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Kim and Dave first connected online playing Minecraft. After months of fraternising, Kim eventually confessed that they had a “crush” on Dave, but given the distance between Ottawa and Indiana, plus Kim’s open marriage and family responsibilities, they could not readily rendez-vous. So, in 2023, Dave gifted them a set of long-distance, remote-controlled sex toys that allow lovers to manipulate the movements of each other’s devices.
Kim, 35, an aegosexual who prefers not to have physical sex, was blown away by the simulated intercourse. “I have had more vaginal orgasms from that thing than in the history of me having sex,” Kim says. “It gets you in the mind space of, ‘Oh, somebody else has control of this.’” Dave, 51, meanwhile, was equally happy with how the relationship unfolded: “The toys were the perfect solution,” he says.
These app-connected sex toys — dildos, rabbit vibrators and masturbators — manufactured by brands like Lovense, which says it has 20 million registered users, and WeVibe, are redefining long-distance relationships. Lovense says its devices are used regularly by couples located as far apart as Australia and New York.
The emergence of the class of smart toys has also spawned a whole new form of remote cruising; on Reddit there is effectively a classifieds board for this type of encounter. People post their availability and kinks, and agree whether to converse over text, voice, or video call. Then they connect over the app to have their sex toys controlled by strangers potentially on the other side of the world. WeVibe says connections are possible wherever you can access the internet, just like FaceTime.
The titles of some recent posts on the 32,000 weekly visitor subreddit r/Lovense are as follows:
- 19f4m nurse looking for a long term controller/owner!
- Ftm twink wanting to get fucked mercilessly (also took an Eddie so that’ll kick in soon)
- Married couple, looking for controller. Please read below
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Voice or video-calling was key, Dave says, to figuring out what he and Kim like. “If I move the control from, say, 20% to 50%, they are gonna feel that the second I move it up,” he says. “So I will know instantly what the response was [from the noises they make].”
Dave, a straight retired data analyst who was recovering from a difficult divorce when he connected with artist and homemaker Kim, gradually brought them a whole set of vaginal, anal, clit, and nipple toys. Kim was soon joining mass “group orgies” organized through Reddit. “There’ll be someone running the session, and everyone connects to it, and you just hand control off to different anonymous people,” Kim says. “You do the controls however you want to do it, whatever vibration or suction, or whatever the toy may be intended for.”
But while some people are very attuned to helping other people experience all kinds of pleasures, there are others who are not — as online, as offline. Dave, who had never used the toys with anyone besides Kim, has sometimes struggled to find other friendly play partners, especially when he has used the Lovense app’s “control link” feature, which also connects you to random people.
“They could be like, ‘I’m gonna ramp your toys up to the max on all levels and just laugh at you,’” he says. “Some people like that jackhammer, and some people don’t like that jackhammer.”
For all the futuristic hardware involved, that reality is as old as sex itself, but it was just the beginning of his issues: The anonymity that makes these encounters possible also creates opportunities for exploitation. “The community has very much migrated from using their toys just for pleasure to using them to get money from people,” he says. “Almost every single time I load the control link, somebody comes on and pushes about being called mistress. I had an experience with someone who convinced me that I wanted to be their slave.”
Dave says the financial dominatrix was “very skillful” and roped him in during a state of pleasure and intrigue. “They asked me to buy them something just to prove that I was serious about the arrangement,” he recalls. “I sent them $80 and within days they were asking for money to control my toys.”
He felt like he had been sexually assaulted, albeit in a virtual space. “I eventually decided that I was going to just completely separate from this person and sent them a message and said, ‘Listen, I’m not trying to judge who you’re who you’re trying to be, but what you’re doing is not for me.’” Within days, Dave says, he started receiving texts threatening to share explicit photos he had sent them with his Facebook friends. Eventually the threats stopped without being made good on, but it was a valuable lesson for the budding kinkster. “I had not been involved in the kink community before,” he says. “I did not understand how to vet somebody. I fell for it.” (Lovense says it has been proactive in addressing the potential of misuse, and has been implementing new user safeguards.)
Now, one of Dave’s boundaries is, “do not call me sir, and do not try to tell me to call you mistress, because if you do, I’m just gonna block you.” He has also discovered pleasure centres in his prostate, and his anus. “The prostate orgasm is incredibly different, because you can just keep having that same orgasm over and over again,” he says. “Nothing stops you from having it more than once, and so with those toys, that’s where I started to really understand that I had a subby side, because I started to feel like somebody was taking control of my body.”
Kim, a switch themselves, helped connect Dave with his sub side. “It was important for me to make sure he had experience in both sides,” they say, “because he started out more on the dom side.” Kim would keep a toy inserted in public, and he would suddenly activate it. “I was in college at the time, and I wore one of the really discreet ones, and there’s just this anticipation that at any time he could be like, ‘Hey, I exist, remember me’.”
Eventually they decided it was time for Dave to experience some of the things that he wanted them to endure. “So I put him through his paces,” says Kim.
Their relationship has moved more into a friendship, but Kim already has their sights set on the next toy. “They have actual sex machines that are really, really expensive,” they say, “but if you’ve got a guy on one end pounding away at one of the other toys, that will sync up to the sex machine, and you can get it on the other end from anywhere in the world.”
Dave is philosophical about the impact of the toys on wider society. “The ability to control somebody else’s pleasure from a distance has completely changed the game for remote contact and relationships,” he says. Through it all, he says that his experiences making long-distance sex toy love has helped him become a more confident lover. “It made me better at both receiving and giving pleasure, and also just general communication — like trying to understand what somebody else wants and what they don’t want.”
Long-distance relationships once relied on handwritten letters, then expensive international phone calls, and then Skype. Now they can include orgasms controlled from opposing poles. For two people who first met stacking digital blocks together in Minecraft, perhaps it was inevitable that physical intimacy would eventually become just another thing that could cross continents.