Once more, technology is surging ahead and the porn industry is figuring out how to capitalize on it. Of course.
This time, it’s VR porn.
It happened with VHS, it happened with DVD, it happened with streaming video, and now it’s happening with virtual reality. Yes, when it comes to that futuristic technology with immersive headsets and realistic graphics—along the lines of the much-buzzed-about Oculus Rift—porn is taking the lead.
Go ahead and laugh all you want about headlines that say “VR Porn Is Coming” or “Adult Industry to Penetrate VR Market;” the fact is, these things are true.
Sometime in the very near future, the “virtual” part of “virtual reality” will go away, and this kind of porn will be just a reality.
So what will you do about it? We have three suggestions.
1) Be Culturally Aware.
The stats are sobering, as we see from this SimilarWeb piece discussing the rise of VR technology in general:
“As with other new technologies, adult entertainment has often influenced and been a driving factor in new technology adoption and the same holds true for VR. In this case, Facebook’s Oculus emerges as the big winner. The company begrudgingly admitted that the device will feature pornographic content in May 2015, when Palmer Luckey, the original founder of Oculus VR told an audience panel that, ‘The Rift is an open platform. We don’t control what software can run on it.”
[shortcode-variables slug=”mypilgrimage-inline”]“SimilarWeb data shows that from January to November 2015, Oculus received 16.7% of its traffic from referrals, 2.7% of which were from various VR porn sites. This traffic accounted for approximately 126,000 total referral visits from pornography sites. The same trend emerges for Oculus competitor Homido. Of Homidos’s 27.6% referral traffic, 51.4% came from [one porn site] alone, accounting for about 82,000 visits.”
Half the traffic from one porn site. That’s astounding. And the trends are just point up, up, up.
Just like television, home video, and streaming video, this is a platform and technology that isn’t going to go away – once people experience it, it will stick around and be here to stay until it gets deepened into something even more experiential.
So stay aware of what’s happening culturally. Be in the know. Expect that every new technology will be used as a means of sexual expression – it’s what people have always done and there’s no reason to believe we won’t do it in the future.
2) Be Personally Aware.
Again, just like with every other bit of technology that has been warped into some means of sexual gratification, you must always ask yourself the important questions.
Don’t just assume that you’re going to want to dip into VR porn. Ask yourself, “Is this something I want?” And then, after you answer that question, ask yourself, “Why?”
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That “Why?” is the most important question you can ask yourself, so ask it repeatedly.
Does the concept of VR porn appeal to you? Why? What are you hoping to receive from it? What positive attribute will it bring into your life? What are you using it for? What are you running away from by desiring something like this?
Of course, you can ask these questions about all kinds of things other than VR porn. You can ask them about any of the other ways you might use porn, all the way from the internet to DVDs to magazines to even your own thought life.
VR porn might just be the thing – and this may just be the time – where you finally learn how to ask (and honestly answer!) all these questions and start getting to the root of where your desires lay.
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3) Be Persistently In Prayer.
This is generally just good advice already, but especially if you find yourself worried about what VR porn means for you personally or for our society culturally. It’s easy to read about the impending arrival of something like VR porn and just throw up your hands and despair. It’s easy just to write everyone off and try to retreat to a safe place to await the apocalypse (or the rapture).
But that’s not the way to go about it. Instead, pray for our culture, pray for our world, pray for your family and friends… and pray for yourself. Seek hope – not just for this world, but for your own life, your desires, your brain.
These things are escapable. You don’t have to be a slave to your desires, and you don’t have to despair about the future or the next generation. So pray for change, yes, but also pray for peace.
And pray for courage to look within yourself and find who you really are and who God has made you to be. VR porn may have “reality” in its name, but just like all other porn, VR porn is fake.
But you, walking in the knowledge of what God created you for? That’s the ultimate reality.
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