She screws! She Talks! SHE HAS AN OFF SWITCH!

Before we begin, we want to take a second to instantaneously orgasm at the realization that we are thisclose to living in a postcyberpunk universe, OMG. The cyborgs are so close, the Sex and the 405 newsroom can almost taste them! Nom nom nom! /geekery

But let’s explore the robots that are actually among us, shall we?

Meet Roxxxy, a 5-foot-7-inches TrueCompanion that outweighs our editrix at 120 pounds. Her skin is soft, her orifices are willing and! She will talk to you about anything that interests you. For as long as you like. Without rolling her eyes!

(Our editrix should send one to her ex-husband.)

A TrucCompanion is a talking sex robot. Priced at $7,000, Roxxxy is the brainchild of Douglas Hines, a mad scientist who thought to slap silicone skin on a computer with voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software, and five pre-programmed personalities ranging from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy — take your pick!

A motor in her chest pumps heated air through a tube that winds through Roxxxy’s body, which keeps her warm to the touch. She also has sensors in her hands and genital areas that elicit vocal responses from her when she’s touched. She even shudders to simulate orgasm (like most women you know! Just kissing, sorry).

Her battery-life is only three hours, but then, that’s more than our iPhones, so we’re not going to complain too much.

“There’s a tremendous need for this kind of product,” said Hines, who’s really a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer, and happily married in Licoln Park, New Jersey.

This version of the bot cannot move on its own, though it can be contorted into many positions. We’re looking forward to advances in the technology that will allow for Roxxxy to get up and make dinner, give us a back massage, then go service our boyfriends and husbands so we can deal with our deadlines.

And once they figure out all the bugs, we expect her male counterpart, a sexy man-thing to change lightbulbs, play with our hair for hours on end and, of course, do us 24/7 — between deadlines, of course.

It’s not cheating if it doesn’t have a pulse, right?

Ew, that’s gross. Sorry. YOU KNOW WHAT WE MEAN.

Image from TrueCompanion. Information from CNN, via Denise Tanton.

Apple’s Anti-Porn Stance Blows, Encourages Scamming

Here’s an excellent argument on the suffering we’re enduring at the hands of anti-porn Apple, by Gizmodo‘s John Herrman:

Apple has a ratings system in the App Store. It has a 17+ rating, for apps with violent, crude or sexual content—or app that have a browser function, which could be used to access objectionable content. Most of the apps above are 17+, which means that if parents so choose, they can block their iPhone-having children from even being able to download them. It follows that they could do the same for 18+ apps, so why haven’t they?

I can understand Apple not wanting to get into the porn business, which, by taking 30% of developers’ revenue, I guess they would sort of be doing. But the current setup just doesn’t make any sense. You can buy an app with a built-in browser, which can access the most horrible smut on the web, and get a 17+ rating. But if you link said app to one of those sites, and disable general browsing, suddenly it’s verboten. Again, I can understand how we ended up here, but the results, as you’ve seen, are depressing.

It’s fair to say that most people just assume there are porn apps, when there really aren’t. But there are hundreds of apps that look like porn apps, cost money, and that are, effectively, bait-and-switch scams. Apple can fix this in two ways: they can open the floodgates and just let people have their real porn apps, which would effectively kill these in-between semi-porn apps, or they can revise how the App Store works: by instituting a 24-hour open return policy for paid apps, like the Android Market has, people would simply return these worthless apps, and developers, now unable to trick people into giving them boner money, would stop making them. They would tumble down the rankings and into oblivion.

Anyway, no matter what Apple does, people will continue to look at photos of naked humans on their iPhones. It may make the company squirm, but there’s no reason to pretend it’s not happening, and to let scammers screw up the App Store more than they already have.

The system is broken, Apple. Please fix it.

Image from MapData. Information from Gizmodo.

The Porn App Store Has Arrived (For Android)

As an iPhone user, I can’t tell you how much it bugs me that the Apple doesn’t carry any sexy apps in their store. Yes, we have some web apps to satisfy the cravings, but web seriously limits what developers can do for us. These are fast times! Our porn should be up to speed!

Bastards.

Well, looks like Android just got a one-up over Apple. Introducing the MiKandi App Store, the first marketplace of porn apps, now in beta.

All you need to do to access the porn store on your Android is go to MiKandi.com on your mobile browser. Voilà! Porn at your greedy fingertips. You’ll have to tell me what you think, seeing as I made the gruesome error of choosing the iPhone over the Android and can’t do it myself. #fail

Image from MiKandi. Information from Mashable, via @harrylang.

Mapping Sex

It’s the age of oversharing, baby, and it just got better.

Introducing, I Just Made Love–think Foursquare, only instead of marking places you’re hanging out, you mark places you’re getting down.

Unlike Foursquare, of course, which immediately lets all your friends know where you’re at, IJML simply marks the space on the map, keeping your identity off the map–unless you let us know who you are in the comments section when you input other details of your tryst, of course!

Image from IJustMadeLove. Information from Mashable.

Make A Slutty iPhone Game, Win iPhone Porn

If you’re an iPhone user, you know the tyrants that be at Apple are hell bent on refusing us our sexy. Lucky for all of us, the world is full of naughty people who know how to get around the rules, like folks at Pink Visual, who run one of the best known iPhone porn web apps and who launched iTouchHer, a naughty games web app this summer.

They only have a handful of games, and not all of them are winners, but they reward high scores with tons of nudity and we like that, so whatever. Could it get better? You bet your sweet assets!

Pink Visual has teamed up with Fleshbot to make a new web app called Kinky Games. If you can come up with a game that’s hotter, edgier and all-around better than theirs, you score a free membership to iPinkVisualPass, the mobile porn section of Pink Visual’s site.

Don’t have an iPhone? You can watch right in your browser! Not sure why you’d wanna do that, seeing as you could just as easily find high-rez porn to enjoy without any restrictions from Big Brother at Apple, but, hey, I’ve done weirder things, so I’m not judging.

Go on, give it a shot. The official rules are on Fleshbot.

Off you go, my sweet perverts, to make app like a porn star. I have faith in you.

Here’s hoping that Apple doesn’t find a way to ruin the fun for all of us.

Image from Kinky Games, modified with a picture of a certain someone we won’t mention–hey, why use stock when you have so many friends who love to get naked?

Technology: Does It Make Sex Easier?

Are the digital tools that make it easier to find sex compounding the confusion that accompanies it? New York mag’s Wesley Yang explores the different anxieties that we face in this digital dating age, based on two years of confessions in their Sex Diaries:

The anxiety of too much choice.
A fact so readily apparent that it has escaped reflection: The cell phone has changed the nature of seduction. One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing, or being with someone other than the person one is with.

The anxiety of making the wrong choice.
One with any game at all has unlimited opportunity. A few find this enjoyable and are up to the task: Identify the single best sexual partner available, or at least the person most amenable to their requirements at the moment. They use their cell phone to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead. This compulsive toggling between options winds up inflicting the very damage it was designed to protect against.

The anxiety of not being chosen.
The worry that one will make the wrong choice is surpassed by the fear that one might find himself without one. To guard against this disaster, everybody is on somebody’s back burner, and everybody has a back burner of their own, which they maintain through open-ended texts, sporadic Facebook messages, G-chats, IM’s, and terse e-mails.

Sometimes being relegated to the back burner is a sign of uninterest: the late-night booty call, the option of last resort. As often, it is a place to confine anyone who might become emotionally dangerous. The back burner is a confusing, destabilizing, and exhausting place to be, and yet none of the Diarists—even ones who appear sexually sated—appear to view it as anything but a fact of life. It is clearly less terrifying than the alternative, which is to not be on anyone’s.

The anxiety of appearing overly enthusiastic.
The back burner is a game, and while the Diarists have various ideas about what constitutes winning, they all agree on how you lose: by betraying a level of emotional enthusiasm unmatched by the other party. Everyone’s afraid disarmament won’t be mutual.

To disarm unilaterally is a strategic error on so many levels—it commits you to a degree of openness you might not be able to maintain, and it exposes vulnerabilities that your counterparty might not be able to resist exploiting. It signals desperation, clinginess, high-maintenance. Most of all, it risks exposing the fond hope, better kept to oneself, that one yearns to leave behind the serial fuck buddies, friends with benefits, and other back-burner relationships to which one had, at some significant expenditure of effort, inured oneself.

The goal of any Diarist playing the game, therefore, is to withhold one’s own expectations until one understands what is expected by the other party. These negotiations require supreme discipline. If you betray the wrong kind of avidity at the wrong moment, your counterparty will not hesitate to pitch you into the shark tank.

The anxiety of being unable to love.
True love! Who could say these words in public without acute embarrassment? It is nonetheless something that the Diarists keep referencing, despite the impression they convey that it is an ever-receding ideal. It’s an odd, negative sort of tribute—a vague longing for something all but lost, but perhaps worth clinging to nonetheless.

10 p.m. I want to love her. And I should. I just, well, don’t. She’s the best girlfriend anyone could ever hope to have. I wish that were enough to love her.

These are just five I hand-picked. If you want them all–and trust me, you do want them all–you’re going to have to visit A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits and Anxieties.

Image by Dushaun.