Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (31 page)

Hyper-romance places unattainable expectations on males, rendering real males as “deficient” in failing to live up to hyper-romantic standards. Women who find their current real-life relationships dissatisfying may seek emotional and physical gratification in these idealized virtual relationships. Already, women have left their husbands – and sometimes their children – to seek romantic satisfaction in real life with men they have begun idealized relationships with online.They wake to realize that these new men are just as flawed in reality as the dissatisfying husbands they left.

Yet with hypersex and hyper-romance, one need never wake up to real-ity.The immersive virtual world is without boundaries, duration, or limitation; it is a vivid dream without an end. We may worry, however, that hypesex and hyper-romance will ultimately corrupt the users, satisfying their desires while thwarting their needs.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Sexual Deviancy Flourishes in Unbounded Realities

The dominance of hypersex and hyper-romance in virtual worlds may cause its share of social problems, both for its users and for real-life relationships. Perhaps more disturbing, however, are the strange fruits of deviant sex, low-hanging and abundant, in virtual gardens. Users might indulge in these forbidden fruits, only to find themselves hooked on the taste.

Virtual environments proffer various sexual deviancies to users, which they might never otherwise encounter. In turn, such unbounded environments tend to normalize such deviances to users, and progressively condition users toward deviancy, while alienating them from their “normal” sexual desires. In real life, for instance, individuals deemed “furries” dress up in elaborate animal costumes to engage with each other socially and sexually. In real life, one would not typically run into a “furry,” but
Second Life
teems with them; furries comprise an estimated 6 percent of its populace. One might worry that users who embody animal-human hybrid avatars in a virtual world, or have sex with such furries, are delving into a deviance that may diminish their drive for normal sex in real life. One might also fear that there may be indeed a slippery slope between having sex with a furry and pure bestiality, as furries vary greatly in their human-to-animal proportions. According to one article, sex with animals is increasingly popular in
Second Life
.
⁹

Yet perhaps bestiality is compatible with psychological health and a good life, as philosopher Peter Singer suggests.
¹⁰
This could be true of a range of sexual deviancies.While “sexual deviance” tends to carry a negative normative connotation, the term itself is merely a statistical notion. Homosexuality, for instance, was once considered by the DSM – the standard handbook in psychology – to be a disorder, since it was a statistical deviancy.
¹¹
Yet I hope we could all recognize that sexual attraction to the same sex, for any statistical deviancy, is compatible with a good human life. I leave it to the reader to determine by her own lights which deviancies are compatible with a good life, and which are contrary. My only contention is that those contrary deviancies will be propagated and normalized by the pornographic singularity.

Beyond bestiality,
Second Life
proffers an assortment of additional paraphilias: rape play, amputee sex, snuff sex (where one avatar is “killed” during the sex act), infantilism, sexual devouring (called “vore”), necrophilia, fecophilia, and anything else conceivable by the deviant imagination.

Age play is one sexual deviancy rampant in
Second Life
. It refers to the virtual sexual intercourse that occurs between an avatar-adult and an avatar-child, both users of variable age and background, who not only trespass into pedophilia, but oftentimes incest as well, where the avatar-adult plays a parent, and the avatar-child plays the son or daughter. There is a spot in
Second Life
nicknamed “molestation grove,” where child-avatars wander around looking for a “mommy” or “daddy” adult-avatar to sexually abuse them. Some adult users purchase child “skins” – child-avatars to embody – in order to prostitute their child-avatar to pedophilic adults, willing to pay.
Second Life
has moved to restrict such age role-play, with very limited results. Needless to say, enforcing regulations in a vast expanse of virtual environments proves very difficult, if not a practical impossibility.

Beyond the virtual world of
Second Life
, some video games offer virtual environments where deviant sex is promoted.
Rapelay
is a 2006 Japanese video game, where the initial goal for the gamer is to stalk and rape a girl in a subway station bathroom, afterwards snapping pictures of her semen-covered body with his cell phone. Ultimately, the player is to stalk and rape a mother and her two young daughters, who are described as “virgin schoolgirls” – “tears glistening in the young girl’s eyes” as one is sexually assaulted. Finally, the gamer needs to turn all three women into his sex slaves. If one of them gets pregnant, the player has to force her to have an abortion, lest the player’s character die and lose the game.What’s worse is the “gang-rape” mode, in which one player can join with other players via the Internet to stalk and rape these women as a group.

Rapelay
is one of many computer games that involve violent sex, a second game being
Battle Raper
, produced by the same company, which involves fighting female non-player-characters, and raping them upon winning. Such games offer an example of the boundless sexual fantasies by which computer users can gratify themselves in virtual environments.

Conditioned to be Sexually Deviant

The sexual deviancies described above are easy to dismiss as the pitiable fetishes of abnormal individuals.Virtual reality, however, is poised to increase sexual deviancy dramatically, normalizing it and proliferating it. The ubiquity, accessibility, and anonymity of deviant sex opportunities tend to normalize these activities; they are no longer shocking, they seem no longer deviant. Normalization is furthered when a user is surrounded by cyber-peers or “normal” people who are known to engage in deviant role-playing.

In real life, the normalization of deviant sex has negative effects on relationships. Consider a study about the “rape myth,” the myth that most women actually enjoy having sex forced upon them. The study determined that depicting and promoting this myth as true tended to reduce inhibitions against using violence during sex, and altered attitudes in male and female respondents.They begin to view rape no longer as a sexual deviation but normal sexual behavior. Males who believed this myth were more likely to act out these fantasies. Even the acknowledgment itself of the rape myth as a viable sexual possibility had negative effects on both females and males, especially those in intimate relationships.
¹²
The Internet abounds with rape-related pornographic content. Some websites, such as www.rape-tube.com, cater to this particular fetish, while other general porn sites offer users a pornographic box of chocolates: rape-themed videos intermixed among an eclectic assortment of other types of porn.

Hard boundaries between the sexual and the deviant rarely exist both on the internet and in virtual worlds. In
Second Life
, deviant sexual stimuli abound and pervade the environment. The avatars you see in virtual bars in
Second Life
– anthros, dominatrices, child prostitutes – peddle their sexual deviancies, seeking sexual partners. And why shouldn’t a user try it? It is safe, it is anonymous, and a user may be curious. No one gets hurt, right?

Sexual deviance does hurt the user, research suggests, and individuals are far more susceptible to it than they realize. Sexual deviancy insinuates itself into an individual’s psychology through voluntary or involuntary exposure. Usually, sexual deviance grows through inadvertent or accidental conditioning.
¹³
That means that an individual’s vulnerability to developing deviant sexual appetites largely depends on the stimuli to which they are exposed. Consider a classic study by Rachman and Hodgson (1968), who successfully conditioned their male subjects, after repeatedly viewing women’s knee-length boots in association with sexually arousing pictures of nude women, to become sexually aroused when viewing a picture of a woman’s boot by itself.
¹⁴
This demonstration of the strong susceptibility of males toward sexual conditioning suggests that sexual deviance can be instilled by mere repeated exposure.

Exposure to forbidden fruits in virtual Edens proves dangerous, as any minor indulgence can lead to a (empirically verified) slippery slope. A six-week study suggests that repeated exposure to hardcore non-violent adult pornography negatively influences individuals’ attitudes, contributing to an increased callousness toward women, an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (a phenomenon called “escalation”), devaluation of monogamy and diminishing assurance that marriage would last, and the view that promiscuity was a normal and natural sexual behavior.
¹⁵

As stated above, indulging in deviant sex fantasies
escalates
and supplants previous “normal” sexual fantasies. Psychologist R. J. McGuire explains the increase in desire for deviant sex in men: “As a man repeatedly masturbates to a vivid sexual fantasy as his exclusive outlet, the pleasurable experiences endow the deviant fantasy with increasing erotic value. The orgasm experienced then provides the critical reinforcing event for the conditioning of the fantasy preceding or accompanying the act.”
¹⁶
Furthermore, this conditioning toward deviance cannot easily be reversed, even by the enormous guilt that the user may come to feel about their deviant attachments.

A shift in users’ preferences toward deviant sex in the virtual world may ultimately cause users to undermine real-life relationships. Consider the case of Lisa Best of the UK. She woke up late one night to discover her husband, John Best, at his laptop.
¹⁷
On the screen, her husband was simulating gay sex with a male-avatar in a bondage-dungeon environment. John’s
Second Life
avatar was named Troy Hammerthall; the virtual environment was called the “Bondage Ranch.” Lisa Best told reporters that she felt sick to her stomach, and is now divorcing her husband. John Best denied having any gay or sadomasochistic tendencies, protesting that he was just “messing about.” Perhaps he was, at first. But his wife traces her husband’s progressive addiction to
Second Life
as the reason for their degenerating marriage, now destroyed. But perhaps sexual deviancy and infidelity is merely a symptom rather than cause of a degenerating marriage.While this is one possibility, I suspect that in many cases, sexual deviancy and internet infidelity represent both a symptom and a cause.

Indulging in Forbidden Fruits Online

Infidelity statistics show that, in the United States from 1998 to 2008, wives who cheated on their husbands rocketed from 14 percent to 50 percent, more than tripling.
¹⁸
Husbands who cheat on their wives more than doubled to 60 percent in 2008, from 24 percent in 1998.
¹⁹
What happened in those ten years? The Internet happened. It started pervading our culture in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Internet provided unprecedented accessibility, anonymity, and communicability.

Marital fidelity is not necessarily a conscious moral choice by spouses. Fidelity is in part due to the circumstances that facilitate extramarital affairs. In real life, an extramarital affair tends to be rare happenstance: the right two people, the right mood, the right place, the right time. A married person resists temptation not just on the basis of moral rectitude, but also from fear of being caught by their spouse, suspected by neighbors, and shamed by their community, as well as varied sexual anxieties such as fear of sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, or sexual dysfunction. Cheating in a virtual reality eliminates all of these obstacles.

How many otherwise faithful husbands would stray if a sexy and willing lingerie model lived next door, beckoning them on a daily basis? In the virtual worlds of the near future, temptation would be nearer than right next door, and even more private and discreet, only accessible to the mind of the user and a remote computer server. Such affairs might occur between users and pornbots, or between users and avatars. Either way, we may suspect the effects would be the same: the erosion of intimate relationships on a large scale.

Already, with mere low-grade virtual sex, the erosion of relationships is evident. Even loving and sexually active marriages are vulnerable to the temptations of simulated sex on the Internet. “Sex on the Net is just so seductive and it’s so easy to stumble upon it, people who are vulnerable can get hooked before they know it,” reports physician Dr. Jennifer Scheider, who conducted a survey of 94 couples affected by cybersex addiction.
²⁰
All of the couples experienced “broken relationships” with partners with cybersex addictions. Commonly, these partners reported feeling “betrayed, devalued, deceived, ignored, and abandoned and unable to compete with a fantasy.”
²¹

Consider a 2008 case that comes from the UK. Amy Taylor divorced her husband, David Pollard.
²²
A private detective she had hired determined that David was having sex with another woman, a female-avatar in
Second Life
. Taylor’s husband, however, was only unfaithful in
Second Life
; he was never unfaithful to her in real life. Nevertheless, she felt he had betrayed the intimacy of their relationship, a response typical of the couples described in the study above.