If you ask a straight, cisgender man to review VR porn videos, you’ll probably get a much different response than if you ask a marginalized viewer with a taste for kink.
Veteran sex writer Lux Alptraum had a difficult experience with VR porn when she previewed a 360-degree adult video shot by feminist indie filmmaker Erika Lust last year. It wasn’t entirely Lust’s fault.
The clip, which portrayed a sex party fantasy that turned the viewer into a “disembodied voyeur” of both vanilla and kinky VR sex, was hailed by Alptraum as “dynamic and exciting” and a “sumptuous buffet of erotic action.” But the VR medium itself left her feeling sick. Motion sickness, she writes, is a “nasty side effect of VR immersion” that’s seen more in women than men.
“As I grappled with my low-level nausea, it struck me that Lust’s latest project represented an interesting feminist challenge,” Alptraum writes for OneZero. “What does it mean to create something appealing to women using a film genre they’re presumed to dislike and technology thought to make them sick—and what might the process of overcoming those barriers teach us about the biases that shape our media landscape?”
Alptraum argues VR hardware may not be designed with cisgender women’s bodies in mind, hence the nausea she experienced. This isn’t something that’s factored into my own relationship with virtual reality as a trans woman. But it’s still difficult for me to review VR porn videos.
I’m a queer leatherdyke with an interest in fantasy fetishism, and most adult VR creators aren’t developing kink-focused VR porn videos for someone like myself. The overwhelming majority of the material out there is built for straight cisgender men first, gay cis men second. There’s a much wider spectrum of human sexuality to be explored than those two groups. And if VR porn creators really want their work to take off, they’re going to have to get a lot more creative.
VR porn review: What’s the future hold?
Finnish adult animator Eskoz’s work is not for the faint of heart. Most of his porn videos involve CGI animations of gigantic women doing cruel, violent things to their miniature victims. In many cases, this involves vore, which is the fetish for consuming another person.
If you’re familiar with BDSM, the power dynamic behind this sort of work should be obvious. It’s a mixture of Domination and submission with sadomasochism; just replace the dominatrixes with giantesses and whips with throats. But there’s something slightly unsettling about Eskoz’s work. Its giants—who have happy, serene smiles—delight in sadism that almost feels sociopathic.
Eskoz’s work, which is basically sexual horror, is the perfect subject for VR porn. One clip from November, “A Quick Snack,” features two gigantic women licking the viewer before one of them devours him. The video, less than two minutes in length, involves a small man being lifted into the air, tasted between the two women, and then thrown into one of the giantesses’ mouths before traveling to her belly.
As far as VR porn videos go, it’s extremely unorthodox. Conventional wisdom suggests the viewer should stay still. The action should all be right in front of them. There should be no surprises, nothing too out of the ordinary, and certainly nothing that would cause fear or anxiety in the viewer. Most virtual reality porn scenes are the equivalent of throwing a 3D basketball into a 3D hoop: utterly mundane.
Eskoz rejects the mundanity, and that’s what makes his approach to VR so good. It’s impossible to watch “A Quick Snack” in one sitting and fully take in what’s happening, so no two views are alike. Look left, and you’ll see a tongue envelop you. Look right, and you’ll see another giantess staring at you. Look up, you’ll see both of them, and look down, you’ll see your own helpless body dangling in the air. The VR porn video puts the viewer in the perspective of a cisgender man, but this isn’t immediately recognizable, so it’s incredibly easy to implant yourself onto the clip. For giantess vore kinksters, that’s actually really hot.
I don’t advise watching Eskoz’s VR porn clip until you’ve gotten your VR legs. It involves a lot of sudden, rapid movement in a fetish scene that’s purposefully disorienting. But that’s the point. By taking a risk and forcing the viewer to be uncomfortable, Eskoz lets viewers get wrapped up in the scene. It’s easy to forget you’re in VR at all when you’re watching a clip that enhances your fantasy fetish.
A world of kinky VR potential
Macrophilia and vore are already two popular fantasy fetish premises for VR porn, although there’s potential for so much more. Realistic 3D animations can involve slime girls, tentacles, furries, monstrous queers, and aliens. But all VR porn doesn’t need to be caught up in fantastical kinks. Consider fetishes for smoking, eating, armpit worship, watersports, wrestling, and navel play. The possibilities with this content, whether based in CGI or real-world recordings, would increase VR porn videos’ appeal far beyond vanilla customers. In many cases, it would actually utilize VR porn to its full potential and provide sexual scenarios that other mediums, such as traditional 2D porn, cannot fulfill.
That’s not to outright discredit VR porn videos that already exist. There’s already plenty of innovative and unique content coming out, whether from VRCosplayX’s erotic cosplay, unsurprisingly, Kink.com’s virtual reality branch Kink VR. But virtual reality’s biggest potential lies in its ability to plant us in situations that are truly lifelike—or so immersive that the unbelievable becomes believable.
Right now adult VR videos don’t quite achieve that. A trip or three down a giant woman’s stomach aside, there’s still a long way to go.
