Can a virtual boyfriend be a substitute for sex?
When it comes to sex education, I couldn’t disagree more with all this abstinence only nonsense. It’s not that I don’t understand it–oh I get it, I really do–but judging from the facts, oh say, skyrocketing amounts of STD sufferers and scores of unplanned pregnancies, no one can convince me that it’s actually working. Still, just because I don’t agree with it as the be-all and end-all of sex ed, doesn’t mean I can’t respect aspects of the idea if it works for certain individuals (to each her own!). And that’s why a new site that’s causing quite a ruckus in Japan gave me pause. Apparently the big craze amongst 20- and 30-something Japanese women is Webkare (Japanese for “web boyfriend”), a website where you can “date” a virtual boyfriend. According to Tech Crunch, “the site attracted over 10,000 members just 5 days after its release on September 10, racking up 3.5 million page views in the same time frame,” and with numbers like that, you can bet some American techie kid who lives in
