THE ADULT INDUSTRY may have changed a lot in the digital age, but some things still live up to the stereotype. Like, say, the house in the LA suburbs I’m currently standing in. The freeway looms less than a block from here, shuttling cars throughout the big-box sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, yet we’re tucked alongside numerous million-dollar homes, behind a pair of neighborhood-announcing pillars. The Hollywood Bowl is a fifteen-minute Uber ride away. So are the Kardashians.
Inside, things are a little less TV-friendly. Mostly because of the statuesque naked woman on the four-poster bed, but also because of what she’s doing. Which involves—and really, there’s no more polite way to say this, so bear with me—inserting a string of oversize beads into herself, while a naked guy stands next to the bed, a towel hanging from his erect penis.
But August Ames and Tommy Gunn, as fans might know them, aren’t here simply to have sex on camera. If that were the case, then the VR camera rig in front of Tommy’s face wouldn’t be forcing him to lean back so far at the waist that he retires to a daybed in the corner to stretch between takes. (“My hip flexors are killing me,” he growls during one lull.) If August and Tommy were making “conventional” porn, then she might not be getting so close to the camera lenses, cooing into them as though they were a lover’s eyes. If they were just making your standard wham-bam-thank-you-surgically-enhanced-ma’am porn, with three Xs but only two lousy dimensions, then the CEO of the company bankrolling this shoot might not be sitting downstairs, having flown here from Barcelona just to be around. And there definitely wouldn’t be a “clinical sexologist” overseeing the shoot, making sure that the action unfolds in accordance with maximum therapeutic value.
But this is VR porn—in which intimacy is the watchword, eye contact is everything, and studios are seeing moneymaking potential the likes of which hasn’t been around since the internet came along and almost cratered the whole damn industry.
Just another day in sunny Encino. Please don’t step on the ben-wa balls.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE (BADOINK) KING
Todd Glider never meant to get into porn. Back in the mid-1990s, he was the living embodiment of the mid-1990s: a twenty-something with an MFA (“pipe, tweed jacket, all that,” he says), living in San Francisco, making zines. Then his girlfriend got a job in Los Angeles, so he started looking for employment in Southern California. One of the listings he saw asked for an “HTML programmer.” He got the interview, and the job, but “HTML programming” turned out to be “writing erotic copy for an online adult company.”
The job, Glider found, suited him fine—as did the adult industry as a whole. He became the creative director at that first company, then moved overseas to work in Europe. In 2010, he became CEO of a large “digital entertainment company,” which now serves as an umbrella over several smaller adult brands. One of those brands is BaDoinkVR, the studio creating the scene that’s shooting upstairs today.
BaDoink—and by all means, take a moment to enjoy that glorious name—released its first VR porn scene in the summer of 2015; the company was profitable within a year. It’s gone from ten employees to more than ninety, a workforce that is “overwhelmingly coders,” Glider says, sitting in the living room of the Encino house. He’s sturdily built, with a shaved head and a gregarious mien, and is dressed like he’s heading onstage to talk to a crowd of tech developers: dark gray button-down, black pants, Apple Watch. That’s not unintentional. The way Glider sees it, VR has the potential not just to make porn profitable again, but to make the tech world respect the adult industry. “This is the first time I feel like we’re leading in any way,” he says. “Silicon Valley left us in the dust, but now adult is carrying the torch.”
Historically, the desire to see naked people doing naked-people things has driven the widespread adoption of otherwise niche consumer technology. VCRs, CD-ROMs, and even streaming video owe much of their early uptake to the fact that they made watching porn more convenient and more private.
But as technology giveth, technology taketh away. The same streaming video compression that turned YouTube into a juggernaut also robbed the adult industry of a huge chunk of revenue. Consumers who once bought or rented DVDs could now just go to so-called tube sites where they could watch high-def porn—usually pirated—to their hearts’ (or other body parts’) content. And for years, studios did what they could to fight the tide, jumping on whatever technology might help them make some money again: 3-D TVs, ultra-high-def resolution. Nothing worked, because nothing made porn seem fundamentally different. At the end of the day, consumers were watching other people have sex. Nothing would change that.
Nothing, that is, but the transformative power of presence.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, HERE’S YOUR FOURSOME
Meet Scott (not his real name). Scott is in his midfifties, married to his college sweetheart. Lives in the Pacific Northwest, works for a software company. Scott had never paid for online porn in his life. Wasn’t what you’d call a connoisseur. Didn’t know any stars, wasn’t familiar with its various genres. (Yes, there are genres. Please don’t act surprised.) He’d watch some if he was on a business trip, or if his wife were gone for the day and he was bored. But then Scott got a mobile VR headset for Christmas. He messed around with the preloaded games and experiences—hung out inside the Cirque du Soleil, did some space exploration—and started looking around for things to do. The first stop was YouTube, to search for VR game demonstrations.
A funny thing about YouTube’s recommendation algorithm: turns out that if you go looking for VR stuff on YouTube, then the site will start suggesting other videos it thinks you’ll enjoy. Eventually, you’ll likely come across a “reaction video,” as it’s called, in which people watch VR porn for the first time. It’s a split screen: on one side you see an appropriately blurred scene of what the user is seeing in their headset, and on the other you see the headset-wearing viewer, their expression likely somewhere between shocked and amused. Interesting, thought Scott. Maybe I should check that out. So Scott went looking for that and soon found a free full-length sample from a studio called VirtualRealPorn. (It’s no BaDoink, but what it lacks in creativity it makes up for in clarity.) Downloaded it to his phone, popped that in his headset. This wasn’t meant to be an erotic journey of self-discovery; Scott’s clothes stayed on, and he didn’t even touch himself.
The video in question, “Your Neighbors and You,” is twenty-nine minutes long. That was an eternity when it was released in 2015—especially in nonporn VR, where most videos were so concerned about motion sickness that they lasted fewer than ten minutes. When the scene begins, you find yourself in bed; a male body stretches away from you, its lower half covered by sheets. The scale is a little strange if you’re sitting up in real life, the way Scott was, but you still realize that the body is supposed to be yours, despite the fact that you can see only its stomach and southward. But don’t think about it for too long, because three women just walked into your room. “He’s even cuter in real life than he is from across the road,” says one with a British accent. “Shall we wake him up?” The other two women crawl onto the bed and put their faces close to yours. “Good morning,” one of them whispers in your left ear. She giggles. The sound is incredibly close to your ear, and incredibly lifelike.
The way things proceed from there is, in one way, utterly predictable: the four of you have sex in every conceivable permutation. Gymnastic carnality aside, though, you’re struck by certain aspects of it. For one, the male performer—i.e., you—doesn’t move. Like, at all. The hands reach out a few times to hold and squeeze various things, but the actor is for all intents and purposes completely passive. Stranger still, the three women stare into the camera nearly the entire time (at least when they’re, uh, facing the camera). If this were conventional flat video, the constant fourth-wall-breaking might seem strange. In VR, though, the effect turns from a gimmick into . . . well, into a moment-maker. Depending where you look, and how skilled an actor the performer is, you really do feel like you’re staring into each other’s eyes.
Scott watched all this in amazement. He had two thoughts. The first was This is an experience I was not expecting.
The second one was I want to see more of it.
Scott wasn’t alone, in either his curiosity or his timing. On Christmas Day 2016—when he got his headset—online tube site Pornhub saw its VR video views jump from around four hundred thousand a day to more than nine hundred thousand. But Scott wasn’t looking for the short preview snippets available on tube sites; he wanted the real thing. “I just couldn’t believe the immersion level that it provided,” he says. “Even though it was a little fuzzy, everything made me realize that this is more than just watching a video in 3-D. When a woman comes up close to your face, you can feel the heat coming off of her, you imagine that you feel her breath. Your brain is tricked into senses that aren’t there because of the ones that are there.”
So he researched some more, tried out the offerings of a few VR studios. Eventually, he settled on a site called WankzVR. (BaDoink, you have a challenger!) He liked that its videos had a sense of humor; there was a Game of Thrones parody and a zombie-themed scene that had come out around Halloween. Most of all, though, he says, he liked that “the biggest emphasis seems to be on making it real. Making it intimate.”
Adult studios, and the consumers who congregate on their message boards and on Reddit to share feedback, call this “the girlfriend experience,” or just “GFE.” And for most companies that jumped into making VR porn, it became the watchword. “That was on the top of everyone’s list when we first started making content,” says Anna Lee, the president of adult VR studio HoloGirls. “‘Give me a girlfriend, make me believe that she wants me, make her look at me, make her be intimate with me.’”
But perhaps no one made intimacy the cornerstone of their productions the way Wankz did. The studio created a camera rig that let performers come riiiiiiiight up to the lens so they could pretend to kiss it. More and more of the company’s scenes became dedicated not to the sex act itself, but to foreplay and face-to-face interaction: whispering, teasing, eye contact. It even started filming the actual sex in a way that explicitly cropped out penetration. Male viewers might, for example, see themselves having sex with a woman in the missionary position—but the camera is tilted such that if they look down, their view stops just below the woman’s waist. (Some VR video, including the majority of adult VR, is filmed in 180 degrees, which leaves some areas of the virtual sphere blacked or grayed out.) The focal point, instead, is on the woman’s pleasure: her facial expressions, the sounds she makes, the way she moves.
It’s hard to overstate how fundamental that shift is. For tens of thousands of years, the vast majority of erotic art has depicted sex in a single fundamental way. Regardless of the surroundings, regardless of the position, regardless of what body part is contacting what body part, sex has defaulted to . . . well, at least one person’s genitals being stimulated. With what Wankz and other VR studios are doing, sex in VR becomes not action, but reaction. The action, studios know, is already taken care of. It’s happening outside of the virtual bedroom, with the viewer taking matters into his or her own hands.
MARS, VENUS, ETC.
Let’s take a moment here to address the obvious: this is all sounding pretty one-sided. You can find VR porn that puts you in a woman’s body, and there’s stuff targeting gay men, but much like the adult industry as a whole, the vast majority of adult VR content has catered to heterosexual males. To a large degree, that’s simply where the money is: according to Pornhub’s data, male visitors are 160 percent more likely to watch VR content than women. In fact, women constituted a mere 26 percent of Pornhub’s overall visitors in 2016.
Consider, though, the idea that VR porn may be more welcoming to women by default than conventional porn is now. After all, technology may have had an effect not just on the adult industry’s financial well-being, but on its sociological one as well. After high-speed internet and streaming technology gave way to tube sites, the rise of smartphones made porn more snackable than it had ever been. In 2015, mobile users accounted for 53 percent of Pornhub’s traffic, and that majority has only grown. (In the States, the curve is even steeper: in 2016, 70 percent of Pornhub’s US traffic came from mobile users.) On average, people spend fewer than 10 minutes per visit to Pornhub—enough time to find the clip they want, handle their business, and move on.
Much like the rise of MP3s created a precipitous dip in album sales, so too did plentiful (and free) porn clips replace full-length movies as the conventional unit of consumption. Whether by cause or by correlation, the porn industry was becoming a buyer’s market, and the economic impact trickled down to its workforce: performers earned less and less for sex acts. Those sex acts, in turn, were filmed in increasingly demeaning ways. A 2010 study of three hundred popular porn videos found that 88 percent of them featured some degree of physical violence toward women such as slapping, spanking, or gagging. That’s not to kink-shame or to deny that a spank can’t be pleasurable for both parties, but when everything was available for free, extremity became the way to stand out.
Virtual reality, though, has the potential to reverse that trend through the magic of empathy. With the frame gone, the viewer is in the scene. And once you’re in the scene, thanks to presence, you’re no longer a voyeur. You’re a participant. No more detachment, no more desensitization.
Does that make things more arousing? More difficult? Awkward? Embarrassing? It depends on the scene. It depends on the person watching it. But regardless, that potential to implicate the viewer, to put them on equal footing with the fantasy they wanted to see, promises to upend pornography in a way no one has considered.
We’re already seeing that in the early years of VR porn. “People are responding to what’s kind of the antithesis of traditional porn,” says Doug McCort. And if anyone should know, it’s him. For the past two years, the forty-six-year-old Alaskan has been reviewing almost every VR porn scene that’s been released online for his website 3DPornReviews.com. And I don’t mean he watches a scene and then does his best Roger Ebert impression; I mean he really reviews it. He watches it once, to make sure it’s worth writing about—there are so many releases these days that he has to be a bit more discerning—then watches it again, pausing and unpausing, grabbing screenshots for his readers, taking his headset on and off. All told, each review takes four to six hours on average, sometimes more.
“Porn had kind of degenerated into gonzo-type shit,” McCort says, using the industry jargon for hardcore, pretense-free porn. “Where else are you going to push it after forty or fifty years? All you can do is push through visual extremes or physical extremes, and that’s silly. VR offers access to things that you just can’t get in porn. You’re seeing a throwback to the basic things that are erotic when you’re in close proximity to another member of the opposite sex. It’s far from pornographic and much more like human intimacy.”
Performers have become more than fantasy objects; they’ve become fantasy partners—and more important, they’ve become people. “I find that I care more about the people in the scenes than I used to,” Scott says. “Even though they’re still playing themselves being a porn star, their personality comes through in a way that I find kind of fascinating—so I actually seek out behind-the-scenes interviews or podcasts where they’re guests, just to hear a little more about their life.”
Sounds like a crush, doesn’t it? Scott maintains, though, that VR porn has actually rekindled his connection with his wife of nearly forty years. “My interest in sex with my wife has increased significantly,” he says. “She thinks it’s because I got a different job and I’m less stressed out, but it’s actually because I realized how enjoyable my intimacy with her is. When I first started watching VR porn, I thought, ‘Maybe this is an opportunity to fantasize about one of the women I had this experience with in VR when I’m with my wife.’ That did not work. There was this cognitive dissonance that actually made it worse. Focusing on my wife as my wife, the person that loves me and that I love, was so much more satisfying and exciting—even though I had this separate set of experiences in VR that maybe made me interested to have sex that night.” VR might have been an aphrodisiac, in other words, but it wasn’t an alternative.
VIRTUAL SEX, BUT REAL INTIMACY
Back at the BaDoink shoot, not everyone is a VR vet. This is the first time for Tommy Gunn, the male performer—but since he’s appeared in more than seventeen hundred films, it’s going to take more than some fancy cameras to faze him. “From what I understand,” he says, “I just have to lay back and enjoy the ride. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.”
Gunn looks a little like Bronn, the roguish sellsword from HBO’s Game of Thrones—if Bronn had grown up in New Jersey and liked customizing military vehicles. He shares Bronn’s plainspoken manner as well. “Porn is, at the end of the day, a penis in a hole,” I hear him tell a crew member in the kitchen before the shoot. “That’s what it is.”
Not necessarily in this case, though. For one, there are those aforementioned ben-wa balls, which at least for the moment are occupying August Ames’s attention. (“Looks like a cat toy,” Gunn says from the daybed between takes. He’s part right; however, being bright green with red, they also look like two tiny heirloom watermelons.) And they’re just one of a number of things different about this movie-to-be, which is BaDoink’s attempt at using VR to make adult content that’s both intimate and instructive.
Like many other VR porn pieces, “Virtual Sexology” is being shot from the first-person perspective of the male performer (in this case, Gunn). This perspective isn’t new to porn; POV (point of view) is now a genre all its own. But it’s close to the default treatment in VR, at least in the technology’s early days, because it creates so much face-to-face intimacy for the viewer. Also, as in many other VR porn experiences, the director tells Gunn that he needs to remain mute and largely still. That can lead to some odd contortions, since the camera rig needs to be placed at his eye level without interfering with what I’m just going to call his operational appendages. As uncomfortable as that may be for him, though, it’s a must for VR—because it forges a stunning link between the viewer’s brain and the body that presence tells them they’re occupying.
But more than the camera angle, it’s the very structure of “Virtual Sexology” that makes it unlike just about any VR porn movie (or porn movie, period) out there. That starts with the sexual encounter itself. Although it includes most of the menu items you’d expect, it’s more like an instructional video: throughout, August Ames looks into the camera and coaches “you” (as embodied by Gunn) through various techniques that range from deep breathing to ways to delay orgasm.
Skeptic’s Corner: Embodiment
You: So you’re telling me that if I look down and see a naked body, I’ll just think it’s mine?
Me: Not at first. And sure, rationally, you’ll obviously know that you don’t have Tommy Gunn’s abs. Or his, well, professional equipment. (Seriously, you could pick it out of a lineup.) But if you’re ever in a mood to go reading through VR research . . .
You: I’m not. That’s why you’re here.
Me: Right! That’s why I’m here. Okay, so what we’re talking about dates back to a concept known familiarly as the “rubber hand illusion.” In 1998, a psychiatrist and psychologist in Pittsburgh asked volunteers to sit with their left arm on a small table and then placed a screen between each subject’s arm and body so that they couldn’t see their own arm. They placed a life-size rubber arm on the table and told the volunteers to focus on the arm—then stroked both the hidden real hand and the rubber fake hand with paintbrushes, timing the strokes as closely as possible but locating the strokes in slightly different places. They did this with ten volunteers. Eight of those ten wound up feeling as though the rubber hand were their actual hand: they felt the paintbrush in the place where they saw the rubber hand touched or thought that the stroking they felt was caused by the visible paintbrush.
Ten years after that experiment, a different group of researchers in Spain replicated the rubber hand illusion in VR, calling it the “virtual arm illusion.” In their own words, they were able to induce “a feeling of ownership of simulated body parts in a virtual environment.”
And now, the virtual arm illusion is one of the foundations of intimacy in VR porn. Remember Scott, the guy from earlier in the chapter? Here’s how he put it to me: “If I reach out with my hand and I superimpose my hand in the same position that the actor’s hand is, it triggers a response in my brain that that’s my hand. Being in the same space really, really transforms the experience to the next level of me being there.”
You: Sure, but what if I’m a woman and I look down and see a man’s body? Or I’m a man and I see a woman’s body? Presence has its limits, right?
Me: You’d think so, but it’s not that easy. Not long after those researchers in Spain proved the virtual arm illusion, another team led by the same person—a scholar named Mel Slater, whose presence research has defined much of the field—wanted to see whether they could induce the feeling of a full-body transfer. They created a virtual environment in which male volunteers sat and looked across the room at a woman stroking a young girl’s shoulder. After two minutes, the scene changed and the men’s perspective shifted. Some of the men were given the first-person perspective of the young girl; if they looked down, they saw the young girl’s blouse and skirt, and if they looked in a mirror, they saw the face of the young girl. The other men found themselves between the girl and the woman, but not actually inhabiting the body of either.
For the next few minutes, the men watched the woman stroke the girl’s shoulder, while a researcher in the lab stroked their own real-life arm. Suddenly, the men’s perspectives changed again, so that they were floating above the woman and girl; they then saw the woman slap the girl, three times, across the face—slap! slap! slap! They then returned to their previous position, and the experiment ended.
Afterward, the men filled out questionnaires, but the researchers were doubly interested in what happened to the men’s heart rates. In particular, they looked at how men’s heart rates slowed when they saw the woman slap the young girl; heart rate deceleration has been linked with so-called aversive stress, or the desire to escape a situation. The men who had been given the first-person perspective of the young girl had a significantly stronger physiological reaction both to seeing the young girl get slapped and to returning to the young girl’s body—just as if the woman posed a real threat to them.
“Through an IVR [immersive virtual reality] a person can see through the eyes and hear through the ears of a virtual body that can be seen to substitute for their own body,” the researchers wrote, “and our data show that people have some subjective and physiological responses as if it were their own body.” And not just a different body—a body of a different gender, and even a vastly different age.
All of which is to say: you might not have a porn star’s body, but VR can make you think you do. 
The actual script is mostly voiceover—in the finished film, a female narrator will handle the exposition, providing somewhat clinical commentary on the benefits of Masters and Johnson’s “squeeze” technique, or how various positions can maximize stimulation for either or both parties—which makes August Ames’s dialogue sound like a cross between an overacting porn star and an everyone-gets-a-trophy preschool teacher. “Oh my God,” she coos breathily into the camera during a segment on Kegel exercises, as Tommy Gunn does what can only be described as dong push-ups, a towel draped over his laboring penis. “Your dick is so strong.”
If you think that sounds cheesy in writing, imagine standing on a powered-down treadmill in the fully furnished rental house, a scant ten feet from the bed, scribbling notes furiously. And if you think it sounds like another sad example of the adult industry peddling the myth of a subservient yet sexually insatiable woman, you’re . . . well, you’re not wrong. At least not in this case. But the porn industry flocking to VR isn’t confined to heteronormative, male-first fantasies. After BaDoink released “Virtual Sexology,” in fact, it went on to make a sequel shot from the female performer’s point of view. Another site, VR Bangers, recently released a male-female scene that was shot from both the man’s perspective and the woman’s, and then synchronized—with the hope that a couple at home will pop on their headsets, reenact what they’re seeing, and enjoy being other people for seventeen minutes and twenty-six seconds. (Or however long it takes before they, uh, get bored.) There’s gay VR porn, trans VR porn, BDSM VR porn; basically, find a flavor, stick a “VR” in the middle of it, and it likely exists. And if it doesn’t, it will soon.
Back in the very beginning of the book, I took some time to set up the idea that real life didn’t always care about reporting. Startups can fail; businesses can change names, be bought or sold, or simply go under; people can change jobs, even careers. That sort of unpredictability has a tragic side as well. In December 2017, during the book’s final editing phase, we learned the horrible news that August Ames had taken her own life. She was twenty-three years old.
In 2011, two computational neuroscientists analyzed more than four hundred million online porn search results and unpacked what they found in a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire. In an interview with TIME, coauthor Ogi Ogas explained the gender gap thus:
Women prefer stories to visual porn by a long shot. . . . There are two reasons. Both come down to fundamental differences between the male sexual brain and the female sexual brain. One of the most basic differences is that the male brain responds to any single sexual stimulus. A nice chest, two girls kissing, older women—if that’s what they’re attracted to. Any one thing will trigger arousal in a male. Female desire requires multiple stimuli simultaneously or in quick succession. It takes more stimuli and more variety of these stimuli to trigger genuine arousal. For a guy, the most common form of [masturbation material] is a 60-second porn clip. For a woman, it can be a 250-page novel or a 2,000-word story. That’s the way to get multiple stimuli. Stories have greater flexibility to offer a greater variety of stimuli. In male erotica, sex appears in the first one-quarter of the story [or film]. For women, it’s halfway in. There’s more time to develop the character before sex.
But if anything can close that gap, it’s virtual reality. VR porn already shares more hallmarks with the longer stories Ogas describes than with a sixty-second clip. “It’s really hard to get somebody to sit down and actually consume an entire piece of adult pornography,” says Doug McCort, the omnivorous porn reviewer. “But for some reason it’s working in VR. People are digging the entire experience.” Some of that is practical, he allows: “It feels weird to go through the hassle of strapping up and putting the [headset] on just to knock out a ten-minute clip.”
But even if VR porn scenes last the same amount of time as a conventional scene might (and many do, when you’re comparing them by original length rather than the clips that filter out from pay sites to tube sites), they feel different. That’s because of the eye contact, and the whispering, and the simulated kissing, and all the ways that directors and performers are learning to take advantage of proxemics and presence. They also feel different because the entirety of the scene, from premise to climax, feels like part of the same encounter.
As the medium in which we watch sex has changed, the sex itself has become increasingly decontextualized. When VCRs moved porn consumption from theaters to homes, movies went from long features to collections of scenes; when the internet came around, those scenes shortened to clips. And when smartphones emerged, those clips shortened even more: porn GIFs have become astoundingly popular, especially among young women. Yet, VR reinstates the totality of an intimate encounter, even if it’s aimed at men who might otherwise treat porn as instant gratification. There’s a seduction to these scenes when consumed in their entirety; the moments before sex matter again.
Keep in mind, this is all for prefilmed experiences, which means that this is virtual sex defined by its limitations. It may or may not be fully compatible with a given viewer’s tastes. It conscripts the viewer, but only into a body that isn’t actually theirs. This is virtual sex in which viewers are rendered dumb and mute: they can speak, but who’s going to hear them? They can only be a consumer, rather than a true participant. (There are, however, app- and internet-connected vibrators and masturbation devices that can be synced to what’s happening on the screen. These so-called smart toys get one step closer to tactile presence in VR porn.) Make no mistake, presence can enable some miraculous reactions, but a one-way transmission like this stops short of full-fledged reciprocal intimacy.
That’s already changing, though.
SMILE, YOU’RE ON CAMERA
“I’m going to pee, because I’m a pee monster. That’s my official title.” Ela Darling gets off the couch for what seems like the third time in twenty minutes and heads to the bathroom. We’re sitting in a hotel room in Miami’s South Beach neighborhood. Outside, it’s hot. Downstairs, the hotel’s outdoor pool and bar throng with women in bikinis and jacked dudes in jean shorts and tribal tattoos. Some of them might be here anyway—this is Miami, after all—but most of them are here for XBIZ.
The AVN Adult Entertainment Expo is a porn trade show people have heard of. XBIZ is . . . not. XBIZ is a business conference, filled with webmasters and affiliate marketers. It’s the nerds’ table in the middle-school cafeteria of the NSFW world. And Ela Darling might be a porn performer, but she’s also a die-hard nerd, and these are her people.
As a kid, Darling fell in love with the idea of virtual reality. This was the late 1990s, early 2000s; Johnny Mnemonic and the Nintendo Virtual Boy had already come and gone, and VR had gone from brain-busting sci-fi concept to schlocky punch line to faded cultural footnote. But still, Darling was an avid reader and D&D player, and the idea of getting lost in an immersive world—“making visual what I was already losing myself in books for,” as she puts it—was something she found not just exciting, but romantic.
Not surprisingly for an active reader, Darling got a master’s degree and became a librarian. Perhaps more surprisingly, she then stopped being a librarian and started acting in pornographic movies. (Yes, that means she officially became a sexy librarian. Fun fact: she has the Dewey decimal number for the Harry Potter books tattooed on her back.) And after a few years of bondage scenes, masturbation videos, and girl-on-girl movies, Darling attended the E3 video game trade show and tried an early version of the Oculus Rift. “The first thing I think of when I hear of new technology,” she says, “is ‘How can I fuck with it?’ or ‘How can I let people watch me fucking on it?’ Usually there’s one or the other application if you think hard enough.” With the Rift, Darling didn’t have to think too hard at all; now, she’s at the forefront of the world of VR camming.
If regular porn is a movie, camming is closed-circuit TV: performers stream live shows to their webcam, which people watch via their browsers on cam sites like Chaturbate or LiveJasmin. It’s been around for years, though with the proliferation of good cheap cameras and high-speed internet, it’s become an increasingly popular part of the adult industry.
It’s also become a lucrative proposition. Because it’s a live show, it’s less prone to piracy than conventional scenes. Additionally, most cam sites generate revenue not from advertising or subscriptions, but from tips. Users can watch shows for free but are able to send small micropayments to performers—“for a good show, sending fun gifts and requesting sexy one-on-one Private Shows,” as website Cam4 describes it—in the form of tokens they buy from the site. While the cam sites keep a portion of those tips, the business model is more like a small brick-and-mortar business than the movie business: performers pay overhead to the cam site in order to control their own destinies.
Camming wasn’t Ela Darling’s first VR play. In fact, VR camming didn’t exist at all in 2014. That’s when she read a Reddit post from two guys who wanted to make VR porn. She wanted to make VR porn, so they flew her from California to Maryland. In true tech start-up fashion, they turned out to be twenty-one-year-old college students. (“It was very Weird Science,” Darling says.) Nonetheless, they shot a test scene in their dorm room. Rather than invest in an array of pricey high-end cameras like other fledgling VR video companies, they went decidedly DIY, taping together two GoPro cameras to create a 3-D image on the cheap. (Again in true tech start-up fashion, Darling wore an R2-D2 swimsuit [at least initially].) After she flew back to LA, one of the students emailed her; he’d finished processing the test scene and was so blown away by the footage that he wanted her to be a partner in the venture. “This is unlike any porn I’ve seen,” he wrote to her then. “It’s like I’m watching an actual person.” (That’s a lot of quote to unpack. The subtext suggests that things critics say about porn are true—that it literally dehumanizes its actors. That’s not a topic for this book, but suffice it to say that whether or not we’re talking about conventional porn, VR’s unique qualities cast that sentiment in a different light altogether.)
Now, the two are roommates and business partners in LA. They’ve gone from GoPro cameras to a sophisticated custom-built rig that lets performers get incredibly close to the lens—the better to seduce you with, my dear!—and Darling has gone from filmed content to camming. Well, partially: this morning, before we met up, she filmed a scene with another female performer she’s friends with. (“She fucked my butt!” Darling says, in a nonchalant singsong that sounds like she’s telling me the copier is broken again.) She’s also gone from doing weekly live cam shows on her own website to being the head of VR for cam site Cam4. Cam4 is the ninth biggest adult site in the world, and the new platform has boosted her visibility significantly. When she did her first show for the site, hundreds of users were watching at any given time.
But despite those numbers, the experience maintains its illusion of one-to-one communication. Darling is careful to use singular pronouns only when she talks to the camera, and even addresses individual users by name when they type something into a chat window. “Cams are about establishing an intimate relationship and a shared sense of vulnerability,” Darling says. “When I’m camming in VR, I actually feel a lot more engaged, because I know that for people watching me in virtual reality, their experience is dominated by me. They’re not checking their email, they’re not texting, they’re not fucking making lunch. They’re only looking at me, and that is really powerful. Like, knowing that I’m conquering all of your attention right now? Damn.”
That direct connection can engender some surprising effects. “There’s a sense of reciprocal attraction which you don’t get from porn,” Darling says. “I’m being naked and masturbating on camera and you’re watching it, and that makes you feel you can kind of open up a little bit. When I cam in virtual reality, guys get to a point of personal self-disclosure much sooner than they do on a regular cam platform.”
Like a lot of cam performers, Darling has regulars, viewers who come back anytime she does a show. One week, she noticed that one of her recent regulars was missing. He was back the following week, and he asked her for a private show. He and his girlfriend had broken up, he told her, and he just wanted to be with someone he felt he could trust. “He’d only seen me a few times,” she says, “and he felt that VR was a safe, comfortable place to retreat to when he was feeling vulnerable.”
“There’s a relationship there,” she continues, “because they feel like they’re in my bedroom. And to some degree they are.” While some cam performers stream from studios built for that specific purpose—a house full of subdivided workstations, each furnished with a bed and a webcam—Darling just sets up a VR camera rig in her own room. When you’re there with her, you’re really there, from the skulls strung up above her bed to the bejeweled gas mask on a female mannequin torso to the many skulls on her bookshelf. (Homegirl is into skulls.)
That relationship, such as it is, matters. And as much as it matters to conventional cam customers, who often pay extra for private shows with performers and buy them things from their Amazon wish lists, it matters even more in VR. “A lot of people don’t have access to romantic relationships,” Darling says. “Maybe they have mobility issues, or health issues, or they work a lot, or they’re just really socially awkward, or any number of reasons why someone might not be able to have that kind of relationship. This is giving them an opportunity to interact with people they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. That’s huge to me.”
But what if that person is already in a relationship? Darling’s regular had broken up with his girlfriend; had his girlfriend known that he spent time, and possibly money, watching another woman masturbating in real time?
The question of whether watching porn constitutes infidelity simply doesn’t have a single answer: every couple is different. Yet, the added power of presence introduces a new complexity to the question. Is getting aroused by the depiction of another person different when that depiction expressly creates the illusion that you’re really there with that person?
Remember Scott, the fifty-something software guy? A few months after the last time I talked with him, he sent me a long, thoughtful email. During his time on the message boards of his favorite VR porn site, he wrote, he had read other men’s stories about watching VR porn with their wives. Some had simply shown their wives movies shot from a woman’s perspective, and others had had sex while wearing a headset. Scott began to wonder whether such a thing was possible in his relationship. VR porn had already rejuvenated his sexual connection with his wife; why couldn’t he tell her about it? So he did.
It didn’t go well. She asked to see one of the scenes he had watched—and after watching the entire scene, she said, “This feels like adultery.” Scott was shocked. In his mind, VR porn was simply fantasy, albeit particularly vivid fantasy. His wife, though, reminded him of a book they had read together that stressed the power of visualization: if you practice shooting free throws in your mind, for example, your subconscious will eventually internalize the repetition, leading to real-world improvement. VR porn, his wife said, was similarly conditioning his mind to have an affair—it was an adultery simulator. (The fact that Scott had researched his favorite performers didn’t help either; they were becoming like girlfriends to him, his wife said.)
Scott didn’t think that he would ever cheat on his wife, but he canceled his WankzVR membership—and began to think critically about his own VR consumption:
I had convinced myself that VR porn was different—it was good porn. Regular porn depicts a man (or men) carrying out acts on a woman, sometimes in very degrading ways. In VR porn, the woman is generally seducing you, making love to you. She’s the one in control, she’s empowered. The scenes tell a story and there is some thought that goes into the dialogue and plot. The sex itself tends to be more tender, more real, with longer foreplay and more realistic endings. I reasoned that if VR is rewiring my brain, at least it’s very close to the real experience of sex.
In hindsight, I now realize that while VR porn is different in many ways from traditional “2-D” porn, the high that it can produce is significantly more potent and thus more dangerous. The combination of a realistic 3-D environment containing a person who is focused on pleasuring you triggers dopamine spikes that flat porn can’t touch. I remember the first time a girl whispered in my ear in VR—I could swear that I could feel her breath and the heat of her cheek radiating against mine. It sent tingles down my spine. That feeling lessened in later videos, so I realize that my brain was, in fact, getting used to the experience (desensitization).
“I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet by coming clean to my wife when I did,” he wrote; he was excited to rediscover “authentic sexuality” with her.
I’m happy for Scott. Happy that he was honest with his wife; happy that she was honest with him; happiest of all that they found a way to move forward. “So many people don’t have a conversation about what the boundaries of their relationship are,” Ela Darling says, “that when someone ends up doing something that makes someone else feel violated, both people are upset: ‘You just did something that made me feel like you violated my trust.’ ‘You didn’t communicate to me that this was a boundary for you, and now you’re mad at me for something I had no idea would hurt you.’ If VR can encourage people to have a fucking conversation with each other, that’s awesome.”
But the intersection of VR and eroticism is just beginning. We’ll continue to see the adult industry create content to match the capabilities of the most powerful headsets, just like it’s always been at the forefront of technological adoption. As VR reaches everyone, we’ll see studios like BaDoink and Wankz and Yanks and Kink.com and Naughty America and a dozen others broaden their offerings, catering to the panoply of tastes. We’ll see camming improve, with cameras that allow viewers to lean in closer to the performers they see in their headsets, and we’ll ultimately see performers wearing their own headsets, connecting with paying customers for private time (as avatars only, of course). And just as certainly, we’ll see handwringing about how the immersive qualities of VR porn make it a danger—to young people, to women, to relationships, to the fabric of society itself. ’Twas ever thus, right?
But consider this: the intimacy Scott and his wife share now is stronger than it’s been in years. And that’s thanks to VR.