The Future of the Virtual Date

Yesterday I attended FutureFest16 sponsored by Nesta. An overwhelming experience to say the least. I had crazed dreams last night about the future. One of the aspects of the fest I participated in was called 'Coming Out'. As technology's influence on our romantic relationships grow and gender identifies shift, we are facing a new world. 'Coming Out' is an interactive installation which invites a person to experience a site-specific audio journey through Tobacco Dock, exploring provocative, challenging and personal stories. 

So, equipped with mobile phone and headphones, I engaged in the stories of three potential dates and picked the one I wanted to go on a virtual date with. In my head, I already understood that technology is transforming the modern dating world, with matchmaking websites allowing people to scope out potential partners before they meet, and apps like Tinder and Happn pairing people based on location. But how will technological intervention play out in our love lives in the future, I wondered as I stepped out into the light and onto my virtual date.

According to a report commissioned by relationship site eHarmony and compiled by MSc Management studies at Imperial College Business School, full sensory and behaviour-based matching will be among the key feasture of dating in the year 2040. Cindy Gallop, advertising expert extraordinaire and founder of the MakeLoveNotPorn and IfWeRanTheWorld companies, also alluded yesterday to these developments saving singles time and energy, delivering more accurate matches and even provide insight and read-time assistance. The report I speak about above, by the way, is based on the analysis of more than 100 years of trend data and interviews with leading experts across the fields of anthropology, sociology, technology and biomedicine. 

My virtual date walked alongside me from his own home, taking me to one of this most favourite places in Tobacco Dock. I stood under the clock as he told me why this place inspires him. It made me smile. But I didn't have a chance to respond, to tell him what I liked about being stood under the clock and seeing the view of the courtyard. I thought to myself at that stage that people will always want to be matched and ultimately form relationships with like-minded people in the most efficient way possible. This is certainly a different way of going about it. e-Harmony estimates that in 2040, 70% of couples will get together online. Staggering. But will this mean because of the accuracy of partnering based on deep behavioural learnings that relationships stand a better chance of survival?

My date then took me to the bar and asked me to give a code sentence to the bartender while I ordered my coffee. I said 'The future is yet to the written'. The bartender gave me a wink and offered me a bucket full of lollypops. I gasped in surprise and glee, wanting to thank my virtual date. However, I found it extremely frustrating that I wasn't able to speak to him directly. My emotions sank. Reports say that in just 25 years, the full dating sensory experience will be available. You could hold somebody's hand and even smell their fragrance, but all from the comfort of your own home. Not sure I like that idea tbh. Gives a whole new meaning to a 'long distance' relationship.

I still don't know what my virtual date looked like, even though by this time I knew a little bit more about him, what he was like, a bit of his history, what he disliked, what had hurt him in the past. Biologically, they say humans are programmed to find people attractive who would be a good genetic match in order to produce the strongest possible offspring, meaning that by studying DNA we may be able to unlock the rules of attraction. Seriously though, I just need someone to be funny and to make me laugh. PING. Instant attraction. I liked this person but without using all my senses, being there in person, would I know if he is actually attractive to me? DNA research would be far too pricey for this social experiment.

I found my concentration dwindling as I again began to think about where I was, where I wanted to be and what I still wanted to see at FutureFest16. There was no way to Pause the virtual date so he just kept on rambling on in my head. There was no way to communicate with him that although it was fascinating walking around him chatting to me, I wanted to do something now that I wanted to do. So I pulled off my headphones and headed for the Imagine Room to listen to a new session. I actually felt bad. 

I thought this virtual dating stuff was supposed to track people's behaviour and how they react to different situations. This technology obviously didn't demonstrate 'hyper-connectivity' including changing the mode, pace, reflection based on my reaction to want to switch my virtual date 'off' for the a while. However, I can imagine that in future, the 'internet of things' together with the prominence of wearing technology could transform how people meet and build relationships.

For example, I understand that smart contact lenses could track the type of people you look at most frequently when your body produces the signs of attraction (measured by hormone levels, pheromone production etc). On a deeper level, this technology could identify your core character traits based on physical, chemical and neural signs, such as how you react to conflict or in social situations and find complimentary matches.

A way to go then for me and my virtual date. There's something scary for me in how artificial intelligence could enhance the date experience, allow for deeper learning by processing highly complex data from multiple sources and therefore, at the speed of light dramatically improve your decision making processes. Frightening to think that love and relationships can be created or removed in a split second based on this premise. Do we want to give up our own sense of exploration both in ourselves and others by allowing AI to do this for us. Isn't, love, lust, pain, disappointment and growth in relationships all part of what makes us human?

My virtual date ended and I was somehow relieved. I did manage to get a lollypop out of the deal though which was nice. I felt the need to ask questions which I couldn't do, I felt the need to look into his face, into his eyes, to see his body language to understand whether he was sincere, genuine...there. When all is said and done I think you can only go so far in relationship building without that human interaction, eye to eye, face to face. Through virtual dating, we creating love, one of the most universal of all human needs, through deceptive attachments? Can they ever be truly fulfilling?

I guess I left the date feeling empty, holding in my hands a group of 'synthetic emotions'. It was like going on a date with a robot.  I was left questioning whether AI like 'lovebots' with intelligent skin, cyborgs with sensory implants, tele-dildonic connected avatars, empathetic person carers loving you day and night can mean a person can generate feelings and emotions towards a robot, or whether a genuine and sincere human response is the only way to find true fulfillment in our realities as they currently exist (true fulfillment outside of a deity which is a debate we won't go into here).

I have a feeling that these technological developments will probably leave us feeling more empty and disappointed than ever before. As our humaness becomes more isolated, we become more skin-hungry. We continue to fulfill this with readily available content, gratifying us only momentarily, rather than deciding to get real with other humans, with all the beautiful and ugly emotional states that this brings with it.  

The case of 'fair'

Just finished watching 'Making a Murderer' series. While studying legality in politics, I came across a lot that I felt was 'unfair'. As annoying as that word is, it is an important concept. "Fair" is never an answer, you will learn in any law school. But it is always a consideration.

Hanya Yanagihara in his bestseller 'A Little Life' states that there's a period in which every law student - every good law student - 'finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realises that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations, and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable'.

So in Steve Avery's case, the words 'right' and 'wrong' and 'fair' and 'unfair' have very little to do with it. What is the law. What does the law say? Yanagihara goes on to say that a law professor in his story would, whenever those words were mentioned, 'say nothing and walk over to the offender, hand him a little slip of paper (a stack of which he kept in his jacket pocket) that read: Drayman 241.' Drayman 241 was the philosophy department in the book.

'Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing concept of kindergarten and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields....fairness is for happy people. For people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.' I love that quote. It witnesses to people who have seen how ugly life can actually be, how gritty it feels when clenched between teeth.

The law, however, is simple. It allows for less nuance than you can imagine. Does this mean 'right' and 'wrong' are for unhappy people? Maybe for those who are scarred, or scared? Ethics and morals, do, in fact, have a place in the law - although not in jurisprudence. A Little Life sums it up so well in this one line: 'it is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them'.

What are the underlying causes of risk and disadvantage for women and girls?

Barrow Cadbury Trust, LankellyChase Foundation and the Pilgrim Trust commissioned a wide ranging review to look at the underlying causes of risk and disadvantage for women and girls. The review looked across the life course of women and girls who experience poor outcomes (offending, homelessness, prostitution and exploitation, chronic mental health and substance abuse) and whilst highlighting significant gaps in the evidence in this area, drew out key messages:

• Gender inequality affects all women, but there is a gradient of gendered disadvantage with poor, black and minority ethnic women at the bottom.
• Prevalence research shows that girls are at greater risk of most kinds of abuse, including severe maltreatment and child sexual abuse.
• In Britain 1 in 4 women experience physical violence perpetrated by a partner at some time in their lives
• There is an accumulation of risk over the life course and the poorest outcomes are for those who experience abuse and violence as both children and as adults.
• Many of the negative outcomes of violence and abuse increase the risk of further victimisation; women who become homeless, misuse drugs and/or are involved in criminality are highly likely to experience further violence.
• Responses to adversity, including abuse, tend to be differentiated by gender, with boys more likely to externalise problems (and act out anger and distress through anti-social behaviour) and girls to internalise their responses in the form of depression and self-harming behaviours.
• For women, there is co-existence of different negative life experiences and that women with multiple problems frequently experience difficulty in accessing support.
• The evidence from service evaluations and research with women at risk supports a model of integrated, holistic, one-stop, women-centred services as being valued and engaging for those who use them although the evidence for achieving specific outcomes is under developed.

The report is critical to the development of a new alliance of organisations which will bring together a shared narrative and create energy to take action on these issues. Looking across the life course of women and girls, this review demonstrates to the emerging Alliance the importance of having a strong gendered narrative and an understanding of the effect of inequality, violence and abuse.

Teenagers peer pressured to 'sext'

Are adolescents today "sexting" for popularity? 

Mobile phones are fully integrated into the social lives of today's teenagers, and offer a sense of autonomy for those looking to hide from adult supervision. Concerns have risen over the use of the mobile phone as an instrument to download, produce, and distribute sexual imagery and a growing number of studies on adolescent mobile communication report that the consumption and distribution of pornographic imagery via mobile phones is common in adolescent peer groups.

Though very few studies have asked "why" adolescents choose to participate in sexting or the use of mobile porn, those that have asked "why" continually point to the influence of peer group dynamics. In a new study featured in the "Sex and the Media" issue of Routledge's Media Psychology, authors Mariek Vanden Abeele, Ph.D., Scott W Campbell, PhD., Steven Eggermont, PhD., and Keith Roe, PhD shed light on the connection between teen's sexting and mobile porn use, and their social status in the article "Sexting, Mobile Porn Use and Peer Group Dynamics: Boys' and Girls' Self-Perceived Popularity, Need for Popularity, and Perceived Peer Pressure."

"We were intrigued by the fact that most teens appear aware of the potential risks of sexting, but nevertheless still commit to producing and distributing nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves to their peers," says Dr. Mariek Vanden Abeele, discussing her and her co-authors interest in studying this topic. "We felt that a possible explanation for the fact that teenagers engage in sexting practices despite the obvious risks, could lie in the role of powerful peer group dynamics such as peer pressure and popularity. We also noticed that teenagers' mobile porn use received little attention from both scholars and public opinion leaders, while current research suggests that this behaviour is fairly prevalent among teens."

Interview studies with adolescents show that there is pressure to participate in sexting and mobile porn use in order to achieve peer acceptance, providing evidence that both behaviours are 'used' to display or gain status in a social circle. (Bond, 2010; Lenhart, 2009; Lippman & Campbell, 2012; Ringrose et al., 2012). Drawing from the results of a large scale quantitative survey study, this study examined how four key aspects of peer group dynamics, namely same-sex popularity, other-sex popularity, perceived peer pressure and need for popularity, are associated with sexting and mobile porn use among teenagers ages 11-20.

"A first interesting result in the study, is that for boys sexting was associated with higher (self-perceived) popularity among both boys and girls, while girls who reported having sent a sext indicated perceiving themselves as more popular among boys, but less popular among girls," explains Dr. Vanden Abeele. "A second interesting result from our study is that mobile porn use was reported almost exclusively by male respondents, particularly by boys who experienced greater peer pressure. This finding aligns with what we know from earlier work on the consumption of magazine and video pornography in male peer groups, and suggests that downloading and exchanging mobile porn may be at least as much about proving one's 'manliness' to others as it is about achieving sexual arousal."

Dr. Vanden Abeele says the results of this study suggest that, in the eyes of teenagers, sexting and mobile porn use do bring short-term benefits in terms of enhancing popularity in the peer group that may in fact outweigh potential long-term risks associated with these behaviours.

Article sourced from Science Daily

Health and 'Hookups' Correlated in First-Year College Women

Sexual experimentation outside of committed romantic relationships, or "hooking up," is  portrayed as unhealthy, especially for young women. 

Researchers from Syracuse and Brown Universities set out to examine the relationship between young women's health and hooking up more closely; their findings, in "Sexual Hook-ups and Adverse Health Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study of First-Year College Women," are now available in The Journal of Sex Research, the official publication of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and a publication from Routledge.

The study examined the associations between sexual hook-up behaviour and depression, sexual victimization, and sexually transmitted infections. 483 first-year female undergraduate students completed 13 monthly surveys assessing hook-up versus romantic sexual behaviours in relation to depression, sexual victimization, as well as self-reported and biologically-confirmed STIs.

Researchers found that early college hook-up behaviour was associated with sexual victimization and depression, but did not predict future depression. Hook-up sex and romantic sex were both associated with STIs, and pre-college hook-up behaviour predicted early college experiences of sexual victimization. Overall, the potential negative outcomes associated with hooking up in female college students suggest a need for proactive educational efforts and further research into the nature of these associations.


Sourced from Science Daily

Do as I Say, Not as I Did: How Parents Talk With Early Adolescents About Sex

Communication between parents and teens about sexuality can reduce early sexual behaviour reports Family Issues. 

However, little research investigates how parents who were adolescents when they had children (early parents) talk with their teens about sex. In-depth interviews were conducted with a racially/ethnically diverse sample of 29 parents of seventh graders. Salient themes of conversations with adolescents were risks of early parenthood, sexually transmitted infections, delaying sex, and using protection. Compared with parents who were older when they had children (later parents), early parents were more likely to report having had negative sexuality communications with their families of origin and to express a wish to communicate differently with their own children. 

Early parents were more likely than later parents to discuss risks of early parenthood and to rely on extended family involvement in sexuality communication. Findings suggest that early parents may bring unique perspectives that enable them to approach sexuality communication differently than do later parents.

A new study suggests that poor mental health and casual sex feed off each other in teens and young adults, with each one contributing to the other over time. Researchers found that teens who showed depressive symptoms were more likely than others to engage in casual sex as young adults. In addition, those who engaged in casual sex were more likely to later seriously consider suicide.

“Several studies have found a link between poor mental health and casual sex, but the nature of that association has been unclear,” said Sara Sandberg-Thoma, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in human sciences at The Ohio State University. “There’s always been a question about which one is the cause and which is the effect. This study provides evidence that poor mental health can lead to casual sex, but also that casual sex leads to additional declines in mental health.”

Sandberg-Thoma conducted the study with Claire Kamp Dush, assistant professor of human sciences at Ohio State. The research was published online recently in the Journal of Sex Research and will appear in a future print edition. One surprising finding was that the link between casual sex and mental health was the same for both men and women. “That was unexpected because there is still this sexual double standard in society that says it is OK for men to have casual sexual relationships, but it is not OK for women,” Kamp Dush said. “But these results suggest that poor mental health and casual sex are linked, whether you’re a man or a woman.”

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Adolescents from 80 high schools and 52 middle schools were interviewed when they were in grades 7 through 12 and then again when they were aged 18 to 26. In all, this study involved about 10,000 people who were surveyed about their romantic relationship experiences across time, as well as depressive symptoms and thoughts of suicide.

Overall, 29 percent of the respondents reported engaging in any casual sexual relationship. These were defined as any relationship in which the participant reported he or she was “only having sex with partner” as opposed to dating. This included 33 percent of men and 24 percent of women. The results showed that participants who reported serious thoughts of suicide or more depressive symptoms as teens were significantly more likely to report having casual sexual relationships when they were young adults.

Casual sex, in turn, was linked to further declines in mental health. Specifically, those who had casual sex in their late teens and early 20s were significantly more likely to have serious thoughts of suicide as young adults, results showed. In fact, each additional casual sex relationship increased the odds of suicidal thoughts by 18 percent. However, casual sex in late teens and early 20s was not associated with changes in depression as a young adult.

The researchers are not sure why casual sex was linked to later serious consideration of suicide, but not depressive symptoms, in these participants. It may be that depressive symptoms fluctuate during adolescence and it is hard to capture an accurate reading when measured just twice, as in this study, Kamp Dush said. But the findings suggest that both researchers and health professionals need to consider more than one measure of mental health.

“Just because a person does not indicate depressive symptoms in one survey is not always proof that he or she is doing OK,” Kamp Dush said. “We need to look at multiple indicators of mental health, including suicidal thoughts.”

The results do point to a possible “cyclical pattern” in which poor mental health leads to casual sex, which leads to further declines in mental health, Sandberg-Thoma said. “The goal should be to identify adolescents struggling with poor mental health so that we can intervene early before they engage in casual sexual relationships,” she said. Kamp Dush said casual sexual relationships may hurt the ability of young adults to develop committed relationships at an important time in their development. “Young adulthood is a time when people begin to learn how to develop long-term, satisfying and intimate relationships,” she said.

Girls' Views on Coercion

Girlguiding has released Care versus Control: Healthy Relationships, which explores girls’ views on coercion. Key findings from the attitudes survey include:

• 23% of girls aged 11 – 21 showed a full understanding of what an abusive relationship is
• 21% said that telling you what you can and can’t wear was acceptable
• 12% of girls aged 11 – 21 said that telling you who you can and can’t spend time with could sometimes be ok
• 21% said that shouting at you or calling you names because of what you may have done could sometimes be ok
• 22% said that checking up on you and reading your phone could sometimes be ok
• 96% of girls aged 11 – 21 said that it was never acceptable for a boy to hit, kick or punch his girlfriend for talking to someone else at a party 

Staggering statistics, woudn't you agree?