By Lynda Arrison

“What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.” The Marquis de Sade, an 18th century Larry Flynt-type libertine and crusader for sexual pleasure, hardly could have anticipated the escapisms peddled by 21st century vice merchants — drugs, sex, gambling and their technological accomplices virtual-reality porn and cybersex — when he wrote those words.

De Sade knew an imagination free from shackles can carry a stronger kick than scheduled reality, and once the forbidden is satisfied, temptation has to reinvent itself over and over again in order to avoid becoming sterile routine.

Nowadays, VR porn is the image of what we would like to do. Sex has always pushed the case for creative content, and simulated sex came to fulfill that mission by finding a new, exotic way to do an old, familiar thing.

Sorting out the archives of the porn industry, it’s clear that, at times, this behind-the-curtains trade has showed more enterprise spirit than Hollywood. Is adult still upstaging the market nowadays?

Porn: always fastest to jump on the gadget bandwagon

Secrets spread faster than news, and the adult entertainment industry knows this best. Pornographers always have demonstrated an uncanny sense for future trends, more so when it came to technological milestones and hurdles.

With every new platform content-marketers, brilliant inventors and tech brainiacs erected, porn found a lift into the future, mindfully keeping ahead of economic recession, piracy’s big nets, third-party restrictive legislation (see the condom laws) and other God-fearing conservative factions.

Let’s face it: The erotic has been the primary engine driving human progress at incrementally faster speeds ever since the first Stone Age man daubed figures of animals on cave walls to attract the favors of a voluptuos Neolithic bushy.

Less than a century away from the first hot batch of Bibles to come out of Gutenberg’s press oven, a Renaissance pornographer (an Italian, at that, going by the name of Aretino) published the earliest known work of erotic literature — a sort of European Kamasutra of Shakespearian gusto.

In the 1800s, daguerreotypes were still in the prototype phase, yet pornographic pictures already were making the rounds in war trenches.

And, less than a couple of years following the first cinema movie’s release in 1895, the adult entertainment industry was releasing the black-and-white, short erotic films that belong in the vintage category today.

Every nerd’s fantasy has its roots in porn

From saving the VHS industry from bankruptcy (75 percent of videocassettes may have been innocently labelled as “kids’ kindergarten concert” or “Christmas with aunts, 1978,” but what they really contained was porn) to power-launching pay-per-call phone sex and later pay-per-call video-chat sex, the adult trade definitely has earned its place as a trendsetter.

If not for porn sites insisting on fee-based subscriptions, credit card payment and streaming video using Flash technology in order to deliver their creative content to hardcore fans of the genre, the internet would have fallen in the gutter to penny-ho level, some argue. The likes of internet giants including Yahoo, Google and AOL learned a thing or two from the business of online porn.

In 1994, an article in The New York Times praised the porn industry for being “at the technological frontier” when a Silicon Valley company called Interotica promoted high-tech interactive shows that allowed Peeping Toms to send various smutty keyboard commands to hardcore porn actresses. The revolutionary cybersex encounter went under the name “The Interactive Adventures of Seymore Butts.”

Even back then, the words “VR porn” sent shivers of great expectation and anticipated pleasure among fans, computer acolytes and future purveyors of online smut like the people who found full-HD AdultInc.

Virtual reality porn makes imagination a thing of the past

These days, the adult trade can’t survive on traditional cybersex practices or your everyday online porn flicks. The race is against itself, since porn always has worked on limitless, unregulated ground, creating enough free, hyper-core and juicy content over the decades to last for generations.

In pursuit of a rebranding campaign, the big players in sensual entertainment now are chasing the next decade’s titillating technologies. Vivid Entertainment’s VividVirtual.com is the vanguard, with studios like Naughty America and Wankz forging their own paths into the immersive experience of VR porn. GamelinkVR.com premiered as the first VR porn aggregate site. Since it began offering the content in 2016, Pornhub’s VR traffic has spiked from a couple of views a day to more than half a million daily in the spring of 2017.

Next on porn’s list: artificial intelligence

What you do once you slip on 3D glasses, attach headphones and wriggle into a leather, circuit-strapped bodysuit is your own business, but imagine how rewarding the experience could be. Add teledildonics and equipment that can “learn” to anticipate and to subtle human autonomic cues and respond in a completely personal way would put to shame anything dreamed up by Hollywood so far. Demolition Man? Forget about it. Total Recall? This would be so much cooler than that.

Both of those movies viewed the future through a lens of 1990s technology. Porn is well on its way to reaching the outer limits of that vision already.

Lynda Arrison is a writer for AdultInc.com who focuses on creating informational content for adult websites. Her five years of writing experience also includes fashion and shopping blogs.

Image © Vladyslav Starozhylov.