Securing Sexuality is the podcast and conference promoting sex positive, science based, and secure interpersonal relationships. We give people tips for safer sex in a digital age. We help sextech innovators and toy designers produce safer products. And we educate mental health and medical professionals on these topics so they can better advise their clients. Securing Sexuality provides sex therapists with continuing education (CEs) for AASECT, SSTAR, and SASH around cyber sexuality and social media, and more. Links from this week’s episode:
*Securing Sexuality does not have an affiliate relationship with Lovense at this time. We have no financial incentive in offering a link to these products. Teledildonics and Digital Sexuality: The Revolution of Remote-Controlled and Bluetooth-Enabled Intimacy
Technology has revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives, including our sexual experiences. From the CyberSM suit in the 1990's to Bluetooth-enabled adult toys, technology has transformed our sex lives in unimaginable ways. One of the latest advancements in this field is the development of Teledildonics, which is changing the way we experience pleasure.
Teledildonics is a technology that uses remote control devices to provide tactile sensations, usually through internet connectivity. It allows couples who are physically apart to engage in virtual intimacy in real-time, using toys that can be controlled from a distance. This technology has opened up new possibilities for long-distance relationships and cybersex, making it possible to experience pleasure even when miles apart. The rise of Teledildonics has given birth to a new form of sexuality called Techno Sexuality or Digital Sexuality. It refers to individuals who derive sexual pleasure from technology or the use of technology in their sexual experiences. It's a rapidly growing trend, especially among younger generations who have grown up with technology as a part of their everyday lives. However, like any other technology, Teledildonics comes with its own set of risks. Security risks are a significant concern in this field, as there have been instances of hacking and data breaches involving Bluetooth-enabled adult toys. Hackers could potentially gain access to sensitive personal information, compromising the user's privacy and security. To minimize the risk of such breaches, experts recommend using disposable email addresses and avoiding sharing personal information such as home addresses or phone numbers. It's also advisable to use medical-grade silicone toys, which are safer and more hygienic than other materials. Despite the potential risks, the benefits of Teledildonics cannot be overlooked. The technology offers people a new level of intimacy and the ability to explore their sexuality in ways that were previously unimaginable. The field is rapidly evolving, and we can expect to see even more advanced robotics and sensory feedback systems in the future. In conclusion, technology is changing the way we experience pleasure and intimacy, and Teledildonics is at the forefront of this revolution. The CyberSM suit, Bluetooth-enabled adult toys, and other advancements have opened up new possibilities for people to explore their sexuality. As we move forward, it's important to be aware of the potential risks and take steps to protect our privacy and security. Key Concepts: Teledildonics Technosexuality Digital Sexuality CyberSM Suit Sex Dolls and Robotics Bluetooth Enabled Adult Toys Security Risks Disposable Email Addresses Medical Grade Silicone Toys
Hello and welcome to Securing Sexuality, the podcast where we discuss the intersection of intimacy and information security.
I'm Wolf Goerlich. He's a hacker and I'm Stefani Goerlich. She is a sex therapist and together we're going to discuss what safe sex looks like in a digital age. And today, today we're talking about the wonderful world of web-enabled sex toys. And I am so excited because of the web-enabled part. We're going to geek out a little bit on some tech, which I'm very happy about. So yes, ladies and gentle dems, it is Teledildonics Day on Securing Sexuality. Yay! Everybody's favorite fascinating subject. So tell me about this term first off. Where did this term come from? You know, that is in and of itself a huge question. The term Teledildonics was actually coined all the way back in 1975 by a man named Ted Nelson, who wrote a book called Computer Lib. And Computer Lib was the first time when we heard this term used and it was, you know, really cool kind of like self published zine style. And he introduced the term to the world. But then, you know, fast forward into, you know, the 2000s. And we have phenomenal researchers like Trudy Barber who take that a step further and in the end introduce the term technosexuality. So Teledildonics is simply, you know, Wi Fi enabled dildonics, sex toys. Technosexuality, on the other hand, is the term that Trudy Barber ascribes to people who actually incorporate technology into their sexuality, into their sexual orientation. Somebody who has, you know, a sexual desire for or attraction to robots, for example, might identify as a technosexual. And then about 10 years after that, we have Markie Twist and Neil McArthur, also researchers who refined this once again and talk about digital sexuality, which kind of encompasses both the Teledildonics, you know, the actual toys, devices and tech, and the erotic or amorous attraction piece that Trudy Barber recognized under one broader umbrella of digital sexuality. So we have Teledildonics, the toys, the devices themselves, techno sexuality, people who incorporate technological devices or technologies into their sexual identity and practices, and digital sexuality, which kind of encompasses all of these and more as technology advances. The digital side is one of the things that's interesting to me because it seems like, you know, you're the historian here, so you correct me where I'm wrong, but it seems like early days, 1975 to say 2000, there was much more of focus on interactivity. There's much more focusing on the whole body. I know there's a lot of conversation around, you know, building dolls and all that sort of stuff. Whereas in recent years, it seems to all have been simplified down to just the toy, right? And we had the full body experience, now we're just talking about the part. I agree. And I think a part of that is because technology itself has come so far. I mean, we'll talk about sort of the full body suits of the 90s, but a part of why those were necessary was simply because that was what the technology required. Whereas now, in the same way that, you know, we see those memes of 50 different electronic devices that we used to have in the 80s that are all now contained in our iPhones, the same is true for a lot of sex tech as well. A lot of the individual tools that we would have needed to achieve a certain experience or sensation are integrated now. And so that means that devices become smaller and also to a certain extent, a little bit less immersive, I guess you could say. Yeah, it does definitely feel a little bit less immersive, especially if you look at like the, you know, early 90s where they had these full suits and whatnot. And there was that one demo that was out there too, you're telling me about. And this was a video you've shown at conferences. That was what, 93, I think? Yeah, 93. Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford created a cyberSM suit, which I will post a link to the video in the show notes. It is a remarkable contraption. It totally looks exactly like what people in the 90s would envision cyber sex to require. And looking at it now in 2022, it looks clunky. It looks a little ridiculous, one might say, but at the time it was the height of technology. And in a lot of ways that speaks to kind of what we're talking about in the way that devices have shrunk as technology and technological advances become more integrated, become smaller, become more smart. And what was the two people's names again? Stahl, S-T-A-H-L, Stenslie, S-T-E-N-S-L-I-E, and Kirk Woolford. So Stahl was the artist, Kirk was the programmer. And all right, I'm going to geek out just a little bit. Just a little bit. So the hardware requirements for this thing was a little bit amazing. Kirk wrote all the code on the Macintosh platform, so I think early 90s Macintosh were just into the three and a quarter floppy disks. The experience was immersive, which meant a 16 inch CRT monitor. So yeah, this Macintosh was this big CRT monitor to power it. It was using new Vista cards. So these were TruVizion video cards. If you think about the most expensive video gaming card out there today, double or triple the cost. And that's what these were. They were on a new bus chassis, so it was a very, very cool video setup for the time, very ahead of its time. These are really expensive stations. And to communicate what was going on, these sensor suits, these weird interesting suits, to communicate that between cities, we were looking at ISDN. So traditional ISDN networks, which is like, it's similar to a dial up modem in a way if you want to think about it that way. But effectively we're making a phone call and then communicating over a blazing 128 kilobits, which meant you couldn't really send much. I think you could send certain signals, but it was very far from immersive. But quite the cool setup, quite the cool setup. Any gamer kid in the 90s would have given his left arm for the setup. And I said that the aesthetic, because the actual device itself looked a little funky, a little ridiculous, but they were also cognizant of the aesthetics of it. And you know, Stahl Stenslie said that CyberSM was based on sadomasochistic role playing. And he acknowledged that VR equipment has always looked similar to SM fashion. So when we look at it and compare it to, let's say, an Oculus mask, you know, from a pure just like technology perspective, we can go, wow, that's a lot there, man. But when you look at it compared to perhaps, you know, a well-constructed corset or to a really nicely done Shibari tie, the ropes and the harnesses and all of the accoutrement that go with the CyberSM make a little bit more aesthetic sense, even if to our eyes now they seem a little out of date. I think that's one of the things that has been lost. There's a tweet flying around that said, people who are alive today forget that computers used to be beautiful. There's a lot more, well, especially if you have an artist working on it, but there's a lot more attention to the look, the feel, the colors in computing in the 90s, as we weren't really sure what these things were going to be. And if you go back even earlier to like 1960s and 70s, oh man, I love those early computers and switches and colors and blinking lights. Really cool stuff, really cool stuff. And, you know, we've given up a certain degree of that for our gray rectangles. But can you bridge us from the past to the present? I mean, are there any other steps along the way besides, hey, we named the term, they do this test in the 90s. What else is going on to get us to where we are today? You know, I think we have to acknowledge sort of the evolution of material science, right? I've been focusing, you're the tech guy. You can talk about the modems and the transmission of data between users and all of that stuff. But I look at it and go, oh, that's pretty or, oh, that's clunky. So you know, for me as a non-technologist, I'm curious about the aesthetics, about the creation of it. And a big part of that is looking at how materials have been used in sex toys and, you know, sex dolls, for example, robots, since we're talking about digital sexuality, how those materials have evolved over time. We think about the 60s. If you go all the way back to, you know, the stag era that we've talked about sooner, you think about ads in the backs of pulp magazines. We all are familiar with the cliché of the blow up doll, the inflatable sex doll, right? They are staples in raunchy comedies. They are bachelor party favors. They're just kind of a running joke now. But back after the development of plastics, that was an incredibly innovative thing to be able to have a plastic partner. Unfortunately, as anybody that's ever bought their child an inflatable toy at a parade or the circus knows, those things pop very easily. So it might have been this incredible use of modern materials to create the PVC blow up doll, but they weren't durable. They weren't functional, really. They certainly weren't aesthetically pretty. I will post some pictures in the show notes of sort of the classic blow up doll vibe. And they're not what I would call arousing. But at the time, plastic was new, and it was an incredible sort of idea. From there, we move into foam and the sort of creation of injection foam and all of that good stuff. And that led to a, I'm going to say higher quality, you know, relative to the balloon dolls of the 60s. But by the 70s and early 80s, you could get dolls that were made out of the same foam that you might find in your couch cushions or the Barcalounger. And that gave the user a different feel. You know, they were heavier, so they were a little bit more lifelike in that respect. They were denser, so they were a little bit more durable in that respect. We were moving a little bit closer to a facsimile of reality, but still nowhere near what we have today. I love the foam dolls whenever I am able to find pictures of them. Foam, as we know, breaks down really easily. Most people are not sitting on their couches from the 70s for a reason. And so where you can find pictures of them, you know, the poor things are cracked, they're splitting, they're yellow. These are not devices that aged well. And so they are a little bit harder to find from an archival perspective. But that leap from inflatable PVC to, you know, injection molded foam was a big technological leap. Then material science really takes off. We start in bringing silicone into things. It's a little bit more flesh-like. I'm not saying flesh-light. I'm saying flesh-like, right? It's got that give of skin. It's a little bit softer. It's a little bit more realistic. It's a lot more durable. And so by the 90s and early 2000s, sex dolls are going more high end. And we're seeing the same thing happen in other sex toys, where the switch from sort of those jelly, plastic, squishy, phthalate-laden, toxic toys are starting to be replaced with medical grade silicone. That enters the scene, which is great from a sex therapy, you know, sexual health and wellness perspective. I want people to avoid using toys that are going to leach toxic chemicals around mucosal membranes. So hooray for medical grade silicone. And that really becomes the big innovation. And from there, we see that integration of this amazing, safe, durable, sensual material being integrated into technologies as the actual engines, robotics, the buzzy things that you can explain way better than I can, the mechanisms of toys start to be integrated in with the silicone. And so we start to get a higher quality toy, a higher quality doll, more useful, more realistic. We're starting to bridge that uncanny valley. And then by the 2000s, you know, real doll and robotics enters the scenes and they just kind of take it and run with it. And now, you know, as a sex therapist, I try to keep up on the latest technologies because my clients are using them and asking me about them and wanting to know about them. And things just progress so rapidly these days that it's almost difficult to stay on top of sex tech development. But throughout all of it, that sort of overarching theme of what materials are being used and how can they be molded and shaped in order to be useful to the user and to have a function that feels pleasurable, realistic, and also is safe has been a huge piece of sort of the technological arc for our teledildonics over the last, we'll say, 40 years. Well, and I think that's the last part you said about safe is a really good point. I think that's sort of my cue to start talking about the security aspects of some of these things. Because when we think about safe, safe in terms of materials, absolutely like you just covered, but safe in terms of that connection. One of the things that's interesting is if we go back to that 1993 cyberSM experiment, I mentioned we've got a suit, right? And that suit is hardwired into an Apple Macintosh. And that Apple Macintosh is running purpose-built software. It's calling over a modem across Europe. This was done between France and Germany. So calling across Europe to another modem, to another Apple Macintosh, to another suit. Now what's interesting about that from a security perspective, I'll start breaking this down in just a minute. What's interesting about that is I've got family who still lives in the country, right? I've got family who still lives in very rural areas. And I'm thinking of one in particular, they don't even have locks on their doors. And that always seems weird to me. Like how do you not lock your door? What are you doing? But they don't even have locks on their doors. Why? Because there's not a lot of people around. There's not a lot of criminals around. There's not a lot of concern to have that. And if we think about this connection I just mentioned, back then there weren't a lot of people who would either A, be aware of how to hack an ISDN system and mess with this relationship that was happening between two people on two computers in two different countries on the European continent. And B, even within the set of people who were aware of it, there wasn't like a lot of motivation, right? I mean, this is a point in time where a lot of the hacking was for curiosity or was trying to get intellectual property. You weren't necessarily going to mess with it. So we have the fact that there's not many people on it. We're not going over the public internet. We have the fact that a lot of the connection is hardwired. It is always harder to access. And even though I went back in preparation for this and I read the NIST article, so NIST writes a lot of security stuff and guidance for the US, I read the original NIST guidance and this is like, yeah, ISDN. Not really designed for security. But even though it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of exposure because there wasn't a lot of people trying to mess with this stuff. So that is something that I have concerns about as a clinician. I will say, you know, my doors aren't locked in the country sort of mindset tends to be what I see most in my clients who use these toys. We don't think a lot about what could happen if somebody walks in the door. I think a lot of my users don't even necessarily think about the idea that sex tech has a door that should be or could be locked. And I'm curious, you know, there are some stories that have come out. I know last year some BDSM practitioners who were using Bluetooth enabled cock cages had those tapped and had their devices, more specifically the content within their devices held for ransom. And as a clinician, you know, I am comfortable asking my clients, are you aware of these risks? But I don't necessarily know how to describe those risks for them or how to tell them practical steps they can take to mitigate those risks. And so I love the idea that the metaphor of, you know, the country back door, because the people that are using these technologies feel very safe and very private in their homes and in their spaces. And I don't necessarily know that they're aware of the fact that their doors are unlocked. So if we were to like take this example that we're talking about the cyber SM, right, a person hardwired to a computer, the computer talking great distances to another computer that's hardwired to another person in their suit, we're going to break that up. Let's break it up. And maybe this is the wrong term you need to inform you. Let's break it up. But like the person receiving the pleasure and the person sending the pleasure, is that okay terms? Is there a better term I should use there? I like that. I think sending and receiving pleasure makes a lot of sense. I mean, ideally, that's what we're wanting from these experiences. What feels pleasurable might vary from person to person, but for the purposes of our conversation, I think that's a great shorthand to use. All right. So the receiver of pleasure in this scenario, they're going to have a device. It's going to be made out of medical grade silicone, like you're mentioning. So we've got some safety properties there. It's going to be talking Bluetooth to your cell phone. I think your point about the meme was really well said because almost everything is in our cell phones right now. So Bluetooth LE or low energy to our cell phone. And that cell phone is going to be talking to the nearest Wi-Fi and that Wi-Fi is out on the Internet. So let's break apart just that and then we'll get to like the sending. We can go from there. First thing is a lot of these devices are made by manufacturers who don't necessarily have a security team, don't necessarily have a, you know, a QA team. They produce some software, but it's oftentimes using off the shelf kits. So it's very common that the device itself will have communication ports open that it shouldn't and will have developer interfaces that open that it shouldn't. Why? Because we grabbed something that worked and we wrapped it in this package with this medical grade so-called and we shipped it. Now it's talking Bluetooth. So what does that mean? That means in your example earlier with the cage that if someone can get into this device they can. You know, if someone can connect to this device, they can take action on it in the Bluetooth world. There are secure ways to do Bluetooth and there are not so secure ways to do Bluetooth and it's not uncommon for this not to be secure. One of the interesting things that was going on around, I think it was about four years ago now, was people using Bluetooth radios walk into a room and know if anyone had one of these devices. So we have privacy concerns there. Know if anyone had any of these devices and turn them on unauthenticated. So I can just walk in and turn on all the devices. Not necessarily a good situation. So the first thing we need to do is secure that communication or be aware of the fact that there's a risk of insecure communication between the phone and the toy itself. And if you're in a public spot that can lead to problems. The second area of concern is on the phone itself. The type of apps that are used. Are they tracking? We've done conversations and podcasts before about everything that a phone can track. But imagine all that same data is being gathered and is now being collected and sent somewhere. That can create some risks. So we've got some exposure on the app itself. And then finally on the Wi-Fi, back to the ISDN conversation. Very few people back then were looking at ISDN phone calls. Let alone able to jump in the middle and intercept those. Unless you were like a nation state or doing something rather sophisticated for the time. But with Wi-Fi, we've all heard the concerns about Wi-Fi at an airport. Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. Because there's so many different ways that our network traffic can be intercepted and acted on. So the other thing is, if you're at a coffee shop with one of these phones, phone apps, and that phone app is talking to a toy. Be aware that there's the potential that someone at that coffee shop is able to know that traffic is able to know what's going on there. I think just for the person receiving pleasure, those are your big areas of concern. Who can talk to, who can see the traffic that's coming from my phone? And who can see the traffic, Bluetooth traffic that's going from my phone to the device? And does that device protect that traffic to the phone? So how does that translate over for the everyday user? How does somebody who can listen to your explanation and understand it, but not necessarily apply it, act on it? Does that make sense? Because I can hear everything you're saying. I can follow everything you're saying. But if I were to take everything I just heard, hold a Bluetooth-enabled vibrator in my hand and say, I need to make this safer. I don't, what action steps can I take? You're spot on. One of the big problems with the entire Internet of Things universe, and specifically the Internet of Things with these types of toys, one of the big problems is that there isn't much we can do about it. It's really a problem area because it's not like you can go, oh, well then I'll just put a stronger password on my toy. Well, a lot of these toys don't have the ability to put on a password. So I think at the most basic, just for the person receiving the sensation, at the most basic, really what you need to do is do it from the privacy of your house. This is the back to the, go to the country where the criminals aren't. Be very cognizant of when and where you use these things. Because right now there's not a lot that we can do. So that's for the toy itself. For the app itself, this gets back to everything we talked about previously. Look at the privacy settings of the app. Make sure that it's not disclosing your location. There was a whole class action lawsuit against toy manufacturers a couple years ago because these apps did not have good privacy policies. So the things that Cat Coode has talked to us about and others apply directly to these apps as well. It's fascinating. Yeah, and a little bit disturbing because you would want a better experience, I would imagine, and more control. And there isn't a lot of control over these things. It's similar to the person who's sending the pleasure, which they may have their own app and their own phone, again, using Wi-Fi. Are you on a public Wi-Fi? If so, be aware that someone can see that, someone can use that. Everything I just mentioned around that mobile phone app itself still comes into play. How we connect the sender to the receiver, I'll get to in a minute, but effectively it's a very similar attack service for the person who's sending. Check the phone, make sure the privacy settings are in place, and wherever possible, you're going to want to use your own Wi-Fi. I think that illusion of control, that illusion of power is a part of the appeal of these toys. The example I gave of the Bluetooth enabled cock cages are sexy to the wearer because they know somebody else controls when they come off or when they are locked down. The appeal of a Bluetooth enabled vibrator is being able to hand over the illusion of control to your partner on the other side of the app. I say illusion because we can always leave that toy on the bed and be watching Game of Thrones in the living room while it buzzes away by itself. The person sending the pleasure doesn't actually control what the user or the receiver is doing with it. It is an illusion of control. I think that's part of what makes the idea of somebody interfering with that so scary because it takes away the playful consent-based, I'm letting you drive for a minute, and instead it's almost like somebody hijacking your car. All of a sudden it's not an illusion of control. Somebody else absolutely has interfered with our relationship or our intimacy information and we don't have an agreement with them about when that's going to be used. That's a very different form of control that can feel very violating very quickly. It absolutely can. When I go back to that CyberSM example, heck, when I go back to the infrastructure guidance from NIST on how to secure the ISDN lines, a lot of it is secured by location, physical access controls. If I can't get to the Macintosh that's wired into that soothe that the person's in, I can't mess with it. If I can't get into the data center room where my ISDN lines are, I can't mess with it. Therefore, we can say that we've got a degree of access controls. We can sort of say we've got that in the sending and receiving example I gave if we're doing it from our own privacy of our home. We don't have to worry about someone who's observing that Bluetooth information or turning the device off or on or anything else. We don't have to worry about someone who's potentially observing that Wi-Fi information and deducing that the sender may be sending information. We do have a degree of physical control. Where the situation gets more concerning is the fact that both of these are talking over the internet. What's it talking to? It's usually talking to a web server, the same web server we throw into every web browser and bring it up. That same thing, that same sort of web interface, but also APIs or interfaces meant just for devices, just for the things themselves. So in this scenario, when the person is sending pleasure and the person is receiving pleasure, it's not like the CyberSM example where the two Macintoshes with the two suits were talking directly between France and Germany. In this case, the person sending the pleasure is actually talking to a web server and the person receiving the pleasure is talking to that web server and that web server is brokering information. So another class of vulnerabilities and risks about this is the web server itself is how the applications are built, is how the applications are presented. One of the interesting things that we've seen in other cases, like the Ashley Madison example, is can I determine if someone has an account of this? So you might imagine if I know someone's using one of these toys, I could go ahead and say, okay, do they have an account? Okay, yeah, I figured they would because I know they have one of these toys by looking at their email address or whatever. But what might also be interesting is can I see who else has an account? Do they have an account with a coworker? Do they have an account with a friend that they're perhaps a little bit too chatty with on social media? You can start to observe behaviors and start to poke at these web servers and expose information. So I know what you're going to ask me, Wolf, that's great, but what could I do about this? Because I'm not a programmer. I'm assuming that's what you're going to ask me. I mean, that's usually what I ask you. I pull up with fascinating conversations about sex and intimacy and then I ask you, baby, what do we do about it? That is our jam. So this is something that we can tell any of your clients, which is if you are using one of these devices, not only do it at home, we already covered that, be aware that you're taking additional risk in public. Maybe that's exciting, I don't know, but be aware that risk exists. But when you register it, when you set it up, this gets back to using disposable email addresses. You don't want to link this to your day-to-day email address. You definitely don't want to get to your corporate email address. There are folks who look into this and you'd be surprised at how many corporate email addresses that they find, how many people in the military that they find. So make sure that you're using one of these disposable email addresses. Like what are some of the ones you recommend today? I am a big fan of ProtonMail right now. That's my go-to that I recommend to my clients. I'm sure there are others and your world would know more about them than I do. But coming out of the world of domestic violence, sexual assault, we always recommended ProtonMail to our clients and our survivors. So my new toy at ProtonMail is what you'd want, not me at my work.com. When we're looking at just the basics of how to secure yourself and protect yourself, that's the takeaway. Now we'll dig deeper into this, but I hope at least that's laid out some of the risks that exist between the person sending, the person receiving, and of course the great wide internet that's in between it all. It does. That has really been helpful. What else should our listeners know before venturing out into the big wide world of teledildonics and connective sex toys? I think today there really is no... Now today being when we record this in 2022, because there are certainly organizations that are working to fix this. But there really is no safe way to do this. So when you're talking about material science and how we had that progression to safe silicone, we are not at the safe silicone level for the silicon, right? For the technology itself, there is no safe way to do it. So have fun, but just be aware that you're taking risks and as much as possible, try to control those risks with good privacy policies, dedicated email addresses, with giving yourself space. And don't forget to password protect your home router and your home wireless system before you plug in your new toys. Absolutely. So as we wrap up, you do a lot with your clients in terms of these toys. How are they being used? What is the perspective of this beyond just the fact that I'm really excited about Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and internet traffic? Tell me about the relationship side of things and some of the things that they should be aware of, both from a let's have fun perspective and also from a here's how to protect yourself perspective. So in terms of physical protection and safety, please avoid jelly toys. I realize that medical grade silicone toys, stainless steel, glass are more expensive, but they are not porous and they are not going to leach toxic chemicals into mucosal membranes. So please buy investment quality toys, everyone. It's unfair, the markup on these things. That's why I think that sex therapists should get wholesale accounts and make these toys available at cost to their clients. But failing that, it's better to save up and buy one high quality toy than it is to buy 10 that are going to cause damage to your body. That is the practical side. On the sort of emotional side, pay attention to how these toys are being used in your life and in your relationships. One of the things that's been most fascinating for me as I've done the work around my sex toy research and my 10,000 years of cyber sex research has been in looking at how humanity over time has engaged with the materials that we sexualize. Right? Like if we go all the way back to caveman days with with paleolithic people taking clay and molding figures out of clay that were erotic or sexual or celebrating fertility, anything connected to the body and the intimate, that was humanity working with a passive material in order to shape it into what we needed it to be in a given moment. And eventually time and technology, you know, we were able to paint portraits and we were able to carve statues and we were able to take photographs. And we had this sort of static image that we didn't necessarily make ourselves, but that we could look at, like looking at a mirror or like looking at a reflection of our aspirational desires and use those to inform our sexuality. What fascinates me as a sex therapist is the point in time when that no longer became a passive action, when it no longer became an individual person alone with something sexy, spiritual or erotic, when it became two people able to talk to each other across time and space. Right? I love, love Betsy Craddock, our first phone sex operator, because she really embodied this notion that the minute a technology is invented, we're using it to connect with one another. And we have done that consistently ever since, whether it has been through online chats, through sharing of videos, through phone sex, through connected sex toys, like we've been talking about this whole time. If you and your partner are using a Max and a Nora, shout out to Lovense, they don't sponsor us but I'm a huge fan of their products in this respect. You know, if you and your partner are using Max and Nora, the integrated cyber toys, you are having an experience together without being physically present in a way that watching a video or looking at a black and white photograph can't provide. And what's really fascinating to me now is watching how we're starting again as humanity, as a species, to evolve beyond material at all. Right? We're not even molding clay or taking pictures now. We're interacting with AI and we're forming relationships of holograms. We're moving from humans and passive materials into humans and the immaterial, where there's nothing tangible or present. And yet we're still forming these deep emotional and erotic connections. And that fascinates me as a clinician. That concerns me a little bit as a researcher, as a sexologist. I'm not really sure what it says for our species when we reach a point where romantic and intimate fulfillment is possible in the absence of another human. I don't know yet whether that's good or bad, but I find the fact that we've reached that point fascinating. And that's why it seems kind of weird to have the social worker, the sex therapist, going on and on about material science. But it's that piece that's most fascinating to me here. It's how we as humans, we as animals, we as a species, connect with and interact with the materials that bring us pleasure, satisfaction, connection, in some cases, love. And I'm very intrigued to see what's going to happen as we move beyond the necessity of a material, corporeal form at all. And from a security perspective, you know, whenever there's a new technology, you said almost immediately it becomes eroticized. Whenever there's a new technology, we oftentimes start without defining the security. We oftentimes start with saying, oh, we're in a small town. It's no big deal. This is the Wild West and we're on the frontier. We'll get to that later. And so especially as we continue to look at some of these toys and some of these aspects, the security was not considered because people were hardwired and no one would have messed with it anyways. Now we're in a situation where everything's on the internet. It's very easy for anyone from anywhere to mess with it. And the knowledge needed to do that is much more common. So we've moved out of the small town. We moved into the big city, but we haven't yet adjusted our street smarts. We haven't yet adjusted the technologies we build and how we build to accommodate for that. This is a really good topic, this intersection between technology and sexuality. And I thank you, dear listener, for tuning in this week to Securing Sexuality, your source for information like this, information you need to protect yourself and your relationships. From the toy on the bedroom to the server on the cloud, we are here to help you navigate safe sex in a digital age. Be sure to check out our website, securingsexuality.com for links to more information about the topics we discussed today, some of the toys I mentioned, and of course our conference next fall. And join us again for more fascinating conversations around material science and more specifically, the intersection of sexuality and technology. Have a great week. Thank you. Comments are closed.
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