NEW YORK, NY — Mike Alvear has made quite a name for himself as host of HBO’s The Sex Inspectors, a reality series that offers real advice to real people desperate to spice up their love lives. As a columnist at HuffingtonPost.com, he recently waxed eloquent about what 2009 may hold for everyone’s sex lives.Alvear said he expects this year to see more people having more sex — but that may not be a good thing. Although a slumping economy will keep couples at home more often — thereby making the bedroom more attractive — singles and philanderers may find themselves short of the cash required to play the field. The end result? A phenomenon Alvear calls “recession sex”: “You won’t wait for the last-call yard sale, so you’ll probably lower the bar to increase your odds.”
Alvear also said he expects “streetwalkers, pole dancers and gold diggers alike … to give it up for less.” In addition, he predicted adult dating sites will lower their fees at the same time more online smut hounds turn to free sites, tube sites and peer-to-peer networks. “Offline piracy, illegal downloads and free video sharing sites are going to make dinosaurs out of adult video studios,” he wrote.
One market segment that could see an upward trend is ultra-high-tech sex toys. He seemed particularly impressed with the SaSi vibrator: “It’s a sort of iTunes dildo — it remembers your favorite vibrations so you can play them later,” he wrote.
Also a positive move, as far as Alvear is concerned, is dating and community sites’ additions to facilitate instant communication and inject “reality” into their presences. “Online dating sites have already introduced relevant searching methods, instant messaging and mobile phone access to pictures and profiles,” he wrote. “What’s next? Videos. They’ll get rid of flakes that use fake pictures, serving as a kind of Venus Lie Trap.”
One thing is for certain, he noted: Porn isn’t going to go away. “The mainstreaming of porn in art, fashion and media is turning adult videos into a sort of Zen koan: No matter where you go, there it is,” Alvear wrote.
