Howard Rheingold, in his recent Virtual Reality, explained the idea of 'cybersex': how someday we will be able to don sensor suits, plug into the telecommunications network and 'reach out and touch someone' in ways entirely unforeseen by Alexander Graham Bell. Speculating about the impact of such artificial erotic experience, Rheingold turned to an already up and-running technology - to 'telephone sex', the adult party lines where you pay to make conversation with a member of the preferred gender. While the UK attempts to shut down such hi-tech services, in America they are already writing academic papers on 'Sex and Death among the Disembodied'.

LRB 26 March 1992 | PDF Download