That's significant because for all the hype around the computer-controllable sex toys, cybersex remains less about feeling and more about looking. Even the SSP Converter Box that drives SafeSexPlus's toys is looking-a cyclopian eye for a strange new telesexual organism. And then there are the webcams, thousands of machine eyes all over the planet. They're pornographic to the core because their electronic gaze is so controllable, so obsessive. What these digital eyes offer is both a new kind of voyeurism and exhibitionism, one based entirely on distance. This isn't the fetishism of the window-peeper and the trenchcoat flasher.

In cybersex, the space between sex partners is a huge part of the turn-on. The Friends Network features a number of Russian exhibitionists, for instance. Maybe they can't buy bread, but they can turn a trick with you, from 6000 miles away. Yet distance, like lust itself, is largely a matter of perception. Looking through the cybersex eye, you and your lover can just be in different rooms in the same apartment, jacking each other off through the phone lines, fetishizing and being fetishized through wires.

In an age in which the novelty of our machines is still high and fear of bodies and their fluids is even higher, cyberdildonics is logical and inevitable. And what's wrong with that? While the carnys behind SafeSexPlus and the Friends Network fail as sexual visionaries, at least they're connecting humans hungry for each other. And they're smart enough not to make the mistake that the original VR visionaries made, that of hyping their virtual experiences as a kind of substitute for the real thing. Both SafeSexPlus and the Friends Network understand a fundamental truth: that virtual sex is not a replacement for skin-on-skin sex; it's simply another option. The disappointment of SafeSexPlus is that all they've really come up with is Gimmick Sex, but that's good enough for the carnival midway.

*Real* cyberdildonics, teledildonics, cybersex—whatever you want to call the melding of sexuality and technology—will be something utterly different from anything we've seen. It will have to come up with the answer to a simple question posed by the techno-philosophers Arthur and Marilouise Kroker: "What is the fate of the tongue in virtual reality?" A genuine technological sexuality will have to account for the tongue, as well as the eyes. All our sense will have to be present and accounted for. Inevitably, real VR sex will be something wildly new and strange, a kind of sex that humans have never experienced before. Until then, we have the cheesier diversions of SafeSexPlus and the Friends Network, gaudy and ephemeral as midway cotton candy. Tasty and fleeting, yet they have their own idiot charm.

Richard Kadrey is the CEO of Gomi Boy Industries and author of Metrophage, Kamikaze l'Amour, and the Covert Culture Sourcebook series.

* Illustrations from FuckUFuckme Site, www.fufme.com/com