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On the field of battle remained three corporations — General Sexotics, Cybordelics, and Intercourse International. When the production of these giants was at its peak, sex, from a private amusement, a spectator sport, group gymnastics, a hobby, and a collector's market, turned into a philosophy of civilization. McLuhan, who as a hale and hearty old codger had lived to see these times, argued in his Genitocracy that this precisely was the destiny of mankind from the moment it entered on the path of technology; that even the ancient rowers, chained to the galleys, and the woodsmen of the North with their saws, and the steam engine of Stephenson with its cylinder and piston, all traced the rhythm, the shape, and the meaning of the movements of which the sex of man — that is to say, the sense of man— consists. The impersonal industry of the U.S.A., having appropriated the situational wisdoms of East and West, took the fetters of the Middle Ages and made of them unchastity belts [and] set in motion antiseptic assembly lines off of which began to roll sadomobiles, succubuses, sodomy sofas for the home, and public gomorrarcades, and at the same time it established research institutes and science foundations to take up the fight to liberate sex from the servitude of the perpetuation of the species. Sex ceased to be a fashion, for it had become a faith; the orgasm was regarded as a constant duty, and its meters, with their red needles, took the place of telephones in the office and on the street . . .
In the course of the decade, synthetic sex came a long way from the first models, the inflatables and the hand-windups, to the prototypes with thermostats and feedback. The originals of these copies are long dead, or else are now decrepit crones, but teflon, nylon, dralon, and Sexofix have withstood the wear of time."