10 Products From the Future of Sex

Robot Prostitutes

Sex work is an emotionally charged topic and the argument as to whether people have the right to “sell their body” has defenders on both sides. But in the future, we may not have to think about it because our prostitutes will be robots. Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars, two academics from New Zealand, authored a paper in April of 2012 that postulated that the future of sex tourism will be with humanoid robots designed to appeal to a wide variety of fetishes.

Injectable Birth Control for Men

Until now, it’s primarily been a woman’s responsibility to not get pregnant. Sure, a dude could wear a condom, but everything else was for ladies only. That’s obviously unfair, but researchers in China are getting very close to a monthly injection that would block sperm production for 30 days at a time, basically making your love gun shoot blanks for as long as you want it to. In their clinical trials, only one man in 100 fathered a child, which is pretty good, but there might be cultural barriers to taking a hormone shot every month.

Asexual Reproduction

Here’s a worst-case scenario: In the future, we might make new human beings without even getting naked. London geneticist Aarathi Prasad writes in her book Like A Virgin that technology is getting to the level where we might only need a single parent in order to create a new child. In Australia, researchers are growing sharks in artificial wombs. Japanese scientists have created synthetic sperm that have been used to create living baby mice. Our lovely, funny genitals may well be obsolete, friends. How sad is that?

Record Your Orgasm

For all of the mystery in human sexuality, the orgasm is actually a pretty simple thing. It’s just a massive explosion of electrical signals in certain parts of your brain that make you feel really good for a few seconds. And we’re already pretty good at sending electrical signals into the brain. Futurologist Ian Pearson predicts that soon we’ll be able to record exactly what’s happening in your brain when you climax and play it back whenever you want, through a chip implanted in your skull. You could even record other people’s orgasms and really feel what they’re like.

Teledildonics

It used to be that meeting people on the Internet was considered weird, but now online dating is totally socially acceptable. So online sexing will obviously be next, right? People have been getting off through the Internet for years, first through text chat and more recently on video, but the third dimension is missing. That’s what the inventors of LovePalz hope to address. Their product is a two-part “teledildonic” system that measures the activity of partners and transmits it wirelessly between them. The faster you work your unit, the faster your partner’s will go and vice versa for tightness. These units are set to go on sale very soon.

Longevity Orgasms

Sex is meaningless without death, as some French philosopher might have said. But in our endless quest to stave off the final curtain, it’s possible that some people might be trying to weaponize our pleasure centers. Research has shown that having regular orgasms is beneficial to almost all of the body’s systems, with Dr. Michael Roizen stating that having 350–700 orgasms a year can add 4–8 years to your lifespan. In the future, your doctor may prescribe you get off more often, whether with a human partner or an aforementioned sex robot.

Sexual Databases

As hooking up becomes more casual, people put less and less thought into choosing sexual partners. The gulf between sex and romance has never been as wide in the modern world (at least since the invention of the charming concept called “romance”). Expect the hook-up culture currently flourishing in American colleges to get even more popular with the introduction of technology. Social networking and massive databases could store your hook-up history and ratings and match you up with prospective sexual partners through Foursquare-esque geotagging, without you ever having to come up with a pick-up line.

Body Modification

We’ve already seen some daring souls alter their bodies for enhanced sexual pleasure — clitoral hood piercings often make oral sex better for women and some dudes have had penile implants to make their business bigger. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Advances in prosthetics and artificial limbs have come fast and furious in recent years, and some sex theorists are already predicting the possibility of flexible, thought-controlled tentacles that can be used to stimulate your partner in totally new ways. You might need to get your clothes altered, though.