WIRED recently publish an awesome article on the rise -- pun intended -- of VR porn. Porn has always been quick to adopt new technology, so this doesn't surprise me at all. But the idea of "cheating" with it, which the article raises, does blur some lines. Focus: Where do you draw the line as far as "cheating"? Emotional cheating? Hugging? Is someone allowed to make a drunken mistake once? What about VR, as raised in the WIRED article? Alt. Focus: What else is VR gonna bring us? "Vacationing" in your home? Immersive movies and roller coaster rides on your couch? Where do you think this entertainment technology will take us?
Cheaters are the worst kind of people. But it’s subjective for each couple. What works for one, may not for another. But both people in a relationship should definitely ensure they are on the same page before getting too serious. I would dump my wife even after the first mistake, and I expect she would do the same.
If you think watching porn isn't cheating, then watching VR porn shouldn't be cheating either. The cover story for NY Mag a couple issues ago was all about sex robots, and they presented some kind of ethical conundrum about it too. (Not whether or not it would be considered cheating, but whether or not it was ethical in general.) That never even occurred to me. I think having VR porn or sex robots available would do a lot more good than harm. Having outlets like that that react to and interact with you (as realistically as technology can) might even be better than just masturbating with disembodied dicks and vaginas. I think I've already talked about how I'm pretty tolerant of cheating here. For the most part, I don't consider it that big of a deal. I've only been in two monogamous relationships and they both cheated on me and I don't even remember that until I'm having a conversation about cheating because there are so very many other things that people can do to each other that I consider much more hurtful than cheating. But there's definitely a sliding scale. I'd be upset if someone had a drunken one night stand but it wouldn't affect my relationship, while if someone had a months-long affair with my best friend then yeah I'd probably dump them. I was just talking with my coworker pal the other week about this and she has the most arbitrary-seeming scale. She said if her boyfriend got a happy ending at a massage place she wouldn't consider it cheating, but if he got a lap dance at a strip club she would. I'm still trying to parse that. I don't know where, exactly, the line is for how many times or what type of person it would have to be with before it mattered enough to me to end things, but it would definitely take more than it just happening in general. Like with so many things that piss me off, it's not so much the actual thing but the idea that they thought I was enough of a fool that they could get away with whatever they're doing that makes me much more upset.
And this is why communication is vital to the relationship process. However you feel about cheating, open relationships, sex in general, if you cannot effectively communicate with your partner(s) then you're fucked from the get go. Everyone wants something different, but you can reach compromise by using your words. ALT. FOCUS: I'm hoping it will add to education. I'm not enough of a big thinker to suggest practical applications, but the potential is clear. Teaching surgeons and other medical professionals springs to mind. Entertainment is a great launching point, as it will generate income while the tech gets smoothed out, but it would be dumb to stop there.
So that begs a certain set of ethical questions, particularly since you've worked in that realm. What instead of just having sex with their robot/VR, they had some violent rape fantasy or something equally disturbing? Should their robots be the outlet for that or would that go further to promote it in a negative way?
Oh, right, I wasn't thinking of it in terms of this kind of question. This is something I've thought about a lot in terms of regular porn and I'm still not sure I've fully picked a side yet. If anyone remembers the Cannibal Cop case from a couple years ago, there was a guy who had a vore fetish and spent a lot of time looking at vore porn and talking on vore message boards and then got caught talking to one of his lil vore pals detailing how they were going to kill and eat his wife. He claimed that was part of the fantasy and he wasn't actually planning on going through with it, but it was decided it was with enough specific details and the plan had gotten past a certain point that it was considered actual intent to murder and he was put in jail. (Where he worked in the kitchen, hah.) There was a lot of talk then about where the lines were for policing fantasy, and I think that for as much as the fetish disturbs me everything up to the entire conversation where they're talking about doing it to a specific person with a plan to do so is fine. It gets a little trickier for porn that relates to things that happen in real life a lot more often than guys eating women though. I'm generally fine with porn that has rape in it. I understand the psychology behind why women have rape fantasies and while I have a knee-jerk reaction to suspect that a guy who likes rape porn is that much more likely to rape someone I don't know how fair that is and I do think, for the most part, there's a divide between the fantasy lives of what we want to consume in porn versus what we want in real life. Maybe even sometimes that the things we seek out in porn are exactly what we don't want in real life. There is something about thinking about someone enacting a rape fantasy in VR porn that feels worse than thinking about them just watching it on screen, in the same way that video games that involve rape feels different than just watching it on screen. I guess since it's more participatory and the gamification of it belittles it. But, ultimately, I don't know if I'd say it's ethically bad. Then it's all especially murky for things like pedophilia. I've listened to a couple podcast interviews with therapists who deal with it and make various arguments for treating it like an illness and what we should do with pedophiles who have never actually harmed kids but either just admit that they are one, or that they consume porn without making it themselves. I wonder if those kinds of people would even support VR porn, assuming it's all completely virtual and there was never at one point an actual kid involved, as a kind of treatment. I don't know where to begin with my own personal thoughts on that. Listening to those interviews was some of the most uncomfortable experiences I've ever had that involved a lot of mental exercises trying to separate my gut emotional reactions and actually trying to think about it logically and rationally. But I'm sure the people in that field are already considering VR porn through that lens. Ultimately I think it all comes down to the question: If you use porn and VR as an outlet for urges and fantasies that are illegal, are you more or less likely to commit those acts in real life? It's similar to the questions about video games and violence I think. Overall, I think I lean towards less likely, but like I said at the beginning I've never really firmly found a side.
It's also possible that the answer to this varies depending on the person and the type of porn/video game, and that there is no one-size-fits-all.
In my black mirror spec script you wouldn’t learn the girl being traumaticly raped the entire episode was actually a robot until the very end when it’s turned over for repair and the ambivalent service tech just shrugs his shoulder and wipes her broken ai memory.
Can u imagine a worst gig than sex robot repairman? He pops her open to tinker with the gears and such and the cum of thousands of guys just spills out. God that would be awful.
Sam Harris did a podcast dedicated solely to this topic. I think it was called “Raping Dolores,” or something. His argument was that, if Westworld existed, it presents an ethical dilemma. By raping and pillaging the hosts, he postulates, we lose our humanity. Not because machines have rights, either. One could argue that a sex robot is no different than a toaster, and who cares if you rape your toaster? Harris argues that by making the hosts so close to human it changes the intent. A person who fucks a toaster has a fetish. A person who rapes an approximation of a person is arguably a rapist in his essence. Therefore we should treat VR very carefully, as how we treat it is a reflection of our own humanity. (This is Harris’ argument.)
I don't buy that reasoning. When you do something, it's the impact that it has on other people that is the measure of how ethical or moral it is. Sometimes people get excited by the strange or taboo. If they practice the act alone, in isolation, using VR, then to me, that is not enough to say that they broke that social contract. Even if it is the most realistic VR in the world... you know that it isn't. Even if you "get lost in the moment" and it seems more real than it is, you've still started down that path knowing it's not real, and have allowed yourself a certain release of constraint for the behaviour that follows. This is no different than video games. If I am playing a video game and am killing all sorts of people, does that make me a killer? Or even predisposed to being a killer? I say n That being said, I could easily see it being a tease that could lead people down that path, given the right experiences, VR or otherwise.
There's a saying, something like: true character is how you behave when no one is looking. I don't agree with what you're saying. You'll get an agreement from Dixie for sure, especailly on drunk driving. As long as you don't crash, damage property, or cause harm to other motorists, the cops shouldn't give you a DUI ticket? If you make it home safely, it shouldn't be illegal?
I don't think that's a fair analogy, as there is a very real-world potential for crashing and hurting people when driving drunk in meatspace. That potential outcome is what makes all the difference. But I would have zero problem with him driving drunk in VR, because nobody is going to get hurt. It's a virtual sandbox. For that matter, driving drunk in VR and sexual assault in VR are very comparable... I think the only big difference is that people are much more offended or outraged at the idea of the sexual assault.