The Future of Sex with Bryony Cole
In this episode, Don MacPherson is joined by sextech futurist, podcaster and speaker Bryony Cole. Bryony is on the front lines of sex technology innovation and adoption. She joined the show to discuss what exactly sextech is and how developments in sextech will change the way humans explore their sexuality, find potential partners and build relationships. Don and Bryony also discuss the importance of sex education and the possibility of a new sexual revolution.
Season Four of 12 Geniuses is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode explores trends in sex that are reshaping the way we connect with others and how we explore our sexuality.
Bryony Cole is a globally recognized expert on sextech. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, The Today Show and other outlets. Bryony is the founder of Sextech School, the first school for entrepreneurs looking to break into the sextech space. She also hosts the award-winning podcast called The Future of Sex and a global sextech hackathon. Bryony is also the author of the Future of Sex reports. Her work is widely accepted as the pinnacle of industry insights and innovation.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don McPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today, we explore the future of sex. Like just about every other aspect of our lives, new technology is changing who we love, how we find partners, and the ways in which we express ourselves sexually. I became interested in this topic as online dating started to become mainstream. It was clear then that technology was forever changing this important aspect of our lives.
And as you will learn in this episode, there is no end in sight to these changes. If the topics of intimacy, sex, and sex technology make you uncomfortable, this episode is definitely not for you. To help us understand the landscape of sex technology and the future of sex, our guest is Bryony Cole. Bryony is founder of Sextech School, which teaches entrepreneurs and investors about the sextech market, and she is the producer and founder of The Future of Sex Podcast.
Bryony, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Bryony Cole:
Thanks for having me.
Don MacPherson:
Can you describe what you do?
Bryony Cole:
I'm a sextech futurist, so I run my own school called Sextech School and help entrepreneurs build businesses in the space. It started with a podcast called Future of Sex, looking at this world of sex and technology.
Don MacPherson:
And can you describe what sextech is?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. I think the easiest way to describe it is looking at it as a compound of two words, sexuality and technology. Sextech is any technology designed to enhance sexuality. One goes, "What the hell are you talking about?" The first thing that comes to mind often I think when people hear those two words put together, sexuality and technology, is robots and sex robots, which is certainly a part of sextech, but sextech is so much more than just sex robots.
It's anything to do with that sexuality bucket from education, health, crime and violence reporting, sexual expression, of course, pleasure, but also like pain prevention and violence and human trafficking. How does that relate to technology? And it could be anything from sophisticated technology like AI, AR, mixed realities, and robotics, or really simple tech, whether that's apps or websites or rubber rings for wearables. If we think about technology, it's just a tool that allows us to do things or solve problems.
Don MacPherson:
I know you were involved in this Future of Sex Report that came out maybe a couple of years ago, few years ago. You cover five different areas. Could we talk about that, because I want to set the stage with that and then maybe move to some less known elements in the sextech world? The five categories are virtual sex, remote sex, robots, immersive entertainment, and augmentation.
Bryony Cole:
The easy ones to pick off there are virtual sex and remote sex, because it's pretty much what everyone's experiencing right now. Going through COVID and if you're separated from your partner, you're looking for different ideas of like, how might I be able to remotely connect with my partner and enjoy some sort of sexual expression? They do seem sci-fi because in many ways we've seen them in sci-fi movies before in that long-distance relationship, so how do I connect teledildonics to someone on another planet or on another country and enjoy sex haptically and through technology.
Remote sex is teledildonics, which is wifi or Bluetooth-enabled sex toys. And I think a lot of people what rings true there is like, "Oh, it's a vibrator connected to the internet." And a lot of the market for that pre-COVID was cam girls, right? Using these sort of wifi-connected vibrators to make money online. COVID comes along. Everyone's locked down. They're separated from their partners, and they still want to experience this. What happened is the sale spiked but they also realized, "Oh, there's sleeves and toys for men that can be connected."
You can either connect to an app and then connect that app and give permission out to someone else on the other end of an app, or you can connect it directly to another toy. And so feel those sensations at the same time. Again, it sounds so sci-fi and like, "Oh my gosh, we can feel these things at the same time and have sex at the same time." Yeah, it still is pretty sci-fi. In fact, when you put it into practice, it's clunky. It's funny. People are going to these products for novelty more than they are to experience this being in the same sensations at the same time.
That's teledildonics. Virtual sex, if we move to that different sector, I guess, is how do we use virtual reality and products like that to not only simulate sex, but use it for different ideas around sex education, which has already since that report came out happened in the adult industry and that porn companies are using this not only for their own content, but also for creating sex education platforms in virtual reality. Virtual sexology is a VR sex education platform.
It's run by a porn company and the teachers are porn stars, but the education and the content there is aimed at making you a better lover or getting to know your body, depending on what course you take, is all designed by sex therapists and really signals or points to the opportunities in this space. If we think about kids that go to school today that might have the opportunity to learn history or geography in VR and how effective that's been, what might happen there, where we teach kids sex education in virtual reality.
We enable them to be sitting in the same room as someone that can talk to them about STDs or STIs or sexual health issues, or allow them to practice consent by walking through a simulation, through a nightclub or something and having to practice consent or saying no before you actually get in that position. In reality, we've seen those sort of practical aspects are really effective. That's what we can expect in the future from virtual sex.
Don MacPherson:
I know I've seen you speak and you talked about the sex-ed that you received. I'm older than you are, and I received reproduction education. I wouldn't say that it was sex education. As I was kind of preparing for this, I was reading this Future of Sex landscape and reading some of the literature on it. And I'm like, "This is the end of humanity." And then I started to pick up some of these things that, oh, there's actually some benefits to humankind from this. Like you were talking about, consent and education and things like that.
I think that's important for people to keep in mind is that this isn't necessarily the end of humanity. There are some benefits to some of these things.
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. Well, I think that's a very normal human reaction to go, "Oh my God, this is the end of humanity," when we have these changes or when we have these big sort of innovation pushes, right? They're quite polarizing. We're either really hopeful and think we're headed towards utopia, or we're completely scared, fearful, and just like, "This is the end of humanity." I think they're normal reactions, and I think we underestimate how quickly we change from being in fear around them to thinking, "This is quite a good thing."
The most obvious example I talk about in that sense is dating apps, where 10 years ago when Tinder came out, everyone was like, "Oh, if you're on Tinder, you must be desperate." And today, if you're single and you're not on Tinder or you're not on a dating app, like what are you doing? How are you finding people? We used to think that that was sort of so embarrassing and now it's like, well, this is actually really empowering technology. Oh, maybe we're sick of Tinder by now, it's on to the next thing. But I think it's interesting to note that those technologies and our attitudes around them do shift and change.
When I talk about virtual sex and people go, "Oh, that would be horrible," and then think, "Well, in 10 years’ time, maybe we'll think differently, just like you thought differently about Tinder when it first arrived." I'm a sextech optimist when it comes to that, but very aware that people are scared. And also I think it would be irresponsible to not mention the dangers of all of these technologies, right?
The introduction of the internet has created so many wonderful things, but also when we look at sexuality even in that bubble, like revenge porn and the proliferation of online pornography and human trafficking and things, they have real dangers as well that you have to be mindful of. There's no sextech ethics committee, and a lot of the time governments and legislation takes five to 10 years to catch up.
Don MacPherson:
Let's talk about augmentation for a minute, because that's one of the areas on the Future of Sex landscape that you talked about. What is augmentation, because I think it's far more diverse than maybe people might initially imagine?
Bryony Cole:
For me, when I think about augmentation, I think about augmenting your appearance and your abilities, right? Adding something on. And for sex, there's so many different ways it could be. Do we want bigger and better things? Can we augment that with a prosthetic? Certainly. I think one of the more short-term interesting parts of sex tech with augmentation is the ability for people to have different genders, shall I say.
And the VDOM, which is coming out in a couple of months, is a smart strap on designed for marginalized communities like lesbians or perhaps paraplegics or people with premature ejaculation that want to have a strap on that they can also augment to wear about in the world and feel sexually expressed, where previously people would have to like put on a sex toy when they're about to have sex because that's what it's designed for. What about walking out in the world? What about my sexual expression and identity as I move about in the world, which is a part of sexuality.
How do I have a penis that goes from flaccid to erect if don't have a penis? Augmenting fashion in that sense is super interesting around questions of sexual identity. I think another interesting example of augmentation is around sexual violence prevention and the Rape aXe technology, which is a female condom fitted with barbs.
And for listeners who haven't heard of the Rape aXe before, the female condom and fitted with barbs was designed to prevent rape, in the fact that if you did experience unwanted penetration, that female condom you're wearing would clamp onto the penis and you'd have to go to hospital to have it removed.
In the context of a country that experiences rape every 17 seconds, this is a really interesting, valuable, innovation, not without political and societal ethical questions and moral dilemmas around it, but I think that's where augmentation is going, where we're solving these almost smaller subsets of the population and issues around that, which is interesting, as much as we are augmenting our appearance.
Don MacPherson:
The last one we haven't talked about is immersive entertainment. Could you talk about what that is?
Bryony Cole:
A good example of a company doing that I think is probably CamSoda. So again, the adult entertainment industry tend to dominate these things where they mix their VR content with sex toys. Kiiroo as well do this, a sex toy manufacturer out of Amsterdam, where you're able to view VR content that they've partnered with adult companies, and they use their own sleeves and vibrators to sync in time with the content that you're viewing, so it feels even more and more like you're there in the room. CamSoda have been working with mixed realities a lot, just doing interesting novelty projects.
And one that I don't know why this came to mind, but I was thinking about this hologram that they created a couple of years ago, which was like a stripper that would like become this hologram out of your smartphone. The other one that is obvious that comes to mind there is Gatebox, a virtual assistant much like Google Home or Alexa. She controls the temperature in your house and the lights and things like that. I told her she, because it's a blue cartoon character, almost like a school girl sitting in this glass case.
And while she controls all the things, she dances around and she sends you emotional text messages and says she misses you. She blends that idea of like a virtual home assistant with an idea of an emotional girlfriend, yet she's just sort of this hologram in a glass case, which to many people is disturbing, but to some people in Japan is so enticing that they've ended up marrying Gatebox. There's hundreds of men that have now married Gatebox. And look, if you work at the company, you get a birthday off and just I think raises a lot of interesting questions around what is intimacy without humanity.
Can we still have intimacy if it's just with technology and what does that mean, and what does it mean to love or marry a technology?
Don MacPherson:
I think what's important to keep in mind if you've never been exposed to this topic, with any technology that's pretty radical like artificial intelligence or quantum computing or biotechnology, some of these technologies that are vastly different than everyday technologies, there's a tendency to initially recoil. And then as you think a little bit more around benefits, you start to, "Oh, I can start to accept it a little bit more and more."
And I think a lot of people who are just being exposed to this topic might just recoil, but could you talk about some of the benefits to humanity that the technologies that we've talked about so far are providing?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. Yeah. And also just that fear and horror is normal and suspend judgments for five minutes now. But I think if we look at the benefits, it can be very obvious if we start to look at our own lives, and I talk about my sex education being fairly average, which is pretty terrible, the world over, right? We had reproduction lessons. How is technology changing that? Well, technology has the power to deliver better sex education for communities like the disabled population. It's already creating a tangible better quality of life.
Handi is a great company that I use to illustrate this example, because there really isn't another company that's innovated around the disabled community and sex like it yet. Their prototypes coming out in a few months and it's for people with mobility issues, pain in their hands, limitations in their hands. That means they can't use sex toys. They can't masturbate. They can't have sexual pleasure. They can't touch someone else. To turn it on the listener, what would it be like if you couldn't use your hands to pleasure yourself or to have sex?
For the longest time without this sort of technology, people have either gone without, so Imagine just never having that opportunity, or they've hired a sex worker, which is expensive and honestly gets complicated because of where you are in the world and legal aspects of that. Handi is a technology that's... It looks really like a pool floaty. This isn't complex, sophisticated technology.
It looks like a pool floaty that you hold or you cuddle and it has different insertables depending on your gender and allows people to not have to go to a sex worker and to enjoy some sort of intimacy with themselves. And that is hundreds of millions of people today, that market. And if we think about all of us are aging, the aging population is a big part of the disabled community might be part of that soon. I think that's a really nice example of where it is benefiting humanity in a very tangible way and people being able to have access to pleasure.
Don MacPherson:
What about addressing loneliness? It seems like that is one of the upsides. There are just some people who may be awkward or who just may be isolated. Do you see that as a potential benefit?
Bryony Cole:
I think in intimacy in general, right? It can either be a hindrance or a massive helper with technology. Within our smartphones, with the apps we have in our smartphones, now we can do pretty much anything now, whether that means your needs for intimacy that you want to improve. You might download an app Lover that has better sex education and sex therapy. It might be something where you want to mend a broken heart and you can download an app for that. There's everything there.
And if you're thinking, "Oh gosh, I'm lonely. I wish I was better at sexting," you can now go and download an app and chat with a sexbot and learn how to become a better sexter. So much of technology is positioned to be a solve to loneliness. And in some parts it has for sure, this connection to therapists and to improving upon ourselves and to potential dates, but then there's the nasty side, which maybe it makes you more lonely. It's really turning the finger-pointing around and going, "Well, how am I using this technology?"
And being the onus on yourself to think about it, "In my life, am I lacking in my sexuality or how can I improve it? And what am I doing with technology and does that make it better or worse?"
Don MacPherson:
You're kind of setting us up to talk about some of the pitfalls or some of the downsides. What have you seen or experienced and heard from clients or people you've talked to around the downsides of sextech?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. I think the most concerning one is a lack of communication skills and in-person skills, particularly in younger generations now for in-person contact, for body language and things that we learned when we were younger because we didn't spend our lives communicating through smartphones. It's kind of an obvious one, but you do see it. The more I talk to teenagers, the more I get shocked by the fact that they do not separate themselves online and offline and have a sexual identity online that I and many people would cringe at because there's no element of privacy to it.
But when it comes to in-person communication, which is something that makes sexual and any relationship great, they're lacking because they don't have that body of experience around how to respond to people, how to stay curious and ask questions and say no and demonstrate what they want. That to me is the most concerning. And ironically, sometimes I'm like, well, maybe we should educate them. How are we going to do that? Oh, let's do it through technology. It's like a continuing issue. The more things we develop and innovate, the more problems there'll be, the more things we'll have to solve.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. It seems like with communication, there is emotional intelligence. It's a muscle that needs to be created. And if they never develop it, they never have an opportunity to use it, then it's going to be lacking. Other than technology, how do we overcome that? How do we teach our children to have these types of conversations? You have talked about some technologies that will develop people to learn about consent and how to give consent or not give consent, but how do we teach our kids to communicate around sex?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. I mean, I think the best part of that is being human and doing it yourself rather than outsourcing it to technology. And that's where it comes down to all the time is, how do you have that conversation as a parent with your child? How do you start to prompt yourself to have those conversations? Because as kids, as babies, we learned really early about this stuff through mirroring and seeing how we're perceived through our mother's eyes. And if she puts us down if we do something sexual, we've learnt that's shameful at a very young age.
I think it's about the conversations we don't have on technology. I think it's the conversations we have in person that are far more substantial and impactful.
Don MacPherson:
When the internet started to be rolled out 20 plus years ago, when people were online for the first time, I remember hearing stories like, “I got online at 9:00 and then it was 2:00 AM before I knew it.” It had nothing to do with sex. It was just like this is a new novel technology. And then there were images of people having sex or whatever, and then there's video, and then VR. Oh my gosh, this is going to be really immersive. This is going to be so alluring that people are not going to be able to pull themselves away.
You couple that with haptics, which most people may not even know what a haptic is. Oh, how are we going to delineate between the reality and the experience that people are having?
Bryony Cole:
I mean, don't you think that people are at some point going to want out in a way that in-person experience becomes almost more special? This is my thinking, especially considering what we've just been through of the past year. It's like those in-person experiences are so treasured now because they're so few. And I think once we get plugged into immersive experiences where it feels like we're just touching anything. It's kind of like a drug, like at some point you're like done.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, I think that's accurate. And most people have the ability to turn that off, but not everybody. I think there will be a segment of population who will just be sucked in and can't pull themselves out. We already see that, right? And the rest of us can, can turn it off or can distinguish between reality and what's happening in this virtual world. I think you've talked about a bunch of different lesser-known advances related to sex and sextech, but are there some others that you wanted to talk about?
I know that researching you, I've seen you talk about some of these things that may not be known by the general population.
Bryony Cole:
I mean, there's lots. Every day there's a new one. I think going back to like body hacking and sci-fi stuff, we think about Rich Lee, who is a body hacker, who's developed the Lovetron9000, which is a chip that he's put in himself as an experiment that turned his penis into a vibrator essentially to vibrate his penis, I think is definitely a lesson on edge case teledildonics, which we talked about, the Ohnut, which is the wearable rings that reduce the depth of penetration for people experiencing painful sex. 75% of women will have had painful sex and will identify with this.
At one point in their lives, they've had painful sex. And for a subset of that, it's regularly experiencing painful sex. And one of them was the founder of Ohnut. Her name's Emily Sauer, And she developed these rubber rings to put on top of the penis. It's sort of a customizable ring, think donuts, which is essentially what she used as her prototype in the beginning to reduce how deep that penetration is going to go and to alleviate some of the pain around sex.
I was actually just talking to a sex therapist in the UK about this, and she prescribes it to a lot of patients now and it gets rave reviews. It's such a simple example of sextech too, because there's no wiring involved. It's a rubber mold and that's it. And it works really well.
Don MacPherson:
One of the things that I found interesting in researching you was how culture really can dictate our drive innovation around sextech. You talked about South Africa and Japan and Iran and some innovations there. Could you talk about that a little bit because I think that's pretty fascinating?
Bryony Cole:
Sure, yeah. Wherever you are in the world, there's definitely sextech going on. And what's interesting about that is it's very related to the society that you're surrounded by and the problems in that society. We use that example of the Rape aXe before, which was developed in South Africa from a nurse who continually treated sexual assault victims and one of them said, "Oh, if only I had razorblades down there." From that was born this idea to develop this female condom fitted with barbs because of this social problem in South Africa. In Japan, sexual harassment on the subways is a big problem.
Two-thirds of teenage girls or girls attending high school will experience some sort of molestation on the subway. It's why they have gendered subway carts now, but out of that was born a UV stamp where you would stamp your perpetrator. If someone groped you on the subway, you could turn around and do this UV stamp, which would then identify the perpetrator to other people. It's sold out in a matter of hours. It costs about $20, and it was developed by a telecommunications company, but it was something where it was developed in a country where perhaps you would go and do that if you felt like someone groped you.
But perhaps in the New York subway, would I turn around and stamp someone? Maybe not, but it was such a big problem that this emerged as one sort of solution there. And then the other example is in Iran where domestic abuse is a real problem. I think the statistic there is around two-thirds again, so it's a huge problem. And how do you help equip women who want out or need resources like education or legal resources without causing more violence and trouble in that scenario? How do you equip them? And Toranj was an app that was developed to look like it wasn't an app, to look like you were using another app.
You could press that button and it would either call a friend that you had nominated. It would call the police if you wanted. It would also provide you access to legal resources and education.
Don MacPherson:
How do you see sextech changing the way we date and fall in love and experience intimacy?
Bryony Cole:
It's always changing. I mean, I see sextech changing as much as we're changing sextech, right? Even last year, no one really was keen on going on a video date with someone, whereas now that's a feature that's in all dating apps because we've all been locked down and forced to use Zoom and video for a year. So yeah, it's not the technology that's changing us. It's us that's changing the trajectory of the technology. When we think about how many celebrities have joined sex toy brands in the past six months, we have seen Gwyneth Paltrow. We've seen Lily Allen.
We've seen Cara Delevingne. We've seen these slew of celebrities join as creative directors, founders, as ambassadors of sexual wellness companies for women, which two years ago would never have happened, but there's been this groundswell of like sexual wellness. You should be incorporated into wellness routines and mental health and physical health. Those sorts of conversations. That's largely like pop culture that's driving these conversations, that's driving this social movement around opening up around sexuality.
In response to that or alongside that, I think technology is also developing. When we think about sextech, I still feel like we're further behind because cultural attitudes around sex are behind real. We're like, oh, we're just emerging out of the '50s in terms of sex education.
Don MacPherson:
That leads me to the next question which is, how should people prepare for this future? Because there's often a normal reaction to resist and that may not be healthy either. How should people prepare for this change?
Bryony Cole:
I mean, I think the best advice, whether you're preparing for change or preparing for great sex, is staying curious. Just staying curious is enough to open your mind and not be fearful around it. Stay curious and have that second question when we think about, "Oh, sex robots, that's not for me or I'd never do that," as like, well, who does that? And who is that? Why? Oh, they're trauma victims? Oh, they can't connect him. Oh, that makes sense. They have a bit more empathy around why that was designed.
Staying open around these conversations around sexuality and staying curious I think is probably the best preparation. And if you can go so far as to ask yourself your own questions about what's lacking in your own life, what would you like to enhance, or what experiences did you miss, then you might even find, I could create my own sextech company and could innovate around this and make the world a better place.
Don MacPherson:
I want to ask about sextech companies because it seems like there are a lot of women who are involved in the innovation. I think I've also heard you say that women are having a very difficult time getting funding oftentimes. Is that an accurate statement?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. I mean, it's very accurate. I think sextech in general is hard to fund. I think a lot of the conversations that are positive and for all the social conversations, positive stuff we're saying on screens, programming, that sort of stuff, when it comes to pitching and raising money, it's still really tough, whether it's morality causes or just people's general uncomfortability with this space because they don't have a vagina. It's very hard to raise money for women's sexual wellness products. It's the big challenge to the industry.
A lot of the time, if you go into those rooms and you talk about sex, it immediately gets lumped into adult content. It's really tough to take yourself out of the porn box. I think that it's clearly not the case, but it's very hard to get out of that mindset, that sex equals porn equals creepy and dirty and weird and we won't touch that.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's where a lot of people's minds go to pretty quickly. Where is sextech missing the needs of people, men or women?
Bryony Cole:
I mean, it's going to come full circle here because it's always about better education. Wherever I go, people have had crappy sex education. I think that would solve a lot of things. If people learned how to communicate about sex, if people learned about their sexuality from a younger age, there would be a lot less shame. It would be lot less taboo around this topic. For me, the answer is always, how do we improve sex education for adults as for kids?
Don MacPherson:
In the future, how do you see sex work being impacted by sextech?
Bryony Cole:
It's pretty exciting. I think there's two different things that are happening here. Sex work online is highly regulated at the moment, as it is offline, and even more so. There's a lot more sense censorship ship to deal with. However, as we've seen with OnlyFans, there's also a new avenue opening up to monetize erotic content, and people definitely have an appetite for erotic content. I think in many ways it's creating new opportunities, which is exciting.
Unfortunately, as that goes ahead, there's more and more legislation around sex work because it gets lumped into human trafficking, which rightfully should be legalized, but it's a very tricky, slippery slope there because then it starts to impact people who are sex workers, who have chosen to be sex workers, and their clients know that they would like to receive their services. It's a really tough industry, I think, to be involved in. It's one of obviously the oldest professions in the world. I think people are getting more innovative around it with OnlyFans and those sorts of things.
But what's interesting as well is as we see the licensing out of people's images and butts and holograms that we may even get to a point where sex work is your holograms doing the sex work on behalf of you and you don't even have to be there to complete the acts, which is exciting and different and definitely very futuristic.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I mean, that's really, really interesting. I wanted to ask you about ethical questions that are being raised here and how are we having ethical conversations. For example, let's say if somebody wanted to create a robot in the likeness of somebody, what are the ethical implications there? Do they have the right to do that? How would somebody get compensated for that? Are these types of conversations being had, these ethical questions?
Bryony Cole:
They're only being had when that happens. It's essentially the Wild West right now. So a year or two ago, someone made a robot in the likeness of Scarlett Johansson. Her response was, "Well, what can I do?" There wasn't any sort of legal recourse that she wanted to take at that point. There is no ethics committee. That's part of the problem, is there's no sextech ethics committee that exists anywhere. All this legislation is slow to catch up. What we are seeing in different fields, which maybe you know more about, is this licensing out of likeness of image as if you were a talent agent or your image.
But we're not there yet and it certainly hasn't hit the sextech community. I would say that the last one it's very much people are out inventing and innovating on stuff without having these conversations.
Don MacPherson:
What sort of privacy concerns should people have as it relates to using some of these sextech apps or sextech technologies?
Bryony Cole:
I mean, assume that everything is being recorded. There's no other nice way to say it. There's definitely vibrators and teledildonics that people use all the time, and the safest advice you can give someone is like just assume. If it's been connected to the internet, then someone else is grabbing it no matter what. I don't know if that's the right thing you want me to say, but it's definitely the honest answer.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, I think that would have been my assumption, and I appreciate the honesty. We've talked a lot about sextech and its features so far. When you look out five or 10 years, what does the future of sex look like?
Bryony Cole:
I think it really looks like a more open, more expansive idea about sex. It's not necessarily about us all partnering with technology. I think the role of technology in the future of sex has been access. It's allowed us access to other people, to more knowledge about sex and sexuality, to understand our identities, to be part of different communities. And I think that's really the vehicle for more open-mindedness, less shame, and less judgment about sex.
And of course, the sextech that we're building now creates more options for people to enjoy themselves and have pleasure and also protect themselves, whether that's healthwise or from violence and danger. We talked a little bit about that before, but I think in thinking about the future of sex, it's always about how our ideas of sex are expanding, and it's never really about the sophisticated technology.
Don MacPherson:
When I look into the future, I often look for historical moments or periods of time that help us understand the future. Are there historical moments that can help us better understand the future of sex?
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. I mean, I think they've been continuing on and on for decades, if not centuries, around where we're going with our ideas around sex and these periods where we think, oh my gosh, the '60s was sort of this cultural upheaval where we started to shift into free love and people having sex and access to birth control. What we don't realize is that was kind of happening all along, and it's less of a moment in time and more of an evolution where we have access to medicines.
I think it was even in the '20s or '30s we had access to medication for syphilis and that changed the way people started having sex, the '70s in terms of free love movement. But more recently, I think the sex that we see on screen is so different to even the sex we saw in the '90s around Sex in the City where things were hilarious or funny. And now we see programs like Euphoria or Sex Education where we're seeing different identities represented. We're seeing different preferences and sexualities in young kids, and it's an opening up rather than I think these moments in times.
We can also, of course, look to Me Too and the Time's Up movements, which have been really powerful in having women come forward and talk about sexual assault. Being able to talk about sexual assault publicly just empowers a larger conversation around sexuality for everyone to start talking about sex, whether that's on social media, with their partners, with their friends. I don't know if you watched the Britney Spears documentary recently, but it took me back to my childhood and being 15 years old, because that was around the time that Britney Spears was becoming popular.
And I just remember how revered she was for being pure in this virginal culture that we celebrated when I was 15, 20 years ago and how much that's changed today. We think about sexually fluid pop stars now and people online talking about homophobia or starting movements around and against upskirting and rape culture. I think it's really hard to point to one moment and say, "Oh my gosh, the future is moving towards a more open-minded perspective around sex because of these movements."
Often we think that they're this decade or this moment in time, but it's actually just an evolution that's constantly happening. I'd argue that we're constantly opening up these conversations. 50 Shades of Grey made BDSM more mainstream and Me Too made to made everyone else feel heard that probably had experienced the sexual assault in private and thought, "That must have just been me." That's rather the long-winded way of saying there's so many moments to point to, to help us better understand this freedom where moving towards around our identities and sex in the future.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I think that's very helpful because when I think about how the audience might be listening to this, there might be an automatic, "Oh my gosh, the world is ending. This is not the way that I was raised," but understanding that there have been advances and there have been generations of people who were very uncomfortable about sexual evolution or revolution. But it seems like you're saying it's more of an evolution and they're these moments in time. I think it will help the audience understand that, okay, it's just the way it is and resisting it is not going to be helpful.
And just understanding it and maybe communicating with children or grandchildren is not such a bad thing.
Bryony Cole:
Yeah. There is lots of panic around the way things seem like they've suddenly appeared. For instance, hookup culture in the late 2000s, everyone thought this is going to ruin us. But in fact, we could argue that hookup culture was happening in the '70s anyway just on a different level of platform. But I think what is true is that these big ideologies or moralities around sex have shifted.
We can quite easily bucket them into those early days when this idea, which still holds for some people this significance view of sex, is that you only have sex with the person that you love, that's significant in your life, that you're married to, which shifted a couple of decades ago for majority of the population in America to this idea of recreational view of sex, where sex was something that didn't have an inherent meaning. It was like scratching an itch.
We did it for, according to a study I've read, 504 different reasons to have sex, including reducing stress, relieving anxiety, helping you go to sleep, as well as it loving a partner. And now I think we are moving into a broader dialogue about sex and a broader view about sex, which not only is about who you have sex with or how you have sex or to alleviate stress or a pain or something, but it's also around your open-mindedness around your identity in sex and gender fluidity and bigger conversations that don't just involve penetration.
Don MacPherson:
With all of the advancements in sextech, is human connection going to be obsolete?
Bryony Cole:
Thankfully, no. I think with all of these advancements and everything that we can do with technology is so exciting, but I think there's no need to be afraid. I think the biggest gift we have for each other is being human and being creative and using our imagination and our sense of touch and things that make us so human, staying curious with each other, that robots or technology will never be able to replicate that. The future of sex is all about humanity.
Don MacPherson:
That's great. That's a good place to end. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you do?
Bryony Cole:
You can Google "Future of Sex Podcast". If you're interested in being a part of the field, you can go to sextechschool.com, and you can find me on Twitter @bryonycole.
Don MacPherson:
Bryony, this has been a fabulous conversation. I appreciate you taking the time and thank you for being a genius.
Bryony Cole:
Thank you.
Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Our next episode, we'll explore the future of food with restaurateur and celebrity chef Justin Sutherland. We will talk about food insecurity, ethical food production, and the future of the restaurant business. That episode will be released May 18th, 2021. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to 12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a genius.
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