Aspects of intimacy

Legendary Charisma, over at Metaversally Speaking, the (virtual) world’s most popular blog, has been running a series of articles on the ins and outs, so to speak, of cybersex. It’s been quite entertaining, if rather psychologically unsophisticated, focusing more on the mechanics than the deeper meaning; just like high-school sex-education in fact. This week’s column features the counter-intuitive assertion that the quality of cybersex can be improved by familiarity with the real-life characteristics of one’s partner. I couldn’t let that pass without comment; you can read the discussion here.

In other intimacy news, researchers in the Highlands have developed a system which allows geographically-separated lovers to caress each other’s bodies using beams of light. This seems a much more promising way of communicating real feelings than interacting in Second Life; it’s directly sensual and avoids all the cerebral processing inherent in text-based liasons. All sorts of conscious and unconscious confusion can occur once the higher brain functions are engaged.