If you’re at all familiar with evangelical Christian anti-porn arguments, this might seem pretty familiar. Here’s how "accountability and filtering" software company Covenant Eyes puts it: "It’s easy to stare at a photo or movie of a nude woman and create the perfect fantasy with her. But where do you live? You live in real life, not in fantasy. So what happens when the way we view women is completely formed in fantasy, then we get up from the computer to interact with women in real life? Problems ensue, and ensue quickly." Both think modern porn destroys men’s ability to relate to women; Shuster just thinks that’s a good thing, or at least an inevitable one.

According to Shuster, this disconnection is why Japanese youth have supposedly stopped having sex, especially when "having sex with a Fleshlight is almost the same feeling." Either way, he says the Japanese attitude "is universal in all developed countries right now," and we’re heading towards the "sexual singularity," defined as "that point in time when people will prefer networked sex over real-world sex." His talk’s title is a slight misnomer: 3D virtual reality isn’t supposed to be the future of porn but the future of the vast majority of human sexual encounters, which will be "hardly recognizable" in 15 years.

"This entire speech I am going to discuss from a heterosexual male point of view."

While I probably should have stopped listening at "sexual singularity," SXSW had promised an expert take on VR and the "growing influence of the female audience." Fortunately, women did come up, but only so Shuster could talk about why he wasn’t going to talk about them. "This entire speech I am going to discuss from a heterosexual male point of view," he explained. "It has application for every other gender, every other orientation ... It's just easiest for me to discuss in that context." Except for a couple of short asides, that promise held.

When Shuster brought up his big historical chart of erotic media, it was interesting to see what didn’t make the grade — mentioning the massive but stereotypically feminine genre of written erotica might have actually undermined the common VR-futurist claim that deeper immersion always drives out shallower, for example. Shuster walked through a detailed comparison of VHS and DVD porn, but his accounting of the past 50 years of sex and tech included nothing about sexting, slash fiction, or anything else not almost totally focused on men who like women.

After deciding to ignore half (or more) of the human population, Shuster moved on to ignoring the other interesting part of the VR equation: technological barriers. Forget the careful hype deflation of Oculus and Sony, or the frustrating and fascinating climb towards each new milestone. We’re apparently on the cusp of high-quality, fully interactive virtual reality and a revolution in simulated touch — I believe the phrase Shuster used was "ready to explode onto the marketplace." Not that we actually got to hear about any of it, because it involved "new kinds of haptics that I am not allowed to talk about," comparable to "the Matrix and the Holodeck." I have no idea what kind of haptics are in The Matrix, but since they can kill people, I guess they must be pretty good.

As Shuster continued, I tried to figure out how putting people in virtual space and re-skinning them would solve his original problem — the issue of perfect control. If there’s a single, defining element of enthusiastically consensual sex, it’s that one person doesn’t get to dictate everything about it — there’s exploration, compromise, and occasionally disappointment. In VR, everybody involved might be better-looking, but you’re fundamentally just adding another layer of complexity.