Editrix Abby  

Future Sex

Extreme Fetish Editrix and Panty Play contributor Abby Ehmann offers her predictions of sex in the next millenium.

This article originally appeared in Panty Play sometime before 2000.

If you were old enough to flip through Life magazine back in the Sixties, you can laugh about the predictions of the future. Here it is almost the year 2000 and no one's walking around wearing silver space suits or plastic bubbles on their heads. We aren't driving around in hovercrafts and we aren't farming on the moon. Yet. In novels, comics, science fiction and every other form of popular culture, the future has been foreseen, however erroneously. Even being pressed to speculate on what might occur in the coming year continues to embarrass the most insightful intellectual pundits, since even projecting 365 days into the future is an innacurate science. So you can certainly take my predictions here with a grain of salt (or for you Trekkies perhaps a Dilitheum Crystal). As the 20th century comes to a close, we somehow cannot help but look forward to the next century and divinate what the world will become. Here, I offer you what I think sex might be like in the 21st Century.

A CURE FOR AIDS
As dismal as the prospect for an AIDS cure may appear at present, the pharmaceutical community is at work on cures for just about everything, including the common cold. So why not a cure for AIDS? If they can come up with something that helps Bob Dole get it up for Libby, anything is possible! So, let's say the cure finally arrives. And let's also say that there's a cure for herpes and every other irritating sexually transmitted disease. The threat of a death sentence has served as a powerful preventative to unprotected sex for over almost two decades now, and many of us who lived through the Seventies lament the loss of the good old days, when indiscrimate sex was the norm.

So, what will happen once that death threat has been lifted? I say, look out! It'll be the swingin' Seventies all over again! Finally, our repressed society will undergo the mythical sexual revolution that we were supposed to have experienced in 1968 and everybody will be busy doin' it! One night stands will be back in vogue and college campuses will again become "hot beds" of sexual experimentation, as opposed to the PC safe sex havens they are now, with their strict rules dictating sexual behavior. Stock in condom companies will crash and burn and the latex industry will suffer a serious setback as people toss their Trojans out the window and get back to boffing sans their heretofore manditory love gloves. Fornication will finally overtake video games, baseball and shopping as the great American pastime. Between the advent of increased and improved sex education and existing excellent contraception, we will again have the ability to fuck with absolutely no damaging consequences. There will be no reason not to be screwing 24 hours a day!

THE END OF PROCREATIVE SEX
As women wait longer to have children and random enviromental chemicals continue to wreak havoc on our reproductive systems, even the healthiest homo sapiens will no longer be able to conceive the old fashioned way. Once in vitro fertilization becomes the only way to bear a child, intercourse will no longer be necessary for procreation. The church will wholeheartedly endorse this non-sexual form of human proliferation, and from the Vatican on down, religious decrees will be made that sex is no longer sanctioned by the church. No. When you can, as the song says, "Pick your sons, pick your daughters too, from the bottom of a long glass tube," you shouldn't be engaging in sexual relations for mere recreational purposes.

Married couples will take vows of celibacy and, as bestowing gifts supplants sex as the way to really say I love you, the diamond and florist industries florist reap the financial benefits. There will be a rebirth of romance, providing a much needed propping up of the sagging economy as shopping, vacationing and dining out become the only acceptable forms of "intercourse" between lovers. Eventually, the only people fucking around will be hookers and rebellious college kids. (The scary thing is that this technology is currently in use, already making women ask, "Who needs a husband?" or a man at all, for that matter. And genetic engineering is also now a fact of life. It won't be long till you will not only pick your sons and daughters from a glass tube, you will be able to specify their eye color, intelligence level and physical stature. Very scary indeed.)

VIRTUAL REALITY BECOMES A REALITY
We've been hearing about virtual sex for so long now, it's almost as though it already is a reality! And between Hollywood's versions of cybersex and TV shows like The X Files, it certainly isn't difficult to imagine. You sit down at your computer, slip on an elaborate pair of gloves, some heavy goggles and an assortment of electrodes designed to stimulate and excite corresponding nerve centers, and you're ready to go. I mean come! People have apparently adapted quite well to jerking off with one hand while surfing the net with the other, so it won't be a stretch to merely add on some more equipment -- peripherals, I believe they're called. And if you keep up with Wired, the mechanisms are already in the works.

The appartuses are similar to sex toys currently in use, but they'll have sensitive sensors to pick up heart beat, body temperature, levels of sweat and sexual lubrication, and so forth. The lucky lover on the receiving end of this remote sexual experience will be equipped with similar devices, and, if it all works as promised, it will feel as though they're actually engaging in a sex act. Imagine! All that primal passion transmitted through beeps and blips, when it would be so much easier to just grab the person beside you and get down to business. Of course, by 2080, we may no longer even be engaging in social intercourse in the face-to-face, old world fashion. We may all be floating around in space pods or something. So don't mock the tech heads who are hard at work in their labs, experimenting on their own genitalia. Our genetically engineered descendants may thank us.

PORN STARS EDGE OUT ROCK STARS AS CULTURAL ICONS
Linda Lovelace was the first real porn star, and since she made her big splash, there hasn't been anyone who has matched her iconic status through nothing more than a sexual performance. But that has been changing. At this year's Adult Video News Awards, many acknowledged the surfacing of adult entertainers in mainstream media outlets, most notably MTV and the E! Channel. Jenna Jameson is suddenly on par with Joan Rivers. And with the widespread distribution of Pamela Anderson's porn debut playing with her now ex-husband's dick on video, even mainstream stars have somewhat unwittingly become porn stars. Who didn't immediately log on to check out those pictures of Dr. Laura?

In the new millenium, the sanctity of Annie Sprinkle's "Sacred Prostitute" finally comes to pass, in the mass worship of porn stars. After decades of sexual repression and misplaced Puritanical values, America will still be pretty fucked up when it comes to sex. But we've revered athletes for their physical prowess and the achievement of excellence in each of their chosen sports. The worship of porn stars is a logical progression. The men and women who fuck for a living are, without a doubt, the best at what they do. Right? Who among us is able to take a dick in every orifice and still smile winningly? And how many men can come on command? Or get it up time after time like the studs of adult cinema? And what about some of those preposterous positions porn stars manage to pretzel themselves into? Talk about athletic prowess!

So in the future, you'll be seeing the smiling faces of fuck film stars on cereal boxes. What better way to get Johnny to eat his Wheaties? They'll endorse everything from batteries -- "My vibrator just keeps going, and going!" -- to bedding -- "I couldn't bear getting boned on that futon one moment longer, so I dialed 1-800-MATTRESS!" Or how about, "After eight hours of being on my back, my skin gets rubbed raw. That's why I love to come home to my comfy cotton jersey Martha Stewart sheets." The aforementioned Adult Video News Awards ceremony will be televised, right along with the Emmys and the Grammys. Doesn't the world deserve to know who wins Best Anal Sex Scene? And the fashion magazines will all scramble to name The 10 Best Dressed -- and 10 Worst Dressed -- porn stars. Or should it be Best Undressed Porn Stars? Let's just say it won't be quite the same as the current array of award shows. Well, then again...

Those are my predictions for sex in the next millenium. They can't all come to pass, since some are mutually exclusive of others. But each one is a distinct possibility. Chances are, we won't all be wearing silver space suits and plastic bubbles on our heads. And one can only hope that we won't be wearing condoms, either!

[Written in 1999]