Sex Is Like the Military

The digital economy owes its entire existence to the US military. As told by Steve Blank, Silicon Valley’s founding father Frederick Terman used defense budgets to turn Stanford University into a powerful engine fueling entrepreneurial ventures. As early as the 1960s, the US Department of Defense awarded contracts for the development of the ARPANET, which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol. The large investments necessary to develop the first costly infrastructures or conduct the first brain-intensive research were made by the military. Israel, the “Startup Nation”, has more high-tech startups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country because of its strong tech-savvy military and the role it played in spreading tech and developing an ecosystem.

Just like the military, sex is a powerful engine that drives the development of the tech industry. The secret history of digital innovations is filled with examples that come from the porn world. For instance, many engineers (sexually frustrated or not) have been tremendously resourceful in finding better ways to compress files so as to send and receive sex videos. Others have made advances in cryptology: in a way, the requirement to remain hidden has long had the advantage of forcing people to be more creative. More recently, giant porn video platforms such as Xvideos have pioneered innovative solutions to tackle the challenge of high scalability. In the digital age as in many periods in history, pornography has been driving technology.

The Sexual History of France’s Minitel

The history of France’s Minitel is very illustrative of that phenomenon. With Minitel, France had the first connected infrastructure in the world. It was an online service accessible through telephone lines, and one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web services. It started as early as 1978 in Brittany and was spread by the PTT (“Poste, Téléphone et Télécommunications”) throughout France in 1982. The French could make online purchases, make train reservations, have a connected mailbox and chat as early as in the mid-1980s. But most of all, they used the Minitel to have access to sex services. These services, mostly sex chats, played a huge part in the success of the Minitel: it made the French more tech-savvy and even turned some Entrepreneurs into billionaires.

These were the thriving “pink” ages of unregulated sex services — the phrase “Minitel Rose” refers to all the sex services offered on the Minitel (see this 1986 New York Times article). The period marked France more profoundly than one could at first imagine. French people still remember when the walls of their cities were covered with posters of “3615 Something” and pictures of naked women. They may not all be aware of it but the Minitel changed a lot of their sex habits. It particularly transformed the practices of the male gay community: gay men found the Minitel to be a liberating tool to find sex partners more easily, without being forced to cruise for sex in places like public toilets and risk a charge of “public indecency”. (It didn’t bring only positive changes: as told by Didier Lestrade and Gilles Pialoux in Sida 2.0 (in French), the French gay community early and sadly became the second-most affected by AIDS, after the United States.)

Beyond the gay community, chatting about sex became culturally widespread in France. The preexistence of the Minitel explains the huge popularity of a French health internet forum, Doctissimo, founded as early as in 2000 (before the end of the Minitel era). The site was created to enable patients to share information about their symptoms and treatments (long before Patientslikeme), which they did; but (surprisingly or not) the sex forum represented most of the traffic on the website. Internet users found it liberating to be able to ask fellow internet users all sorts of sex questions, under the protection of anonymity. To this day, Doctissimo, which now belongs to Lagardère Active, can be said to be one of France’s most successful “sex” websites, even though sex was not the site’s first raison d’être. It illustrates how users will use a service the way they see fit. As with the Minitel, users will find a way to make the most of what’s there and often surprise the Entrepreneurs who had not foreseen how their websites would be successful.

Anonymity vs. Privacy, Acknowledgement, and Praise

The first era of Minitel-like sex applications liberated people because they enabled them to speak freely under the protection of anonymity. The question today is whether or not the second age is about moving away from complete anonymity. Indeed, when sex becomes more socially acceptable, people can speak openly about it, and, why not, become brand ambassadors and share and recommend products or services. The 100-million-strong readership of Fifty Shades of Grey is a case in point: it reached that level of success precisely because it was shared, discussed and read out in the open, just like any other novel. What E.L. James did for erotic fiction, Entrepreneurs should do for the SexTech business: make it socially acceptable and scalable.

When it comes to sex applications, anonymity will not disappear overnight. The need for anonymity depends greatly on what is taboo in one’s surroundings. Teenagers like anonymity because they find it hard to talk about sex in public. Some cultures have such strong taboos that anonymity is an indispensable shield. It’s not safe to speak freely about sex issues in half the countries on the planet. Anonymity is often the only solution to provide what really matters in the sex field: privacy.

But in our Western world, anonymity is not the future of SexTech. Quality content is rarely associated with anonymity. Anonymous applications have had a tendency to be more female-unfriendly: aggressive, misogynistic behaviors, or increased competitiveness often act as a repellent. The gender imbalance has long led men to pose as women (after all it is anonymous) and deprived businesses of more than half of the addressable market.

As a result, there is an increased need for better-designed, trustworthy applications that eliminate trolling, aggressiveness, hostility and sleaziness—applications that promote effective privacy instead of anonymity. The next successful sex applications will probably be integrated into offline lives and force a break with anonymity. The French startup Happn proves that a dating application can be built on real-life interactions instead of the other way around.

Is Silicon Valley at a Disadvantage in the SexTech Business?

A key reason why SexTech remains marginal may reside in the many problems that Americans have with sex. When it comes to turning sex into a business, there appear to be strong cultural differences between the US porn-fueled style, the uninhibited / macho Latin European style, and the German or Swedish sex-is-natural-and-nudity-is-normal style. In other words, the American culture makes it look as if there isn’t any space to inhabit between porn and complete abstinence. Are US companies not in a position to conquer the more sexually-liberated European market because of how the US society treats sex in general?

First, sex is increasingly a subject for litigious Americans. One can only agree with the objective of protecting women and children from rape and abuse. But the many protective laws passed over the past few decades have also had the paradoxical impact of making free sex expression (in speech and acts) more taboo and judicially risky. The California ‘Yes means Yes’ laws are therefore a bit controversial, even in the USA: if a woman doesn’t explicitly say ‘yes’ at every step (even if she says ‘yes’ with her body), a sex act can be classified as ‘rape’. And surprisingly, acts of violence have not decreased following the passage of these laws in California. A combination of binge drinking and a culture of violence towards women have made sexual mores a brutal topic on US college campuses.

Second, the prudish US culture has made sex increasingly taboo for young Americans. In lieu of sex education, many school boards promote abstinence campaigns only. For many, porn becomes the only escape as they learn about sex exclusively through male-dominated, women-objectifying porn. In lieu of sex education many school boards promote abstinence campaigns only.

It’s as if sex could somehow never be fully natural and everybody has to be “protected” from it. Because sex is taboo and evil, porn occupies all the space. It’s hard to find a relaxed and natural way of expressing one’s sexual needs: it tends to be either aggressive or ‘professional’. As Cindy Gallop — an English woman whose words ring particularly true in the US — explained in a TED talk in 2009 when she unveiled her #Makelovenotporn campaign,

An entire generation believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex. We live in a puritanical double standards culture where we believe that a teen abstinence campaign will actually work, where parents are too embarrassed to have conversations about sex with their children, and where education institutions are terrified of being politically incorrect if they pick up those conversations… Pornography de facto has become sex education… A certain amount of re-education has to take place. I have no problem saying “Actually no thank you very much I’d much rather you didn’t come on my face.” My concern is with young girls who don’t want it but believe that they must let boys do it and pretend to like it.

Author Cristina Nehring is another author who wrote at length about the dangers of US puritanism:

There’s a strange thing happening in America. A new fundamentalism is emerging in our midst. It is an erotic fundamentalism, and its champions, oddly enough, hail from the same ranks as those who yesterday decried the fundamentalism of the Taliban, the practices of Islamic extremists, the backwardness of Eastern burqa champions. The West is best, they told us — and there was some reason to believe them. In the West, you don’t get stoned for adultery, they said. You don’t segregate the sexes. You don’t hide women just so men will not be tempted. You don’t practice preventive mutilation to avoid erotic error. This now seems forgotten. The United States is in the throes of a pious convulsion at odds with its image of itself. As Americans, our image of ourselves is that of a people of unprecedented liberty from taboo, of endless erotic opportunity, of a sexual freedom so wide it is lamented as loudly as it is lauded.

Finally, the sexism of the Silicon Valley is often put forward as a liability. The lack of gender balance in the world of tech makes it more likely that it will create applications that don’t address women in a gender neutral way. Half in jest, some Silicon Valley managers have come up with the very simple “Dave rule”: to improve gender balance you must have at least as many women on your team as guys named Dave. (Easy enough: either you hire a few women or you fire a few Daves.) No wonder why the problem is not getting solved anytime soon.

In fact, more women should set up shop to make the industry less sleazy, starting in the US. It represents a huge opportunity for women in general. It’s true that it is still very difficult outside of Germany or Sweden to be treated seriously as a businesswoman in the SexTech world. Women in the sex industry are treated either like sexologists (supposed to listen to everyone with any kind of sex issue and have the answer to everything), or like prostitutes, or both. In other words it’s not the same for a founder to fully identify with one’s project when that project is BlaBlaCar as when it is selling dildos.

Connected Toys and Playful Applications: No Giant in Sight

Connected toys and virtual and long-distance sex applications are all the rage today. Fueled by AI and sensor technology, the sex toy industry is worth at least $15 billion globally and growing by more than 30% each year.

Hum is the first “robotic, artificially intelligent vibrator,” designed with pressure sensors that can feel your movements. Vibease provides remote-controllable vibrators for long-distance sex. Minna Life produces ‘Limon’ vibrators than can measure and record vibrations for a better sex routine. Good old condom manufacturer Durex launched a line of connected underwear items called Fundawear, that allows you to control vibrations via a mobile app. Blewit offers men a “performance training product”, a tube equipped with an internal layer that replicates the sensation (and suction) of a vagina. The Semenette is an ejaculating dildo designed to make artificial insemination for lesbian couples sexier. We-vibe, a Canadian startup, manufactures popular couples and solo vibrators, with a marketing that is the opposite of sleazy porn. The list of connected toys goes on and on.

Apart from devices, numerous applications satisfy various sex needs. For the sporty types, there are quantified-self applications and self-tracking wearables, including insertable devices like kGoal that help women train their pelvic floor, or SexFit, a smart-ring developed by a British sex toy company called Bondara that is like a pedometer, for the penis — it can also tell you how many calories you’ve burned and it allows you to share it on Facebook (really?). Spreadsheets is another app based on self-tracking (are you supposed to keep your mobile phone with you during sex?). Other applications like dontspreadit are designed to test and track sexually transmittable diseases. Startups like Makerlove offer free downloadable 3D-printable designs for all types of sex toys, so you can just choose and print the penis or vagina of your dreams. Even regular porn is being technically enhanced: SugarDVD, one of the numerous Netflixes for porn, has developed an app to watch porn on Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset.

Toys are not only there to spice up our current sex lives, they also aim at replacing it once and for all. In Japan, for instance, virtual sex is progressively replacing real sex. Often afraid of physical contact, the Japanese have the highest rate of abstinence in the world: even married couples often don’t have sex, which makes Japan a prime market to test Orgasmatron-like devices designed to replace boring, unsafe physical sex. This could strongly reminds one of Miles Monroe’s line in Sleepers: “Are there female robots? Cause the possibilities are limitless, you know.” Indeed the staggering amount of sex robots, toys and applications designed to enhance or completely replace physical sex is impressive. The possibilities are indeed limitless…

Connected devices and virtual sex applications are anything but a marginal business opportunity. Yet despite all the buzz, few sex toys startups, however innovative and clever they may be, seem to be in a position to conquer a bigger market. In the end, many of these toys are gadgets you can do without, the sort of things you will buy and use a few times, then put away in a drawer and never use again. It is in fact the non-connected toy and paraphernalia market (handcuffs, blindfolds and lingerie) in its entirety that is of significant business importance, which is why distribution is key to making the SexTech industry flourish even more.

Fifty Shades of Distribution

When it comes to selling, there’s Amazon, and then there are the others. It’s impossible to have precise sales figures on the importance of sex in Amazon’s business, even though it is suspected of selling at least $100 million worth of sex toys and paraphernalia. What we know is that there are more than 60,000 ‘adult’ products in the catalog: as a result, Amazon is often said to be the largest purveyor of sex toys of all kinds.

Amazon’s strength is in selling sex toys like books and food, and thus protecting its buyers with a shield of anonymous banality. Interestingly, Amazon first handled its sex items just like any other goods that they had on offer. But as Brad Stone wrote in The Everything Store, Amazon changed its algorithm policy after some customers complained about receiving not-so-discreet lubricant recommendations. It seems that Amazon customers prize discretion over everything else.

While Amazon’s sales have continuously grown, many trendy brick-and-mortar sex shops have also been spreading over the past decade in cities like New York, LA and Tokyo. US chain The Pleasure Chest is a case in point:

Vibrators, dildos and all kinds of things both unmentionable and unimaginable are offered at this infamous West Hollywood institution. The Pleasure Chest is one of the classiest sex shops in a city filled with, well, lots of smut. It’s clean, welcoming and the salespeople there really know their stuff — you can get the lowdown on lube without blushing, or even satisfy your curiosity about fleshlights and anal plugs sans judgement. In fact, the vibe is so safe and comfy here that you’ll probably explore further than you intended — and leave, well, very satisfied.

Fifty Shades of Grey did more to make sex toys socially acceptable than any manifesto ever published. These shops are more mainstream now than ever before. But none has scaled up to become an e-commerce giant and threaten Amazon. They just cater to trendy urbanites.

Another model is worth mentioning here: Pure Romance is a popular US ‘Tupperware’ model, with suburban women hosting Pure Romance ‘parties’ in their homes. The model presents many advantages: it is based on the social acceptability of sex toys; it is also well-designed, non-porn, female-friendly and repeatable. The only question is whether this model can be exported to Europe. Indeed ‘Tupperware’ meetings are very American and popular in low-density suburban areas populated with many stay-at-home women. In more urban Europe, the model may not be as popular. We Europeans tend to view these meetings as somewhat exotic, typically US institutions just like cheerleaders and baby showers…

The fastest-growing e-commerce sites that struck our attention are German and Swedish. When it comes to selling sex toys in a non-sleazy female-friendly way, Amorelie, a German company, seems to be one of the best. In terms of style and design, Amorelie looks nothing like what the porn industry has to offer; instead, browsing the site feels like surfing on Airbnb. You treat yourself to a feel-good experience. Amorelie fully inhabits the space between porn and non-sex: it showcases non-porn sex in a world where women aren’t whores and everyone feels at ease with their sexuality. Amorelie was initially launched by Rocket Internet veterans and is on its way to becoming a very big player in Europe. As for Lelo, it is a successful Swedish brand that also inhabits that space—with a growth not quite as impressive as Amorelie’s, though.

What About the Dating Applications?

The history of SexTech is filled with an endless list of dating applications. We won’t try to compile a comprehensive list here, but will basically try to show that there are several generations of dating applications and that these are meant to fill a very fundamental sexual need: finding sex partners. Although they are seldom categorized as ‘sex’ startups, dating applications are really among the most widely used (and useful) sex applications. They have changed our culture profoundly and may even be said to constitute a sex revolution.

The first generation of dating applications, which include the American Match.com and the French Meetic, are focused on making dating and romance easier. Sex is never explicitly put forward on these applications. As a result, in a women-come-from-Venus-and-men-come-from-Mars kind of way, they have long suffered from a dichotomy between men looking for sex and women looking for romance. Often the female/male ratio is unsatisfactory because of that imbalance. Many services have since openly addressed that issue by targeting women first.

There are now as many matchmaking applications as there are varieties of cheese in France: one for each individual taste. The largest sites include OkCupid, which features a massive user database, the already mentioned Match.com, and the aptly named PlentyOfFish. But many more dating applications focus on a smaller niche, like The League, which caters to the rich and super-educated only. Some of these applications are weird, like Bristlr, a dating app and website for ‘bearded men and the people who prefer facial hair’. (It started as a joke website, but now the company says the app has 100,000 registered users.) There’s even a dating app for gluten-free singles! And the list goes on.

Dating applications also distinguish themselves by the way the matching is made: Hinge aims at making it less awkward to meet people online by introducing its users to people with whom they share mutual Facebook friends. And because they have friends in common, they are more accountable and more likely to behave in a ‘civilized’ way. Hitch is based on roughly the same idea.

The second generation of dating applications set up to make the search for sex partners more explicit (and move away from ‘romance’ as a primary objective). In France, AdopteUnMec (adopt a man) was a small revolution in that it implied that women too could be looking for sex and that was ok. Founded in 2009, Grindr is a geosocial networking application geared towards gay and bisexual men. Grindr doesn’t exclude romance of course, but it unashamedly focuses first on providing the best tools to find geolocated sex partners. Profile creation is a fairly minimal experience. You choose a “Tribe” that describes your type, and then you’re finding other users and chatting them up in minutes. 3nder (pronounced “Thrinder”) is a Facebook-authenticated dating app that presents itself as the “Tinder for threesomes”. Several applications also target the adultery ‘market’, like Gleeden, the “first extramarital dating site made by women”, and the infamous “Life is short. Have an affair” Ashley Madison, which caused quite a stir last year when hackers stole all of its customer data (and sadly revealed that most female profiles were in fact fake or inactive).

The biggest second-generation dating app of all, Tinder, geared users toward a world of swipe and scroll. Tinder encourages users to make snap judgments about potential partners. They create a simple profile with photos (and a few sentences) and then throw themselves at the Internet’s mercy. The app displays singles in your area. If they like a photo, they swipe it to the right; if they don’t, they swipe to the left. If both swipe right, they can send messages and meet. The app was launched in 2012, and by 2014 it registered one billion “swipes” per day. Tinder is now regarded as one of the most impactful and successful applications in the history of online dating—it even landed spouses for more than a few of its users. Happn is following, with an impressive growth that rewards the importance of real-life interactions.

Finally a few recent applications have tried to address the despondency of dating experiences and the misogyny they often attract. Some applications now offer alternatives, as explained in this Guardian article:

Thanks to humanity’s universal enjoyment of passing aesthetic judgment on others, the app has grown at a phenomenal rate. In January it was reported that Tinder makes 21 million matches and processes 1.5 billion swipes every day — as of the start of this year, it had made 5 billion matches. But it has also emerged as a place where women regularly have to put up with the kind of sexist, vulgar and aggressive messages that, if said in real life, would see you instantly shunned as a pervert. Entire websites, blogs and even books have sprung up — such as the Instagram accounts tindernightmares.com and ByeFelipe—documenting the daily obscenities received, unprompted and unwanted, by millions of women. They can range from the relatively harmless (“I am sensing that you have magical boobs”) to the aggressive, with words such as “slut” bandied about freely.

Bumble has swiftly established itself as one of the pioneering new dating apps designed to improve the experience for women. On the surface, it doesn’t seem all that different from Tinder… The game element that makes Tinder so addictive remains. But it has a few fundamental differences, mainly that once a match is made it is only the woman who can strike up the conversation. If they don’t talk to their match within 24 hours, the guy disappears.

Should We Rule Porn Out?

Porn has a bad reputation. It is mostly designed for men: many attempts to target women with ‘different’ porn have failed miserably. Porn’s problems are related to the fact that it echoes porn-fueled male fantasies. Porn fuels porn: it is now so widely available that it feeds social norms and beliefs (women are supposedly either sluts or uninterested in sex) and sexual practices—to the point that porn is now considered the most important source of information and sex education for young teenagers, at least in developed countries where there is universal and unrestricted internet access.

As it cannibalizes our sex lives, porn also suffers a backlash revealed by the prevalence of prudishness—at least in the US. Porn’s own excesses may explain why the US has fostered both a multi-billion-dollar porn industry and social beliefs so hostile to sexuality that many Americans actively promote abstinence as a substitute for sex education (see this hilarious John Oliver video); until only a few years ago it was still legal for states such as Texas to forbid oral and anal sex between consenting adults.

Yet porn, too, is undergoing the radical change brought about by the digital revolution. Mostly, it is slowly going mainstream. Led by HBO’s Game of Thrones, mass-market TV series are beginning to show a wider audience scenes of naked people having sex. Last year, PornHub reportedly planned on running a Super Bowl ad, although it was rejected (even if it was likely a false claim designed for free publicity). Also, there is the widespread practice of sexting by American teenagers and the possibility that the younger generations have a very different sex life because they were raised in the porn-abundant digital age.

But the most impressive evolution in the porn business is the battle that is currently going on between traditional production studios and Uber-like online content platforms. Because technology makes it cheap and easy to produce, distribute, and remix content, porn, too, is prone to disruption by giant two-sided digital platforms. There are two positive consequences associated with that trend. The first is that porn is slowly breaking up the uniformity: the greatest merit of a platform, after all, is that it gives room to every (lawful) walk of life instead of imposing the one and only that appeals to the average majority—so maybe women-centered porn is only a question of time after all. The second positive consequence of this new, “de-mass’d” porn industry is that performers (so far, mostly actresses) can reclaim their independence from traditional, exploitative producers and finally enjoy a direct relationship with their audience — as well as the financial rewards that go with it.

Hence the birth of a new porn industry that gives less away to organized corruption and exploitation, like that suffered by the likes of Linda Lovelace, and enables its workers to be their own masters. Before the Internet, happy, independent, women-friendly sex professionals enjoying a direct and trusted relationship with their audience were rare personalities such as Xaviera Hollander or Tristan Taormino. Thanks to the Internet, as explained by MIT scholar Kate Darling,

Establishing a live connection between performers and viewers, either as a show for multiple people, or as a private session, creates an engaging experience for consumers. While the feed of a live camera show can be copied and distributed, the actual experience of interacting with a performer cannot be replicated. As a result, the operators of live camera platforms are able to sell interaction. Consumers appreciate the direct connections to performers, making the experience highly personal and more engaging than static content. For an audience that is constantly searching for new ways to intensify the consumption of content, interactivity is a valuable addition.