There's also a romantic novel written quite a while ago with this concept in mind.. Thayer, Ella Cheever (1880) Wired Love: a romance of dots and dashes. W.J. Johnson Publisher. Sounds like a really contemporary title don't you think? ( it's all about a love affair using the Telegraph) I also have hardcopies of some S/M style cybersex online conversations from the mid 1980s if that helps... Cheers Trudy Dr. Trudy Barber FHEA FRSA Senior Lecturer in Media School of Creative Arts, Film and Media University of Portsmouth Room 3.19 St. George's Building 141 High Street Portsmouth PO1 2HY United Kingdom Trudy.Barber@port.ac.uk T: +44 (0)23 9284 5307 F: +44 (0)23 9284 5372 http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/scafm/staff/title,56309,en.html Ongoing current project see: http://www.cdpt.info Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_mjwJTPc4c
James Hinton <sgtsareth@gmail.com> 01/06/2011 04:28 >>> Quoting Hilary W <hilarywheaton@gmail.com>:
I was wondering if the list's collective mind could help me with a question: when was cybersex (here defined as two or more individuals engaging in typed descriptions of physical sex acts, emotions etc) first discussed popularly and by whom? ...
Any thoughts, comments, epiphanies would be greatly appreciated :)
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You might want to try a Google book search for "cybersex" limited to items between, for example, 1900 and 1995. Here's a link to a sample earch which returned 766 results: http://goo.gl/WcOF5 [Note. Google Book search is somewhat non-deterministic, repeated searches may return different results.]
A Google book "ngram" search might also be fun .. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
Ciao,
Steve
Hilary, It has been at least since 1985. While I can't say I have checked the veracity of the story, and have only seen reprints, not the original, Ms. Magazine ran a story in October 1985 titled "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover" by Lindsey Van Gelder. In it she details her experiences as the victim of a man pretending to be a woman named Joan on CompuServe in the early 80s who used his connection with women to lure them into physical world sexual encounters. She states "Joan was sexually aggressive. Every woman I interviewed reported - and was troubled by - Joan's pressuring to have 'cybersex'. This is on-line sex, similar to phone sex, in which people type out their hottest fantasies while they masturbate. (In the age of herpes and AIDS, it has become increasingly popular.)" Van Gelder claims to have met Joan in 1983, but we don't know if "Joan" was active in Cybersex at the time already or if "she" didn't become "aggressive" until '84 or '85. -J. Hinton _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/