Episode 40 - Cybersex: Expanding Sex, Love, and Consciousness through Technology with Regina Lynn

Transcript

Dr. Patti Taylor: In this amazing show discover just how many people are connecting through cyberspace. Find out how you can have mind-blowing orgasms in virtual reality. And learn how you can expand your identity safely, and yet outrageously.

Regina Lynn: That’s my beat. I look at technology through the eyes of sex and I look at sex through the eyes of technology. You can’t show me any gadget or any new technology or anything virtual anymore without my immediate, “Okay, how can we have sex with that.”

Regina Lynn: They may not be embarrassed to talk about their sex lives or their sexuality, but you bring in, “And I did it by the computer”, and then it’s like, “Ooh, we got to be, we got to be careful, we can’t talk about that”, so, and I just talk about it.

Regina Lynn: I mean certainly you can tell within the first fifteen minutes if it’s a thirteen year old boy, that’s very easy. If you can’t tell you don’t need to be on the internet either, you need to do your homework and go to bed.

Regina Lynn: Going to go into second life, going to have an actual avatar with the collar on, and the third day you could be in a text chat room totally vanilla, the fourth day you just want to talk. I mean you could be whatever you want at that time, and I think that’s very freeing for a lot of people.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Now could someone like highjack this, you know, like they, you know, you always hear about the social security numbers and safe, I mean, how safe is this if I sent something really nasty and luscious to my, you know, special lover? Is there any chance it’s going to show up on the morning news?

Regina Lynn: Yes.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Welcome to the Expanded Lovemaking show. I’m your host Dr. Patti Taylor of expandedlovemaking.com and I teach you how to give and receive way more pleasure than you ever dreamed possible. Today on the show we are talking about cyber sex, expanding your sex, love and consciousness with new technologies and realities. We live in a world with multi-featured cell phones, computers, web cams and even online virtual communities, yet often we’re alone, either through necessity or choice. So can we expand our love life through these new technologies? Well here to inspire us as to how is our guest Regina Lynn. So welcome Regina.

Regina Lynn: Hi, thank you for having me.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Oh, it’s my pleasure. So let me tell you a little bit about Regina. She is the award winning Sex Drive columnist at the magazine wired.com and the author of Sexual Revolution 2.0, and her new book Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Frontier is a woman’s guide to increasing sexual intimacy, pleasure and fun as an every day technology. So I’m sure we’ll hear more about that, huh?

Regina Lynn: What, tell all my secrets? Yes, of course.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I hope a few of them anyway. Any case, Regina has a fabulous online blog and forum as you might expect from the online technology guru here, and she’s a major voice, examining how we can dance between the tantalizing interfaces between technology, turn-on, ethics and pleasure. So I think our listeners will love this show. These questions have fascinated many of the greatest thinkers of our time; mind, body, technology, turn-on, sex, pleasure. Yum. So we will explore some deep concepts today, but also some very practical ways that you can participate in expanding cyber sex pleasure. After all this is a revolution that is happening to us all right now, so lets explore how we can get involved in ways that will expand our experience of life and love. So Regina, I want to know a lot, and lets just start, you work for Wired Magazine which is undoubtedly the gospel of all things cool and wired and turned on, so, and you’re their sex ed columnist, that must be an amazing birds eye view of technology. You want to just tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be the sex ed columnist?

Regina Lynn: Well I can tell you that having written this column about sex and technology, so that’s my beat, I look at technology through the eyes of sex and I look at sex through the eyes of technology, you can’t show me any gadget or any new technology or anything virtual anymore without my immediate, “Okay, how can we have sex with that”, so this has made family holiday somewhat awkward, but it’s been a very interesting journey. I’ve written the column for five years, and it’s interesting to see how people respond when you say, “You know, I cover the intersection of sex and tech.” Some people go, “Oh, you mean like online porn?” Some people say, “Oh, online dating?” Other people just sort of nod and they get it and they don’t define it. And I think what’s happening is when I first started the idea was fairly new to the mainstream. Five years later there’s a lot more of us in sex space talking about tech, and talking about it not always in the fear way. You know, if you watch the evening news there’s a lot of fear. The internet is full of pedophiles and they’re going to jump out at you from MySpace and they’re going to make you cheat on your spouse, that’s like our story, and there is a whole other story. So I try to tell the other story, that one’s covered.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I’m really glad you are. So, do you try a lot of these products?

Regina Lynn: Yes. I haven’t been able to personally experience everything that I write about because up until this year the column was every week, so that’s 200 columns in four years. I can’t do the math for how many that is in five, 250. But if I can’t do it myself I’ve had volunteers check it out, I’ve interviewed experts, you know, the whole, the whole thing. But a lot of it, you know, I know about it ‘cause I did it or I met the person who invented whatever it is I’m writing about because I was in there doing it, so, I mean I just think a lot of it’s really fun. I’m not too embarrassed to talk about it, and I find that people get embarrassed that they did something through technology. They might not be embarrassed to talk about their sex lives or their sexuality, but you bring in, “And I did it by the computer”, and then it’s like, “Ooh, we got to, we got to be careful, we can’t talk about that”, so I just talk about it.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I think the definition of technology is changing so rapidly, why don’t we maybe define what is the universe of cyber sex and technology at this current moment knowing that it’ll probably change in the next couple of days?

Regina Lynn: I think, used to be if you said ‘cyber sex’ people pictured, you know, loners sitting in basements typing in text, but it’s so much more than that. I mean you have everything from sending your lover, your partner erotic text messages or flirting by text message, through sharing audio, erotic audio, erotica together, you know, you put it on the iPod and you’re listening to it together, to, there’s still text, you know, there’s three dimensional virtual worlds which is kind of like entering into an alternate reality, entering a cartoon world. I hate to say cartoon ‘cause that connotes like silly, but for shorthand. I mean there’s just so much that people are doing. A lot of it’s on the internet, not all of it is. And, I’m sort of choking up here because there’s so much it’s spraining my tongue. Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I just looked at your book and there’s a lot, I mean, you, this book is written for women so, now you can use your cell phone as a vibrator for example, right.

Regina Lynn: You can, you can. There are easier ways, I think, to get off with your cell phone, but there is software that will take that vibration setting and make it just keep going until your battery dies.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, and you can use your iPod as your boyfriend, right?

Regina Lynn: Yes, there are a couple of vibrators that you can, you plug into the headphone jack of anything, doesn’t, it can be an iPod, it can be any MP3 player, it can be your computer headphone jack, and the vibrations will respond in time, in, they’ll respond to the music, so if you have a pulsing base beat, it’s going to sort of, the vibrator will pulse and if you have country music on the vibrator tends to be a little more steady, and you can create, you know, what a fun thing to do for your girlfriend, create a playlist of all your special songs, hand her that and the Oh My Bod iPod vibrator and there you go. And while the book is written towards women, ‘cause it’s a women’s publisher, it pretty much applies to everyone.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right, and that’s Sexier Sex, which has got more links in it and more suggestions than, well it’s what you would expect from someone whose been writing 200 columns for Wired Magazine for the last five years, what more can I say. Now you got involved in this for healing. I mean, you got involved and you found you actually healed yourself and so, I mean, rather than having loners in the basement, I mean you go on the internet, it looks like there’s a bunch of like beautiful buxom blonde babes all waiting to make love to you, all you have to do is, you know, pay .99 cents, you know, for a minute and, but you actually got involved and found that it was a very healing experience for you, so the reality was very different for you, and you actually went in with a partner, so this is really busting the stereotype.

Regina Lynn: I think it happens a lot and people tend not to talk about it ‘cause we just tend to keep our, you know, our, what should I say, our damages kind of, you know, to ourselves, we’re embarrassed, we talk about it with our therapist or something. So it was in the mid 90’s and I was married at the time and my husband had, we’d been looking at online porn, like, “Ooh, what’s this”, you know, we were just, it was back when a picture took a while to download, you know. So, and he had told me he’d gone in this chat room, an adult chat room, and I said, “Oh, that sounds interesting”, so I went into the adult chat room, and I went in intending to look around for half an hour and just sort of, you know, it was just a text chat, to see what it was all about. Five hours later I finally log off and went to bed. And we both became regulars in that chat room, although I was much more into it than he was ‘cause I’m a writer, so writing and reading. So at this point I hadn’t fully recovered from having been molested as a child and sex was still very scary to me, and my husband and I had been trying to work through this and he was really wonderful and really patient and we tried all the tricks about sensitization and desensitization and so on. Anyway, in the chat room I was able to really express sexually and creatively, erotically, without the quote “threat”, quote, of a penis in the picture or bodies in the picture. And as a writer the excitement of writing and having that response right away and knowing that I was turning on this man and finding that he was turning me on and really getting going and building this erotic scene, it was probably the first uninhibited orgasm I’d ever had, which I then was able to over time bring that safety or that feeling of like, “Wow, does everybody know about sex? Sex is great”. I was able to bring that into my offline relationship.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow, that’s amazing. Did your husband know that you were having this?

Regina Lynn: He did. All, you know, it was completely open all along. I didn’t necessarily give transcripts or details but, and he and I eventually parted ways amiably, kind of related to that experience but not completely related to that experience, so I just feel like I was really, I mean I was lucky to have a good supportive, you know, a good support partner going through this. But the point is I have seen a lot of people who found so much healing. You know, maybe they were struggling with, “How do I come out to my family” or “I’m the only gay person in my town” or “I’m the only polyamorous person in my town or the only BDSM practitioner”, whenever they think they’re all by themselves, they’ve gone online, they’ve found community, often they find that they’re not the only one in their town ‘cause now how to kind of suss that out and find other people. So there has been a real healing going on. We only hear about the, you know, the scary stories of you show up and it’s somebody completely different. But there’s a lot of healing that’s happening online too.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I have to say I love that story and I know I mentioned this to you but I’ll share it with all my listeners. I actually have your blog page on my home page, and I follow you, I’ve been wanting to interview you for the last year because I’m fascinated with the, with what it’s like to, you know, take our consciousness out of our body and it just so, it just so fascinates me to think of just taking who we are as a person and going through the e-waves, and, you know, and just having our consciousness make love without a body, because I know what it’s like to make love inside a body and I know what it’s like when someone meets me and they see all of me, and of course I’m beautiful and, you know, and I know that and they know that or, you know, if I’m their type of course, you know, I mean I guess it, you know, it’s a matter of taste, but, you know, what about when they’re just seeing my essence or my energy or what I want to portray and where I’m this disembodied person, I’m just this being. It’s a whole other way of relating and that kind of fascinates me, and I think that’s part of this, it’s like a whole other dimension of sexuality to explore, and that so fascinates me and I think that’s what you start to talk about or have been talking about, and it just, you know, can you talk about it?

Regina Lynn: I can. There’s a couple of myth busters I need to do here. One is people, your buddies will rib you and tell you, “Oh dude, she’s a man.” Lots of women are online because guess what online sexuality is: it is communication. And I do not mean to be stereotypical here, but communication, it’s talking, it’s listening, it’s intuitive. If you go back and you read your chat or your instant messages a year later and you remember how you were in each others brains and you got it and you understood, you read the chat and you realize you didn’t actually put a lot of it into words. The other thing is people worry that the person they’re talking to is lying, they’re not really who they say they are, they’re not really, you know, they’re saying they’re forty and really they’re twenty or the other way around. But up until the point where the two of you are meeting in person with intent to go to bed together at which point the clothes come off and you realize this is not the sex, the gender, the age, the whatever that you need it to be to be in real life, you know, play partner or partner, it kind of doesn’t matter, you know, and every persona that somebody’s putting on online is part of them, and if you are sustaining this relationship, whether it’s friendship or a love relationship or a sex relationship or any combination online over time you can tell. I mean certainly you can tell within the first fifteen minutes if it’s a thirteen year old boy, that’s very easy. If you can’t tell you don’t need to be on the internet either, you need to do your homework and go to bed, so there’s that. So in terms of, you know, the big fear is they’re not who they say they are, but then the other, the big freedom is you can be whatever aspect of yourself you need to be, and one day that could be, you know, kinky dominatrix rule the whole chat room, and the next day that could be just submissive, going to go into second life, going to have an actual avatar with a collar on, and the third day you could be in a text chat room totally vanilla, the fourth day you just want to talk. I mean you can be whatever you want at that time, and I think that’s very freeing for a lot of people who feel like they go to work, they raise the kids, they are the spouse, they have, you know, married couples always have their TV shows that they watch together and there’s kind of all these different kind of obligations and things and a lot of them are fun that we do in our lives, but we’re not leaving a lot of time all the time to really be sexual explorers in a way that we can online.

Dr. Patti Taylor: I love what you’re, I love what you’re saying and I have to admit, sometimes I get kind of bored with myself, even though I’m really wonderful, I mean, you know, I think I just like to be more than just one flavor, you know, even though it’s a great flavor.

Regina Lynn: Here’s something that I noticed when I was first chatting and healing from this sexual hang-ups I’m just going to call them, we’ll throw a lot just in that one word, was that oral sex had always been really scary to me, giving oral sex. I could receive it without too much of that garage door coming down, but felacio, blow jobs, whatever you want to call it was like so scary and so difficult. Playing through it online, having that safety, putting it in words, having them all turned on, boy, did I flip 180 on that. It’s now my favorite thing, love doing it, I can go for as long as I can go until my jaw cramps or whatever. Online your jaw never cramps, your elbow cramp instead. So a lot of exploration that you’re doing online you do end up bringing back into your, you know, your offline life. It’s not like you’re two completely separate people. People try to have that separation and that’s where it gets a little dicey, they’re not admitting. But you change and you can make it a good healthy thing or you can make it a not so healthy thing and that, you have to take responsibility for that.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, so I’m curious. Can you give us a little taste of what that might sound like, a little bit of your felacio chat?

Regina Lynn: Was like, you mean hand me the mic and have me perform?

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well just a little reenactment I believe it’s called.

Regina Lynn: Gosh, you know, on the spot, kind of not, ‘cause you have this sort of tension that builds and this excitement that builds and it’s so much more than the actual words.

Dr. Patti Taylor: I’ve just never seen one or heard one written, maybe just describe what one might sound like. I mean, are two people just sort of saying, “Now you’re, now you’re licking my beautiful gorgeous pearl and it’s glistening and throbbing”, is that kind of what’s going on, and you’re going, “Ooh, ooh, it feels so good?”

Regina Lynn: That can be. I’ve found that what’s really fun is to do multi layered chat, so you’re going back and forth, you’re saying something, then they type something, you type something, or if you’re on audio you can say it out loud, whatever, but one layer is the fantasy you’re building, and that could be you’re at a beach on a tropical island and the waves are lapping at your toes but you’re too engaged to move from the water, so that’s the setting. So now you’re writing about, you know, the romance of it all, the setting sun, the cooler, the cool breeze, the sand in the crack of your ass, I mean you can get funny, so that’s the fantasy. You have another layer where you’re saying what you’re really doing, “I’m stroking myself right now. My fingers getting really wet. I just gushed all over my chair, you know, I have to type one handed.” So you’re saying what’s really going on with your own self. And then the third layer is what the two of you would be doing with each other if you were together in person while you were building this fantasy, which is, “Oh, if I were there I’d pick you up off that chair and walk you into the bedroom and throw you on the bed.” People tend to sink up on do they want romantic romance novel language with glistening pearls and throbbing members, do they want it to be more porno with cocks and pussy’s and tits. It’s, I mean, I’ve had, I had sessions that went three and four hours, so I can hear all the listeners right now that are younger than a certain age rolling their eyes and going, “Oh my god, hours!” But seriously, it can get really good.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow, and do you prefer the audio or the written, or does it just depend on the mood you’re in or how strong your arm feels that day?

Regina Lynn: I, I mean, I’m a writer, I’m a reader, I love text, I find text amazingly freeing. But I know that there’s a real excitement when you develop something online with text and then you move it to the phone, or if you don’t want to give out your phone numbers yet you, Skype, Skype is great, it’s a free download at skype.com, it’s a voice over IP program, it’s audio, you know, you just sign on and it’s really good, really, really good audio. So that’s pretty exciting ‘cause you can hear now the, you know, the wet squishy body sounds, you can hear the moans, you can hear the breathing. It is very intimate. I’ve found combining the Skype and the text can also be very powerful.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well wow. I’ve had some really hot phone sex in my life, but I’ve never combined it with sex before. So we’re going to take a short break to support our sponsors. I know you’re not going to leave from this conversation so, but please do stay with us anyway. This is Dr. Patti Taylor and I’m with Regina Lynn, and you can find out more about Regina at www.reginalynn.com, r-e-g-i-n-a-l-y-n-n dot com. Again, her new book is Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier and that’s written for women but it’s really for anybody who wants to do this and like a hundred other things, it’s all the links you could ever dream of, so got to get that book. So we’ll be right back.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, so we’re back and before the break we were talking about the overviews of cyber sex, and now we want to get into more specific details, I think we were kind of getting there a little bit. What would be a good way to share an orgasm? We talked about the text and the audio over Skype, what could we do with something visual?

Regina Lynn: Well let me list them out for you. Even if you live, even if you have a partner and you live in the same dwelling with the partner, you can do these things. If you’re long distance this is wonderful. If you’re single you need to, I guess, have a partner to share with but you can usually find one online. So you can do real time with web cams, and you can do those private in almost any of the popular instant message programs, Skype, which we mentioned earlier for audio, Skype does really good web cam, so that’s skype.com, and again, that’s the two of you or the six of you or however many you have, you can just download it for free, install it for free, add each other to the buddy list, it will automatically detect your camera and now you’re connected by web cam, but Yahoo, MSN and I think AIM, I think that they all have web cam.

Dr. Patti Taylor: And now what? So I’ve got, is that like the little eyeballs, you hook those up?

Regina Lynn: Yeah, you can get a web cam, you know, they vary in price from $10 dollars to $100 dollars, they’re on Amazon, they’re at Best Buy, you can probably get them at Wal-Mart, and you, again, it’s gotten very simple, you plug it in, your computer detects it, now you’re on camera.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, now what? I’m lying in my bed and you’re lying in your bed or, you know, then what?

Regina Lynn: Well that’s where you get really creative. This is where you go, “Lets see, is my, if I have a desktop computer, I can’t necessarily, don’t want to move into the bedroom, but I don’t want everyone seeing my whole living room either. I know, I will put this gigantic poster behind me. I will tack a sheet to the ceiling so I have a sheet behind me.” You want to create some kind of atmosphere, you want it to be well lit, ‘cause you might feel shy in the well lit space, but the other people will be very glad that you lit. Then you point the camera or put your body in front of the camera to whatever you’re comfortable showing, which may be not your face and it might be just your breasts and it might be just your butt, whatever it is, and then you can, if you’re sharing, going all the way to orgasm, you get yourself to orgasm however you feel like doing it, and your audience will appreciate that.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Now can someone like hijack this like, you know, like they, you know, you always hear about the social security numbers and safe, I mean how safe is this if I sent something really nasty and luscious to my, you know, special lover, is there any chance it’s going to show up on the morning news?

Regina Lynn: Yes. This is where trust comes into play, you know, you have, if you don’t know who you’re playing with keep your face out of the picture. If you do know who you’re playing with and you’re not 100 percent in trust, it does no harm to keep your face out of the picture. Anything you put online can be captured in some way. People can take screen shots, people can film it, people can capture video, it could end up on, if it’s x-rated it can’t end up on You Tube because You Tube doesn’t allow it, but it can end up on Porno Tube or X Tube. I mean, you, anything you put out there could be spread all over the place. Whether the person is going to do it, whether you care if they do it, whether you’re going to get fired if someone finds out, all of those are individual to your situation.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay now, and this could be going on real time too, right, so they couldn’t capture it, could that, could they?

Regina Lynn: Yeah, they can capture it, even if you’re real time, both of you are on the web cam having a chat, they could totally be recording it, you could be recording it.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, now in your book you talk about, Sexier Sex, you talk about things, nasty fun little things you could do right from the office.

Regina Lynn: From the office, from the office a cell phone with a camera is awesome. You can duck into the restroom, you can flash whatever part of your body to the camera, take the picture, you’re done in five seconds, send that picture to someone. If you’re sending nudey pictures to your lover at the office, be cautious because if he gets it at a meeting and he looks at it and somebody see, you know, he could be reprimanded and it’s not his fault, he didn’t ask you to send it, so, you know, be…If you’re sending naughty pictures or audio, if you’re sending little audio clips of yourself with your vibrator, heavy breathing, or with your hand, heavy breathing, send, attach it to an email and send it and put in the subject line “Not safe for work”, you know, let them know. Meanwhile, they’re going to see that subject line and they’re going to go, “Hmm, what did they send me this time? I can’t open it right now ‘cause I have a meeting in five minutes”, so that, you know, you can create some interesting anticipation.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Yeah, you’re going to drive them wild, right? Now how ‘bout MP3 files, do people do a lot of that?

Regina Lynn: I think more and more. It’s very easy now to record something, anything and send it off as an MP3. There’s a free program called Audacity, and that’s spelled a-u-d-a-c-i-t-y, I’m like, “Oh no, spelling in the microphone!” And it’s very easy if you have a headset microphone, you just plug it in, record, save as MP3, you can record anything you want. You can tell them a story, you can give them a to-do list, that’s not very exciting, you can record your own orgasm and send it along.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow, that would be really nice. I mean, I’m just thinking, ‘cause you know, my partner travels a lot, and I’m just thinking of ways that would be nice to kind of stay in touch when he’s away on a business trip, and wouldn’t it be nice, or if he’s at work and he’s having a hard day and I could just sort of say, “Honey, look here, look there, I have a little surprise for you”, what kind of surprise could that be?

Regina Lynn: You know what, I got this tip from one of my girlfriends who met her boyfriend, they now live together, they met online in a video game, and she sent him, she took a full frontal, full nude picture of herself, but then she opened it in a graphics editor and she chopped it into thirty smaller pieces and everyday she sent him one piece, and he had to reassemble the picture on his end, prove that he had done so by sending her a picture of the reassembled picture at which point he earned a reward. I’m not permitted to explain the reward, I’ll leave that to your imagination. And I just thought that was clever and sweet and also lets you play a little more because, you know, we’ve seen the pictures, we appreciate the pictures, but now you’ve added an interactive element to it.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well that’s really sweet. Now about online communities, is there any action going on in there? I mean, are there adult rated online communities? I’m sure there are, and how hot and steamy do they get?

Regina Lynn: Here’s the thing: it’s still out there, it’s much harder to find now that everybody’s on the internet, it’s a lot harder to find the communities where the people are smart and sexy and you want to be there for any length of time. There are still text, there are web cam, you can go to paltalk.com, that is a good web cam community. Pal talk, pal like buddy, p-a-l. A lot of that community action has moved into the virtual worlds, like Second Life, like Red Light Center, which is adults only and it’s erotic or pornographic, depending your point of view. There’s one called Jewel of Indra, which was designed by a woman. And in all of these communities you have to kind of get in there and you got to talk to people, ask to be shown around. Eventually you will work your way to the adult spaces, and be nice and patient and talk to people, at which point you’ll find communities you’re accepted in, and the reason I’m so kind of, I’m not just jumping out and going, “Yeah and it’s great”, is that we’ve all had to become very protective of our spaces because everybody’s out there and some people really seem to have a good time going in and wrecking everybody else’s good time. So don’t get discouraged if you feel like people are giving you the cold shoulder not as welcoming as you’ve read because it’s just kind of harder to find. Once you do though, I mean ask your online friends, ask the smart people “Where do you hang out?”, ask the one, the ones who turn you on, the ones you find interesting, “Where’s your, where do you hang out?”, and they take you there, then anything goes. And what’s fun about these 3D virtual worlds is if you’re a visual person you’ve got the visual, if you’re an audio person you have the audio, if you’re a text person there’s still text, so it’s sort of feeding in all these different layers in all these different ways that make it easier to engage on different levels with different people.

Dr. Patti Taylor: And, so that’s really great. So, is it, you know, I’ve never done this, so is it like emotionally satisfying to hook up with somebody, like say I’m alone that night kind of, you know, nothing’s happening to really make a connection with someone I’ve never met, I’m trying to imagine what that would be like. Have, you must have had a lot of experiences like that.

Regina Lynn: It’s funny, I really enjoyed that when I first started chatting and things. Now not so much, now I prefer to, you know, I’ll go into Second life and I will meet new people or talk to new people, but I’m not really interested in engaging with them sexually. I’ll flirt in general with the room. I find that for sexual engagement now I like to know the person, I like to develop a relationship over time because I don’t have a lot of time for one thing and I have a lot going on, so it’s not, it’s not maybe as urgent as it was. But yes, because you’re there without your body, you’re there in mind and spirit and emotion, so if you find someone you click with it can be emotionally satisfying in a way that may not be the same way an in person experience is, but it’s still very valid. I think the same rules hold true online as they do offline. You’re going to have a better chance of finding interesting conversation and flirting if there’s something else going on. You go into Second Life, check the events calendar and you’ll find classes and workshops and dances and certain Deejays and moderated discussions, so there’s kind of a thing going on you can go and get value from and talk to people about a built in starter, you know, maybe it’s a strip club online, a virtual strip club. So that gives you kind of a, you’re not just walking into kind of blank space and going, “Hi, I’m Regina”, you know, “Does anybody want to have the sex with me?”

Dr. Patti Taylor: Yeah, so secondlife.com is a virtual community, just…Do people ever feel it’s important that someone actually sees their real picture? I’m thinking, you know, I might, if I ever had a virtual community interaction, I might actually want someone to see my real picture and my real face and kind of know like who I was.

Regina Lynn: Yeah, different, some people prefer never to show the physical face, the real life, if you’ll call it that, face because they really like their persona and their life that they’re living online and they want you to know them as, you know, who they are online. Other people really do want that, “Oh hey, this is the avatar I built, this is the house I have in this virtual world, you know, but here’s who I am. You know, I’m 45, I have a husband, I have 3 kids, I’m a teacher, it’s really fun. Here’s a family outing.” So it just kind of depends. The hesitation of showing your face is if you are in a, you know, if you’re in a virtual world and you are a dominatrix for example and in your life you’re a second grade teacher, people, mainstream people are still afraid of sexual expression, they’re afraid of kink, they’re afraid of online. If it comes out that you, the second grade teacher, have this thing that you do on the weekends where you go online and you play a dominatrix, it has nothing to do with your teaching job, but it can come back and get you right now.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I’m totally inspired. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat at home and I’ve just been alone, and just alone. And gosh, to think that I can just go out and be a total slut or the queen of the ball or really popular is something, you know. I just, it never dawned on me that, you know, and have a great orgasm. I mean, what’s a great orgasm that you’ve had just online?

Regina Lynn: Oh, let me pick one. I’ve done some really fun role play, in text, role playing that we were wolves. Now there’s a whole community around that called Furries and they hate the press and, you know, we’ll just let them be. But we role played, in text mind you, animals so we couldn’t speak. We could only use grunts and growls and actions, you know. Instead of saying, “I’m doing this to you”, it had to be like, “Regina”, and you’d type it a certain way so it comes out an action word, “Regina is sniffing, you know, this or licking that”, and it was really hot. And here’s the thing: okay, it’s cyber space, we’re on instant message, so that means all we have is our brains, you know, all we have is text right now, so all we have is our words. We’re role playing wordless animals so now we have to use all body language to build the sex scene, this erotic scene in body language that we’re tying in text with words. And for a word geek like me, I mean that was just, like it’s stimulating creative center, it was turning me on, I had a vibrator hand because I, from all my typing I have tendonitis so I can’t do myself with my hand. So that was pretty hot, I’d do that again.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow, so that’s a case in point, you know. Here I’m sitting at home and I could’ve been a Furry, had I…

Regina Lynn: I think, I don’t mean to be, one, I don’t mean to be emphasizing the danger for teachers, it’s a particular chip on my shoulder, I think every teacher should get on and do something kinky so that the communities stop freaking out about it. And two, you just have to be patient with the tech, especially in the 3D worlds. We’re not there yet, I mean there is network lag, there, it’s, the interfaces are all different in all the worlds and they’re all difficult if you’re not, you know, if you’re a newbie. So you kind of, if you can kind of get through that, and get through and see it as a challenge, then it can be really fun. If it’s too frustrating maybe it’s not for you, maybe you’d rather go read erotic stories online or write erotic stories and submit them to be published or, you know, go on MySpace. I mean, there’s so much you can do.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well I think I like the audio, sounds good, but I’ll have to read your book and take notes. I mean, I have a copy of your book online of course, but I definitely am just going to pour over it and take notes. Anyway we have to take another break here. This is Dr. Patti Taylor and we are talking to Regina Lynn about cyber sex, expanding your sex, love and consciousness with new technologies and realities.

Dr. Patti Taylor: So we’re back and I’m Dr. Patti Taylor and we’re talking to Regina Lynn about cyber sex. So before the break we were talking about some hot sexy things to do. I’m totally inspired. Now I want to talk about consciousness and technology. How can we look into the future here about consciousness and technology and sex? I mean, where are we going will all of this?

Regina Lynn: I’m glad you asked that. So much of our focus is what’s the next technology. Is it going to be sex robots? Is it going to be teledildonics, which is controlling each others sex toys over the internet which already exists. But I don’t think that’s going to be our big challenge. Our challenge is we’re expanding our ideas of sex and relationships everyday. People are going online, they’re falling in love, they’re going, “But I still love my partner. I still love my family. And I met this other person and they fill a part of me that no one has ever filled before, and I genuinely, I’m going to learn about this”, and they go, then they start questioning, “Am I polyamorous?” Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. But the word polyamorous was not even out, you know, in the world ten years ago. We’re looking at, with all these technologies and how do we as human beings engage emotionally with the gadget. But most of the time it’s not the gadget. The gadget is facilitating a connection with another person. Whether it’s, you know, an internet gadget or a cell phone or a text message or an email, whatever, I think a lot of the traditionally hammered into us beliefs of there being one right way to be sexual and one right context for a relationship, and if you’re not within that paradigm you’re deviant or perverted or freaky or weird or unnatural, I think a lot of that is blowing up right now. I think that’s why there’s a lot of fear in our politics right now and family values this and family values that, because people don’t yet have a grip on this expanded idea about love and how making love is such a literal term. I think our technology is holding up a mirror to ourselves, or maybe a lens that we’re looking through that is showing us all these other ways to connect that are all valid and that we’re going to have to accept that’s part of being human and figure out a way to deal with it.

Dr. Patti Taylor: And that we’re so much less limited than we ever imagined.

Regina Lynn: Absolutely.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Yes. Well, we could be, I know, that’s great, we could be with just more people in more ways. I mean, the world is our oyster, right?

Regina Lynn: Bring on the love.

Dr. Patti Taylor: I love that. Well we’re almost at the end of our show. I’d like to ask you a final question. What is one of the most favorite things about your job?

Regina Lynn: How do I pick just one? I love when people email me and tell me that something they read in my column changed their lives, changed their mind, opened them to something, taught them, you know, that they could be what they wanted to be or that there was no reason not to pursue a relationship or a fantasy or something like that, that it alleviated the fear.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow, that has to be an incredibly wonderful feeling, just to touch people one person at a time, huh? And actually I’ve read your column, it’s an amazing column man, you’re, you have a blog too.

Regina Lynn: It’s very humbling, especially in the beginning when it was all very new to me to get these emails from real people and real relationship situations or real sexual struggles they were having, and to have been a part of their healing the way other people online were apart of mine, it’s like, it’s so humbling, it’s such, you know, I mean it’s just, it’s amazing. Thank you.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well thank you. So, as I said, you can find out more about Regina Lynn, you can read her columns in Wired Magazine and you can go to her website, reginalynn.com, she has, you’ll find out more about her on her show episode page at personallifemedia.com and certainly her website at, well like I said, reginalynn.com where she has, you have a forum and a blog, right, where you’re always writing.

Regina Lynn: Mm hmm, I do. I don’t blog everyday. I don’t want people to get tired of me. But yeah, I blog information about the books, information about the forum, new columns, everything’s, everything’s there.

Dr. Patti Taylor: You know, you always talk about why it’s good to have sex with robots or, you know, very interesting stuff.

Regina Lynn: Oh, like anyone could even question that.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right, so you really have to check Regina out. So this does bring us to the end of our show. Thank you once again so much for coming on and joining us.

Regina Lynn: Thank you.

Dr. Patti Taylor: And so, we have been talking with Regina Lynn. Please send me email at [email protected]. For text and transcripts of this show and other shows please visit our website at www.personallifemedia.com, and if you haven’t already please be sure to subscribe to the Expanded Lovemaking show so you can get automatic updates. Also please visit me, Dr. Patti Taylor, at www.expandedlovemaking.com where you can join my mailing list and find out more about my products, services and events. So this is your host, Dr. Patti Taylor, and that’s all for now, and I remain yours in ever expanding lovemaking. And I’ll see you next week.