Pavel Kozák - How has the Internet changed our sex-life?

Day-after-day, we rarely become aware how radically have the past twenty years - the years of Internet - changed our perspective on sex, and - as its consequence - our partner life. The Internet youth must often make clear to the older generation what they speak about and whether they both speak about the same thing. We can observe it especially comparing the attitudes and behaviour of the thoroughly and up-today informed young ladies with their mothers.

From the past deviations, the Internet has made an ordinary behaviour (voyerism/exhibitionism, masturbation, oral sex), from condemnations has made labels (sex with a same-gender person or with a toy), ideals has turned into myths (the simultaneous orgasm). A wide discussion has been evolving about phenomena almost unknown in the past (the female ejaculation, a multi-orgasmic man, the breast orgasm). For the Internet-inspired dreams, the standard features of the sex-behaviour (in a couple, heterosexual, coital, orgasmic, in love and twice safe - against diseases and unwanted pregnancy) mean but a sort of the middle-of-the-road sex-life. "90% of Internet makes sex - and the remaining 10% acts as if the 90% did not exist," said a www-porn tycoon. And so, we are facing two types of culture - the TV-culture and the Internet-culture. What we see on Internet and how we pay for it have been fostering all the main advanced www-technologies.

Sexology itself recognizes the Internet as one of the three main starting momentums of the Second Sexual Revolution, together with the HIV/AIDS-pandemic and the development of the female sexuality. (For the First Sexual Revolution was crucial that the sexually transmitted diseases became curable thanks to antibiotics; together with the contraception and the employment of women.) The factors of the Second Sexual Revolution are intertwined and we cannot treat one of them non mentioning the other two.

From those giving advice on Internet, the professional sexology experts are connected with their establishments and so they evade the radical theses about sex considering them subversive (I. Tang: Pornography). Besides them there is a plethora of volunteers and self-invited guru's who help and offer how-to's there. Key-words search supported, the sexual minorities can seek and meet: such actions can take place which would hardly ever occur without Internet, the participants appearing there under their chat-ID's. In specialized chats, the very same teens are used to discuss in-depth such practices over which their parents would shake heads (if they have heard about them at all) - to hear then, at school, the official AIDS-curbing doctrine which has not changed from 1980's on. Can we figure out the impact of such a schizophrenia on the malleable young soul...?

Doubtless it is a blessing that we can anonymously consult a person of the opposite sex about her/his experience and feelings. Just as doubtless it is wicked if the Internet is proliferating the visualisations of the unprotected intercourse and penetrative sex in the times of HIV/AIDS, supposed we cannot avoid its normative impact, esp. on the teens.

Anyhow, there are several phenomena motivated on Internet about which it is not evident whether they are good or bad, for whose fortune they are proper or in which moment of a person's sexual CV (the surrogate training; re-shaping of our partner-life in accordance with the better targeted sexual interests).

Now, we can see that the Internet offers us a much wider information basis for the decision-making about our life, an insight much nearer to "how is it in reality", if compared with the post-war generation still indoctrinated with the relics of the frozen Victorian morality, in spite of all the inter-war vitalism. The more it entails that we cannot get rid of our own responsibility for our neighbours and for ourselves. After all, on the background of the Internet jungle, we have no other option besides performing a more professional job in the field of ethics, as soon as we step onto an unexplored space also in the reality of our lives. Philosophers are aware that however difficult it is to say that something is "somehow", the more difficult it is to say well-supported either that it is good or that it should be "different".