It all began with Sherry Turkle and her book Life on the Screen. I had heard of MUDs before. For the first time I found out what they could be for ...
Then I found a list of EWTOO talkers. Dived in and made a staggering number of mistakes, some of which were funnier than others ...
Then I found the BDSM talkers and made friends and more mistakes ... by and large people are more forgiving about the mistakes here ... which brings me on to the subject of Cybersex. Well I couldn't keep off it for long ...
Sex in RL is fraught with all kinds of consequences depending on your gender: you might get pregnant, you might catch a sexually-transmitted disease or your wife might find out and savage you with a kitchen devil (TM). Part of the allure of cybersex is that it is safe. Even the BDSM is safe and (relatively) painless.
The power of cybersex lies in the fact that ninety percent of sex in RL 'takes place in the mind' as Sherry Turkle put it. As she so delightfully suggested, much of the text is typed in one-handed. Cybersex is of course condemned as immoral, disgusting or sad depending on the prejudices of the condemner (if there is such a word). To a large extent their attitudes come from technophobia. Thus would the illiterate condemn love letters as a perversion.