I'm lying down as a brunette woman straddles me. I'm holding her hips. She's moving in sync with a machine attached to my body, in a room full of strangers at a trade show in Denver. This is The Handy, a VR-connected masturbation device, and it is, genuinely, kind of remarkable.
The Playground
Sex has always been a place where humans experiment. We are, at our core, wired to seek pleasure, connection, and novelty, and we have been inventing tools to help us do that since before recorded history. So when I say I spent an afternoon at a sex tech trade show trying out a VR headset connected to a masturbation machine, I'm not being provocative. I'm being an educator who does her homework.
The Handy works. The experience is immersive in a way that's genuinely hard to dismiss. The strokes are programmed to match pre-recorded video; the haptic feedback is precise; the production values are high enough that your nervous system doesn't immediately reject the premise. It is, and most people who've tried it will tell you this, not as good as the real thing. But if you don't have access to the real thing, it's good enough. That's not a small statement. That's actually the whole argument.
A few weeks before the trade show, I was at 📝Gay Ski Week. Different scene entirely. A group of people, many of them living in some variation of ethical non-monogamy, in the mountains, with each other. What I remember most is not the novelty of the situation but how present everyone was. These were some of the most socially capable, emotionally fluent, genuinely human people I'd spent time with in recent memory. They knew how to flow. They knew how to make you feel seen without trying. They were not, for the most part, particularly plugged into the AI world.
I keep thinking about the contrast. The VR headset. The ski week crowd. The machine that simulates connection. The people who had actually built it.
The Same Story, Two Cultural Languages
Here's what I noticed when I got home and started paying attention: we are in the middle of two parallel epidemics that almost no one is talking about as the same phenomenon.
The first is the male loneliness epidemic. This one has press. Men in Western cultures are more socially isolated than at any point in recent history: fewer close friendships, less physical touch, thinner community infrastructure. The traditional structures that used to hold this together (trades, religious institutions, civic life) have eroded faster than anything has replaced them. Into that gap have stepped AI companions, apps designed to simulate the experience of being known, wanted, emotionally tended to. The user base is overwhelmingly male.
The second is what I'm calling the female horniness epidemic, because no one else has named it yet. Romance novel sales grew 52% in 2023. The romantasy subgenre, fantasy romance, supernatural partners, emotionally intelligent immortal beings who find you fascinating, hit $610 million in 2024. 78% of buyers are women. The 🏷️#ACOTAR hashtag has over 8.5 billion views on TikTok. The primary readership is not teenagers; it's women aged 18-54, many of them partnered. They are not reading these books instead of having sex. They are reading them because the kind of desire and attention these fictional partners offer is not something they are reliably getting anywhere else.
These are not separate cultural trends. They are the same story told in two different languages. Men are turning to AI companions. Women are turning to fictional vampires and fae lords. The technology and the genre are different. The mechanism is identical: reward without risk, connection without exposure, desire without the discomfort of another actual, complicated, sometimes-disappointing person.
What We're Actually Hacking
I want to be precise here, because this is where most conversations about sex tech go wrong.
The question is not whether these technologies are healthy or harmful. That's the wrong frame; it flattens something genuinely complex into a moral verdict. The more useful frame is: for whom is this a bridge, and for whom is it a bypass?
For a person who cannot access intimacy through conventional means, due to disability, chronic illness, geographic isolation, trauma, or social anxiety so severe it becomes a barrier, sex tech and AI companions can be genuine access points. They can allow someone to practice. To feel less alone. To find language for desires they couldn't previously name. That's real. That matters. I'm not dismissing it.
But the nervous system doesn't know the difference between a bridge and a bypass. It just knows it got the reward without paying the biological cost. And what that cost actually buys you, what the friction of real intimacy is actually for, is something I don't think we talk about enough.
Being known by another person is dangerous. It has always been dangerous. You make yourself a target. You extend something fragile into someone else's hands and you do not know what they'll do with it. The nervous system registers this correctly as threat: not metaphorically, but literally, as a survival signal. Real intimacy is what happens when you approach anyway. When you stay present through the fear of exposure. When you tolerate the gap between wanting connection and not yet knowing if it will be returned.
That capacity, I call it friction tolerance, is a skill. It develops through practice and it atrophies without it. And what I watched at Gay Ski Week was a community of people who had, through years of intentional practice with consensual risk-taking and emotional directness and physical presence, developed extraordinarily high friction tolerance. They weren't fearless. They'd just built a culture in which fear was navigable.
The Thing We're Optimizing Away
Here's what the VR headset cannot replicate: the moment before. The negotiation of desire. The risk that the other person might say no, or yes but differently than you'd imagined, or yes and then change their mind. The way that uncertainty, held, navigated, resolved, is actually the mechanism through which real intimacy becomes possible. It's not the obstacle to connection. It's the infrastructure.
When we build technologies that deliver the reward signal of intimacy without requiring any of that, and when we scale those technologies to millions of lonely people, we are not solving the loneliness problem. We are teaching the nervous system that the reward is available without the practice. We are raising the threshold for real-world interpersonal risk-taking in people who, given the right conditions, could actually take those risks.
I don't think the people building these technologies intend this. I don't think the people using them are weak or broken. I think we are living in a cultural moment where the infrastructure for real human connection has degraded faster than we've noticed, and we are filling that gap with whatever's available. Sex tech is filling it. Romantasy is filling it. AI companions are filling it. And none of these things are doing what the people reaching for them actually need.
What they need is friction tolerance. What they need is practice being known. What they need is a community, like the one I stumbled into on a ski mountain, where the social norms make it safe enough to try.
That's not something you can download.
Afterthoughts and Artifacts
The Lioness, a biofeedback vibrator that tracks arousal data over time, is the sex tech device I think about in the other direction: what would it mean to use technology to increase self-knowledge and self-awareness, rather than to simulate another person? That's a different article and probably a different conversation.
The White Lotus Season 3 character who wanted to experience life as an Asian woman through a sex simulation is still rattling around in my head as a data point about what we're actually seeking when we seek embodied experience of another. Sitting with it.
If the romantasy trend interests you as a cultural signal, the data is more legible than you'd expect. Search "BookTok" and "romantasy sales 2024" and prepare to be surprised by what the numbers are actually saying.