Oh, the romance of it all. There you are in a darkened room, the walls flickering from the candlelight. You have on that secret little thing you like, the one that makes you feel oh-so-hot, something from the lingerie section at Sears or maybe the scuba shop at the mall. Whatever. You’re sipping a fine Charles Shaw vintage 2006 cabernet as Celine Dion softly croons the theme from Titanic from your boom box. And in front of your eyes you behold two delicious creatures making slow, sensual, tender love to each other. Or maybe someone beating their bound lover with a form of pasta, who knows. One of them is yellow, sort of a cross between a muskrat and Mr. Magoo, with hair that looks like something you pulled from your garden this morning, and the other looks like a cartoon version of that kid from Home Alone on crack.
Which is an appropriate metaphor, because you are very much home alone as this takes place. You’re staring at your computer monitor, and with your free hand you’re punching in keys to move an avatar that’s giving virtual head to the avatar belonging to the gender-unspecific person in Nova Scotia who is playing the other character in this digital sexual playground. You’re having sex online. Sort of. No, not the chat room whack-off variety of online sex from recent history – that’s soooo yesterday – but true virtual booty, with a visual component and discretionary movement controlled by you. And man, have you got some mad skills.
Nobody at Wicked Pictures is particularly worried that this form of virtual sex will replace their DVDs as the favored vicarious vice of choice, but there’s no contending that online virtual sex is on the rise. For the uninitiated, online virtual sex is the ultimate and inevitable perversion – gamers like to think of it as evolution – of the common video game, though you’ll find no Game Cube or X-Box titles at Best Buy that can take you there. No, this is a “members-only” proposition that takes place within online venues such as Second Life (one wonders what happened to their first life), IMVU (instant messaging gone kinky) and Gaia, all of which are online community environments that employ little cartoon figures with sweet, cherubic faces, and in some cases, whips in their hands. These sites differ from “virtual worlds” within which a wide variety of games are played in that they are more about real-time interactions between characters who are fronts for real people, drawing from a database of pre-programmed moves and actions that allow you to do everything from pet a virtual dog to comb someone’s virtual hair, to committing virtual murder, as well as various and sundry forms of sexual behavior. Imagine the Michelin Man getting it on with Lucy from Peanuts, and you get the idea. The interactions are limited only by the robustness of the programming and the imagination of the players behind the digital cartoon faces. A scary thought, that.
And as if this isn’t dark – or at least weird – enough for you, here’s a little shady realism to give the whole thing a bit of the same slimy feel as that offered by the porn world. Some of these sites actual charge money – as in, real world dollars – to have your cartoon engage in sexual acts with someone else’s cartoon. Virtual strippers in virtual strip bars charge the member real dollars for virtual lap dances, and it goes downhill from there.
It all just proves that one or both of the following clichés of the times are true: live and let live, even it it’s not real… and more aptly, there really is a sucker born every minute.
