LOS ANGELES – About a month ago, I threatened promised I’d soon write an obligatory porn-predictions post for 2018, as a companion piece to my obligatory year-in-review of 2017, naturally.

The time for that post has come, because the conditions are perfect – by which I mean it’s the first Monday after AEE, nobody is sending in press releases and some poor schmuck from Maxim has chimed in with some predictions which reminded me of my own solemn duty to prognosticate.

2016 2017 2018: The Year Virtual Reality Takes Over Porn. This year, for the third year in a row, adult VR is poised to be the biggest thing since sliced bread – with the possible exception of homemade, unsliced, organic, gluten-free bread.

Further spurring on the adult VR trend, major VR device manufacturers will still disallow adult-related apps and content from their official stores, but they’ll slide out some haptic feedback accessories which just happen to fit over the user’s crotch and nipples. When asked whether these haptic accessories are made for adult VR use, the manufacturers will deny it, claiming they’re designed to enhance movies like Saw XLV by making people literally piss themselves, or to encourage a male viewer’s genitals to appropriately recede into his body when watching immersive 3D mainstream movies from which Kevin Spacey was unable to be digitally removed before the films hit the market.

Porn will become more like mainstream movies. With users expecting more from their porn than just serving as fodder for masturbating to depictions of people performing sex acts, porn studios will endeavor to make their movies more like a mainstream movie experience.

As a practical matter, this means you’re going to have put up with rows full of millennials texting on their phones in your living room as you try to jerk off, extremely high soda prices in your kitchen, and the occasional popcorn fight breaking out. (The floor will be quite sticky too, but as a compulsive masturbator, presumably you’re already accustomed to this phenomenon.)

A “porn renaissance” is coming. Every so often in these kind of obligatory porn-prediction pieces, you’ll see someone use the word “renaissance” – as in “Because of this technology, the porn industry is experiencing a renaissance,” or maybe “He does like four different things for the company; he’s a porn renaissance man.”

Accordingly, I figure I’d better write something about a porn renaissance in my post, so here goes: Sometime this year, at least two people will be arrested making porn at a Renaissance Festival. My money is on it happening in Texas, or possibly Missouri, and at least one of those involved will be wearing one of those stupid fucking jester’s hats.

“Fauxcest” will continue to make me uncomfortable, especially when my sister brings it up at family dinners. Seriously Janet, just stop it.

“Porn for women” will continue to attract thousands (of mainstream journalists). In 2018, you won’t be able to go two days without seeing a headline about feminist porn, or porn for women, despite there being infinitely more articles about these genres than movies which fit within them.

“Feminist porn is very empowering, because it gives women agency and depicts women as full beings, not just vehicles of male pleasure,” various people will say, in some form or another, in every article dedicated to the subject.

Porn will make it to the next obligatory year in review. Most importantly, porn will survive long enough to necessitate another end-of-year review post. Will any of the above predictions come true in the interim?

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter; if they do happen, I’ll take credit for my foresight, and if they don’t, I can recycle them in 2019!

Tarot cards image © Gabriel Bulla