LOS ANGELES — Bustle published today a survey of several experts and sex workers about the potential for virtual adult content in the burgeoning metaverse.
To explore some of the forthcoming possibilities of the metaverse, the female-oriented news and trends site interviewed digital immersive environment pioneers like Second Life’s Philip Rosedale and RD Land’s Angelina Aleksandrovich as well as academics, journalists and sex workers.
Although writer Nona Willis Aronowitz acknowledged that, in practice, the metaverse “may end up being entangled in the same biases and dangers of our current reality,” she noted that in the best-case scenario it has the potential to be “an exciting frontier, both for our sexual imaginations and for the safety and de-stigmatizing of sex workers.”
The initial adoption phase of the technology — most visibly ballyhooed by notoriously sex-averse Mark Zuckerberg and his recently renamed Meta empire — might result in a promising “lag in regulating the sex work that happens in the metaverse,” Willis Aronowitz wrote. “Like earlier versions of the internet, more advanced VR platforms might enjoy a few years of the wild, wild west as legislators struggle to grapple with the changing landscape.”
Speculating that “sex work in a metaverse would simply be an expansion of the marketplace that already exists online,” the writer spoke to people with experience in other versions of online sex work, like former cam performer and current journalist and historian Noelle Perdue.
“Instead of doing custom content, people will create custom experiences,” Perdue told Bustle, describing a more immersive version of platforms where sex workers “can interact with [clients] on a subscriber basis, like OnlyFans or Pornhub Fan Club.”
Historical background was provided by Philip Rosedale, whose early 21st-century digital environment Second Life has been widely acknowledged as a relevant analog and precursor to the current metaverse.
“People were, from the very start, able to sell things to each other or pay for services,” Rosedale told Bustle. “And sex is one of the many services people pay for.”
“Virtual reality opens up so many exciting possibilities for exploring the more surreal elements of fetish and kink,” Perdue added. “There are a lot of fetishes that are not possible to recreate in real life, like a giantess fetish, or hypnotism, or more fantastical, niche desires. Virtual reality provides such an amazing opportunity to actually be in those fantasies in a way that you can’t in [reality].”
Sex worker and advocate Tamika Spellman, from Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive, emphasized that metaverse interactions have the potential to keep providers and creators safe, especially compared to in-person encounters. But Spellman also warned financial issues might act as gatekeeping factors.
“There are some [platforms] where you need to have a major credit card to pay for a space to advertise,” she noted. “Not everybody has that.”
Still, if the metaverse becomes the third coming of the internet as projected by Zuckerberg and other high-tech gurus, sex workers will probably find a way, the article stresses. “Sex work has been around since the Biblical times,” Spellman added. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Angelina Aleksandrovich, founder of sex-focused “multisensory metaverse” RD Land, projected a virtual space where “sex workers can jump into any kind of avatar that the client wants to play with; they can change the world on-demand, play out different scenarios that the clients want.”
For Perdue, the ideal scenario would be for the metaverse to "shake up" IRL stigma "as full-service becomes more normal in a virtual reality space."
To read “Sex Workers Will Probably Be Safer In The Metaverse — If They're Allowed In It,” visit Bustle.com.
