Freaked out by the rise of wearable technology? Terrified it’s gonna find its way into every aspect of our lives, to the point where we’ll all essentially be sentient Macbooks with eyes and spindly legs?
Well, millennials don’t share your concerns, if a recent survey from Wearables.com is any indication. According to the survey, approximately 25 percent of millennials would gladly use wearable tech like Google Glass during sex.
Commissioned with the Center for Generational Kinetics, the survey examined millennials’ general attitudes toward wearable tech, polling more than 1,000 respondents born between the years 1977 and 1995.
The survey also reported that 12 percent of millennials would wear wearables if it made them “more attractive” to the opposite sex, while nine percent said they would be romantically interested in someone who wore Google Glass.
The fact that these two statements seem totally antithetical to each other aside (in fact, my colleague Nico Lang wrote an op-ed earlier this year with the all-too-apt headline, “If you’re wearing Google Glass, I can’t have sex with you”), the study does reflect millennials’ willingness to embrace new technology, despite the swirling criticism surrounding wearables like Google Glass.
In itself, that’s not so shocking: Young people will always be on the forefront of new technologies, and more eager to integrate them into their lives. It’s the fact that so many millennials are willing to integrate wearables into their sex lives that’s a bit surprising. There’s a lot of concern-trolling surrounding the rise of sex tech, with people speculating whether forthcoming technological advances like sex robots, smart sex toys, and sex-tracking apps will get in the way of real, human-on-human intimacy.
Currently, a lot of this concern is for naught. There aren’t too many wearable tech options on the sex tech front right now. While Italian researchers have developed huMOVE, a wearable patch to track your sexual performance, it’s currently only used in a clinical setting to diagnose premature ejaculation. And while Google Glass devs have created apps to record and share homemade X-rated content on Glass, such as MiKandi’s Tits and Glass or the multiple POV app Glance, Google’s notoriously stringent restrictions on such content have prevented Google Glass sex tech from thriving.
Still, it’s not like technology hasn’t already made it into our bedrooms, albeit in smaller, more subtle ways: According to a recent study, for instance, 10 percent of Americans use their smart phones during sex. So if millennials really think they can get off to a partner wearing Google Glass, well, more power to them.
H/T New York Daily News | Photo by Tina Franklin/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)