Written by Iran Narges and Allison Huang for Medium. Originally published on July 20th, 2016.
Iran Narges: How do you define sextech?
Cindy Gallop: Essentially, sextech is any technology or tech-driven desire to amplify or improve the quality of human sexual experience.
As a society, we are all remarkably mixed up about sex. Our reluctance to talk about sex openly and honestly, and the shame and embarrassment we feel around it, has many implications. For example, because the media and tech blogs are just as uncomfortable covering sex as anyone else is talking about it, when they do talk about sextech, they tend to default to the hardware side of sextech. And so you’ll see all the coverage in the media about teledildonics, VR porn, sex robots.
The issue with that is all of the awareness and coverage goes to that side of sextech when there are many more interesting things happening on the side I call software, which is where my own startup, MakeLoveNotPorn, operates. The software side is technology that is designed to bring people closer together in the real world. The reason that the media are not comfortable covering that side of things is because it involves people actually having sex with each other.
The irony is that when you default to the hardware, what you are doing is placing all of the emphasis and focus on sextech on those aspects of it designed to drive each of us further and further apart from each other into our own little isolating virtual world, and I am all about the software side of sextech that brings us closer together in the real world.
Head over to Medium to read the rest of this fascinating conversation!
