Sex tech, sexual data and materiality

Abstract

ABSTRACT In its consummate materiality, the sexual body is vital to the current discourse in digital health studies, disability studies and critical, feminist and postcolonial data studies, and broader theoretical trends in new materialism that insist on the embodied status of data production. This sexual body is a vital element in understanding the materiality at the heart of data production. This article explores how datafication becomes inscribed into sexual culture, influencing norms and expectations of sexual behaviours and culturally dominant ways in which the body is conceptualized. The article considers Pornhub, the AI RealDoll, two smart sex toys and a number of dating, intimacy and sex tracking apps, in order to explore the increasingly significant relationship between sex and data. This article considers the datafication of culture to describe the pervasion into culture of imperatives of quantification and categorization and binary and definitive epistemologies. The rhetoric, aesthetics, design and affordances of datafying technologies, and users' engagement with the data are considered here in relation to their impact on contemporary sexual culture.