Will VR porn kill intimacy?

Is pornography driving the virtual reality (VR) craze? Mark Zuckerberg, owner of the market-leading Oculus Quest 2 headset, would be reluctant to admit it, but a recent study suggests this may be the case. 

Of a sample of 3,000 VR headset users in Britain and the United States, more than 80% said they had watched porn on their new devices. Most were men. But women, we are told, are catching up.

The study had an ulterior motive, however. It was conducted by Dreamcam, a webcam platform which, with the help of stereoscopic imaging, a 360-degree camera and hundreds of paid actresses, promises the next level of porn experience. “This innovative technology teleports your Dreamgirl next to you”, entices the website. “You can touch her. You can feel her. Still in doubt? Just put on your VR headset and try.”

This, we are told, is the future. As the house-bound citizens of the developed world become accustomed to working and socialising online, the VR porn industry is preparing for a twenty-five-fold increase in revenue in the next five years. At the annual SxTech Conference in Berlin next year ­– the largest of its kind – actors and producers, investors and hackers, will explore everything from the future of sex robots to sex in space. 

Nothing, as it were, will be unexplored but “it’s not something to be scared of”, says Ness Cooper, a sexologist and sex therapist, and a regular at conferences such as SxTech. “People were scared of books when they first came out. It’s a natural progression… VR porn is going to be integrated into our intimate relationships.”

In 2015, Chris Milk, an American filmmaker, made the case that virtual reality would act as an “empathy machine”, revolutionising how we interact with people miles away. “Through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected”, he said. “And ultimately, we become more human.”

So, too, has “intimacy” been central to debates over VR porn. Academics in Germany reported in 2019 that men experienced more than just heightened arousal, compared to watching a screen. “Participants felt more desired, more flirted with, more looked into the eyes”, they noted. “VR pornography seems to be a powerful tool to elicit the illusion of intimate sexual experiences.” 

As any regular porn user knows, however, the illusion of intimacy is not intimacy. And some argue that, far from changing our relationship to porn, VR has only so far modulated what normal porn already does: provide passive pleasure for anonymous observers.

“VR pornography is dominated by a variation on the point-of-view genre of pornography where the viewer is embodied in a stationary, subject position – often that of a straight, white male – while a female actor submits to the desire of the actor”, according to a paper in the Porn Studies journal in 2020. “The promise of VR pornography,” the paper concludes, “is currently some way from being realised.”

In the meantime, concrete research on the effects of VR porn on ordinary people is scarce. “We know that more people watch PornHub than watch Netflix”, says Leighton Evans at the University of Swansea, author of the paper cited above. “But there’s an incredible stigma attached to academics who research pornography.”

Leighton cites not only institutional prudishness as a problem, but the puritanism of the technology companies. Meta, previously Facebook Inc., owns the best-selling Oculus headsets. “The primary access of VR is through Oculus, and Facebook won’t allow access to pornographic material”, says Evans. “They claim that no one is watching it, I suspect, because that’s what they want their image to be.” That, and the need to sell data to a variety of clients – including conservative ones that would prefer not to push ads on PornHub.

The millions of curious teenagers growing up in the 2010s, with easy internet access from home computers and smartphones, were the guinea pig generation for the rise of online porn. Now, a more radical experiment is about to take place before the results of the previous one have been fully realised.

NoFap.com, a forum for recovering porn addicts, was founded by former Google employee Alexander Rhodes following the onset of porn addiction. Rhodes would masturbate up to fourteen times a day with online porn during his teenage years. “Your brain becomes accustomed to it”, he told an American interviewer. The Reddit sub-thread which goes by the same name has nearly a million members, mainly men, whose stories of shame, abstention and relapse are alarming. 

“More damage was done to me in the last two years on VR than in the seven before them on 2D videos”, writes one user, who describes being taken on a virtual “date” on a pre-recorded porn video in which the actress frequently looked into the eyes of the user. “Not only will this speed up your addiction rapidly, but it will leave you with zero motivation to find a real partner because your brain believes you are already having sex”, they add. “I eventually realised that the loneliness and depression I was trying to escape with porn was nothing compared to the empty feeling of dread I had after using VR for over a year.” 

Porn addiction affects perhaps one in twenty-five men and one in a hundred women, according to UK Rehab. Even so, Cooper believes that concern over virtual sex is verging on a moral panic. Over half of men and a third of women report using porn on a regular basis, and most do not get addicted. “I’ve met a lot of people who say they’re addicted to porn and often, once you dive deep into it, it’s about what people have been brought up to understand about their sexual responses and needs”, she says.

For Evans, the main concern is for inclusion, rather than restriction. “Currently almost all VR porn is a straight, white man being performed on by a woman. Things are changing, but there’s a long way to go.”