Monday already?

I found this five-year-old Time.com article in which Joel Stein writes of his attempt to have remote sex with a porn star:

Will Cybersex Be Better Than Real Sex?

There are two fields in which i'm anxious to see technology improve: medicine and hard-core pornography. And since I'm not sick yet, I'm pretty focused on the porn thing. Luckily I am not alone in my stunted vision of utopia. The desire for newer, better smut has long been a major impetus behind technological progress: vcrs, dvds, Web development and I believe X-ray glasses were all spurred by prurient desires.

It's a funny article, and honest. But once again we have a writer musing on whether technology-enabled sex will replace "the real thing." I feel like a stuck MP3: No, of course not, and nobody wants it to.

All our work to develop whizzbang sex-tech the likes of which we've never seen before is to give us more opportunities to have sex of some kind. It's not about replacing sex (perish the thought!). It's about having sex when we otherwise couldn't. Or having sex with people we wouldn't ordinarily get to, like porn stars. Or having some fun with each other. Keeping intimacy going over long distances – just being able to work through the silly and into the sexual with someone you already know is a real bonding experience, believe me.

Unfortunately, the site he mentions, SafeSexPlus.com, no longer exists, so I can't look back to the state of teledildonics half a decade ago. But apparently it worked in conjunction with the iFriends video chat network, which is still going strong.

Video chat didn't replace hanging out with friends, did it? So why think cybersex would replace sex?