How The Internet Made Sex Better

The digital world transformed our sex lives — but not in the ways we expected.

- Anna Fitzpatrick

As long as people have had access to the World Wide Web, we’ve been using it for sex. By 1991, soon after the launch of the modern internet, the Oxford English Dictionary had recorded the first use of the term cybersex. AOL chat rooms, where strangers often logged on to partake in libidinous conversations, went public not long after, and sex.com, one of the first porn websites, launched in the mid-1990s. These developments soon prompted a moral panic. Covers of magazines such as Time and Maclean’s warned about the dangers of children accessing inappropriate content, while major television stations ran Pass about online sexual predators. Looking at popular media of the early 1990s, one could be forgiven for assuming the digital world was populated with hackers, sex offenders, and no one else.

Flash forward a few decades — and a great many incarnations of search engines, video-streaming platforms, and social-media celebrities — and it’s widely acknowledged that all kinds of people go online to find sexual gratification, to google sexual questions, or even to meet their soulmates. Tinder, the mobile dating app frequently used for hooking up, is available in at least 196 countries, has an estimated 50 million monthly users, and has been called “the free-market economy come to sex.” Discussion-forum titan Reddit is the seventeenth most popular website in the world, according to Amazon, with thousands of subforums dedicated to sex, relationships, and every conceivable kink. There are also hundreds of online-only sex- education sites and sex stores, allowing shoppers to browse sex toys and learn how to use them from the comfort of home.