for sex at those times when I don’t feel like pretending he’s Michael Fassbender for about 45 minutes.

This might seem to you a silly concern – but then again, you’ve never watched the guy play video games. Gaming is an act which completely absorbs him, regardless of whether he’s playing a shoot-em-up game on a high tech console, or Free Cell on his phone.

Of course, no video game (of which I’m aware, at least) also requires my husband to thrust his hips and/or support the weight of a human female for the hours at a time which he tends to play, so maybe I have nothing to worry about. For that matter, faced with a choice between shooting aliens and fucking them, I’m not entirely sure he’d opt for the latter.

Unless, of course, the alien in question were Leeloo.