Anna Jane Grossman

Vatan and I had arranged this weirdly intimate encounter so he could demonstrate the kinky technological offerings from HighJoy.com, his 4-month-old dating site. Unlike other matchmaking sites, High Joy provides forums where singles (or married folk, as the case may be) can chat with each other live, as well as see their partners and hear their partners (if they have an Internet camera and microphone). And if they’ve purchased one of the male or female versions of the Doc Johnson HighJoy-enabled sex toys, partners can also rotate each other’s shafts.

Since Howard Rheingold discussed the field of “teledildonics” in his 1991 book “Virtual Reality” and hypothesized we’d all have “portable telediddlers” by 2020, a plethora of mostly unreliable, clunky Internet sex toys have entered the market. The sensor-packed full-body “Cyber Sex Suit” became a flaccid venture in 2000, when the company couldn’t assure the Federal Trade Commission that the suit wouldn’t cause heart attacks. Soon afterwards, a sex toy that could be operated by brightening and dimming a computer screen got bland reviews.

The one major success has been the Sinulator, a wireless adaptor that can transform almost any sex toy into one that can be used over the Internet. The Sinulator is user friendly — it’s operated through the Sinulate site, therefore requiring no downloads — and, aside from the initial cost of the adaptor ($119.95 including two free vibrating bullets that can be inserted into many toys), it’s free to use. Sinulators started out being mostly used by companies that train cameras on live “webcam girls”; site visitors are charged extra to manipulate a girl’s — or sometimes guy’s — dildo over the Internet.

HighJoy, however, represents a real shift in teledildonics: It’s reaching beyond the realm of late-night porn surfers to a much wider audience. There’s not a porn-site ad to be seen on its pages. The site and toys are instead being marketed to a heretofore overlooked population: people who want to have sex with other people in the hopes of possibly founding or furthering a relationship.

It’s a consumer group that’s apparently jonesing for Internet-enabled sex toys. According to the Sinulator’s makers, 75 percent of the devices are now sold to individuals wanting to use them with lovers or Internet friends. The company says that many customers are men who claim they operate their wives’ sex toys from their desks at work.

But do American singles really want to have sex with potential mates in front of a computer? We’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the idea of falling in love at a virtual distance — sussing out every little detail about a person before meeting them — so perhaps test-driving people’s bed skills before doing it in the flesh isn’t such a reach. Could nothaving online sex with a potential date be considered bizarre one day?

“It’s a way to practice your skills, especially for people who are trying to better understand their sexuality,” Vatan says. “What’s more, it’s very safe sex. It’s as safe as it comes.”

HighJoy, which costs $7.95 a month to join, seems to be gambling that overlapping a socially acceptable technological relationship-building tool (online dating) with one that feels a little more on the dirty side will lend a veneer of OK-ness to the latter. So far, the evidence suggests that it’s going to take more time for online daters to jump on the teledildonics bandwagon. Although more than 10,000 members currently use the site, far fewer HighJoy-enabled sex toys have been purchased. A quick search of the site reveals 30 profiles of men with toys and about half as many women. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of eager test-drivers out there — you don’t need to own a toy in order to tweak someone else’s.

After my tutorial from Vatan, I decided to boldly jump into the HighJoy chat forum.

A speedy go-through of the profiles shows a wide variety of people, from swinging middle-aged couples (who blurred out their faces in their photos) to normal-looking women in their 30s sitting at desks, to men proudly baring stiff body parts. Some admitted to being virgins. Others wore crotchless chaps. Each profile has a “back door” — an optional page where people can describe their sexual tastes: positions, toys, fantasies, etc.

Aside from height and age, my profile had no photo or information in it. All it said was that I was a HighJoy-enabled female. I guess that said a lot, however, because within 24 hours I was bombarded with e-mails from men whose screen names contained words like “stud” and “rock hard.” They were all eager to schedule “dates” to help me test my toy.

Before answering, I had to figure out if having virtual sex with a virtual stranger was really something I could do — even though I’d already told my editor it was. Truth be told, my initial response to teledildonics was unbridled smirking.

An unscientific survey of my female friends confirmed my suspicion that, like most porn, anonymous online mutual masturbation is probably more of a guy thing. Yet I had respect for the online dating pioneers who were using HighJoy to meet and hook up.

Take Greg, 31, an L.A. poet who joined HighJoy after a recent breakup.

“I was looking for something a little different. I felt like I’d already done the whole normal dating-site thing. You chat, you get coffee, you find out they don’t look like their photo. It got old. So I went on Google and found HighJoy,” he says. “The video, the audio, the sex toys — it had all the normal dating-site stuff, but then it had those extras and that really intrigued me.”

In the last four months, Greg says he’s had sex with five women he met on HighJoy. However, none were completely random encounters — each conquest was preceded by a day, if not weeks, of “getting to know you” conversations, either in private chat forums or over a computer videophone. He even wrote erotic poetry for one of them.

“It’s like being at a bar,” he says. “You feed off some stuff in their profiles, or you talk about their photos. Then you talk about how you like having sex. I’ll usually explain how to use the toy, since I’m kind of a veteran now.”

Once Greg has seduced a partner, he sets a scene. “I put on music. I’ll dim the lights and put flowers in a spot she can see. I want to create something nice for her,” he says. “I want her to feel like it’s sexy, not dirty. This isn’t pornography to me at all. It’s kinky and erotic, but it’s also clean and good and safe.”

Dani, a 28-year-old restaurant manager started using HighJoy because she says she likes sex but doesn’t want to sleep around. She also doesn’t like how most dating sites facilitate meeting only those people close by. “Living in L.A., it’s really hard to meet people and date — there are too many metrosexuals.”

So, through HighJoy, she found a man named David who lives in Spain; they first started communicating when he contacted her complimenting her photo. She responded because his profile showed he had similar music interests (Neil Young, Coldplay, Beatles, Rolling Stones). After three weeks of talking through the HighJoy chat console, they started to use their cameras and toys to have sex. “You can’t just go out and have sex with anyone these days, but with this you kind of can,” she says. “Real sex is a different kind of intimacy [than this], but this helps get the ball rolling.”

Recently, David has been talking about coming to visit her, but Dani says if he doesn’t, that’s OK– what they have has gone beyond a normal online courtship, but it’s fallen short of an actual relationship.

“I feel closer to David than I do to anyone else I’ve chatted with, because I’ve let him be intimate with me,” she says. “I’ve never felt this close to any of the people I’ve [talked to on other dating] sites … If he were here, I’d date him, but at the same time, if I never hear from him again, I won’t be heartbroken.”

My curiosity was piqued after talking to Dani and Greg. Maybe I could have a torrid little online fling, if only so I could tell my grandchildren that I was one of the first ones to have Internet sex. I suddenly was picturing myself as some bold, futuristic sex babe — I’d be Jane Fonda in the killer sex machine in “Barbarella,” or Diane Keaton going into the Orgasmatron in “Sleeper”…

I told all this to a friend with whom I’d been joking about writing this article. I’d been e-mailing him links to weird products I was stumbling upon (like this or this, and he’d instant-message me stuff like “Honey, I love it when you hit Ctrl+Tab!” But when I said that I was actually thinking of doing it, the jokes stopped. “You’ve swum too deep and I can no longer follow,” he said.

I was deep indeed. Was I crazy to even be considering doing this? I decided to consult New York sex and relationship expert Regena Thomashauer, aka “Mama Gena.”

“Anything that gets people to relate to their sensuality is a step forward,” she told me. “It’s possible that people using these devices are people that would be too reticent to have one-on-one contact in person, and for them this is an improvement over having no sensual life at all.”

I wouldn’t say I don’t have any sensual life at all, but I have been single for a few months, and somehow during the course of researching this article, I had begun to find something alluring about the naughtiness involved in a virtual tryst. It was excitingly risky without any of the dangers of bringing a 3D stranger into my bedroom.

As I gamely scrolled through the profiles trying to pick a partner, I found that an amazing number of men were into “anal beads” and “double dildos” — things I might be able to deal with in the context of a relationship, but upfront it was too much information.

Then I got a message from a 24-year-old in Florida whose profile seemed innocent enough — he said he was a college grad who likes Jennifer Garner types, and fantasizes about sex on planes. He had no photo, which meant I could mentally summon up Hugh Jackman. Neither of us had audio or cameras, so we just started to type back and forth to each other.

Floridian Hugh was shy, and our conversation was haltingly awkward. He told me he worked in insurance and I told him I had my toy plugged in. He politely asked me if he could try moving my dildo in a “non-sexual way just to experiment.” The vibrating ears moved furiously, and I told him of his progress on my end. “Awesome,” he wrote. Within a half hour we were having an awkward instant-message version of phone sex. I could’ve done without his frequent use of “LOL.” I also could have used more courting (not to mention foreplay), but I was on deadline, dammit.

To my astonishment, there was something weirdly sweet about the whole thing. Unlike porn, this made me the recipient of all the attention. It was kind of touching that someone — even a stranger — wanted to pleasure a real me in lieu of getting off on Jenna Jameson. At the same time, I didn’t feel as physically and emotionally exposed as I would be having sex with a man I’d just met if he were actually in my bed.

The physical awkwardness of typing and touching myself was a problem — kind of like trying to eat an ice cream cone while washing dishes. Yet it was more intimate than phone sex, since Hugh had control over what I was feeling.

Problem was, he was no pro. I had to tell him I was distracted by his constantly asking if I preferred the shaft going to the left or right and to just move the thing himself. Eventually, he started to get the hang of it. I think we were both a little amazed by the whole thing –”Wow! We’re really doing this!” he wrote — but just as we really started to get going…

The vibrator stopped working. The bunny ears refused to move. Hoping it wasn’t the batteries — I didn’t have any others! — I unplugged the whole thing from the computer. This made the screen freeze and I had to restart.

When I logged back on five minutes later, my cyber Lothario was gone, and echoing in my ears were the words of my grandfather banging the vertical hold knob of his pre-cable television so many years ago: “One day, they’ll make a better version of this that actually works,” he’d say, “and it’ll be great.”

So when the first guy who contacted her through JDate revealed on his profile that he was only 5-foot-3, Walters assumed he was telling the truth.

“I’m 5-foot-5 so I thought it wasn’t that big a difference,” said Walters. “I thought I could deal with it.”

The pair made a date to hang out at his house. But when Walters arrived, the 30-year-old who came to the door resembled an Oompa Loompa. “He was maybe 4-foot-11,” Walters said. To be polite, she spent hours with him playing Trivial Pursuit — a friend was supposed to give her a “rescue call” but then forgot. When Walters finally wrangled her way out of his place, her date presented her with a sweatband he had made out of a tube sock and a teddy-bear decal. “It’s awful,” said Walters, now 24. “But I haven’t thrown it out. I keep it as a reminder of how bad online dating can be.”

Fortunately for Walters, earlier this year she found a way to stave off future dating dramas. She started using TrueDater.com, one of a handful of new Web sites that promise to make it easier to get an honest assessment of a potential paramour — before you waste an afternoon playing board games with him or her.

With the explosive growth of Internet dating — last year 21.8 million people browsed online dating sites, and one out of every 10 Americans who use the Internet posted a personal ad online — it’s not surprising that sites are emerging that help people vet their dates and do more sophisticated probing than a simple Google or Friendster search. Yet for all its potential benefits, rating sites can feel a little like an idea hatched over a bong. “Dude, what if after you go on a date with a girl that’s a real dog, you could warn everyone else in the world who might eventually want to go out with her!”

At TrueDater.com, those who have met the three-dimensional person behind an online profile review him or her, not unlike seller evaluations on eBay or customer reviews on Amazon. “She claims to be 44, actually is 51. Uses people, then discards them. Thinks she’s smarter than God,” read one recent post on the site. Another read: “If he doesn’t get his way, he’ll throw a tantrum, complete with mundane name calling and finger pointing.” All that’s missing is a few stars and a tally of total satisfied customers.

“We’re fostering a movement in truth in online dating,” said Mark Geller, 36, who co-founded Los Angeles-based TrueDater in January. (TrueDater allows users to read reviews of people with personal profiles on Nerve.com, which is hosted by Salon, Match.com, JDate.com, American Singles and Yahoo Personals, and doesn’t charge for the service.) “It’s not about reviewing someone as a human being, it’s about reviewing the truthfulness of the profile. It’s basically answering the question: Is what you see what you get?”

Dishonesty, it seems, is a quiet thwarter of online love. According to a poll conducted on TrueDater, 34 percent of the site’s users said that the biggest problem with online dating was people lying about their weight; 13 percent said it was lying about marital status. Fibs about income and height were also top offenders.

Geller’s goal is to get these numbers down; he estimates 100,000 people have used the site in hopes of minimizing their chances of meeting a dud. “You spend a few weeks talking to someone or e-mailing, and then you meet him at a Starbucks and maybe he’s nothing like what he said he was,” he said. “And it makes you feel like you’ve just wasted time.”

After a lot of wasted time — with men who posted fake pictures and one who said he was single but was really married — Natanya Levioff, a 32-year-old who works at an education consulting firm in Washington, D.C., has become a TrueDater devotee. “There’s a lot of temptation to lie or exaggerate with online dating,” she said. “I’ve had people tell me they’re 35, but they’re actually 50. ‘But I look 35!’ they’ll tell me. One guy I contacted was really good-looking with black hair and light eyes. Kind of rugged guy-next-door look. I was like, ‘Wow, he’s cute!’ Well, it turns out the guy was using a stock image and I saw another guy a few weeks later using the same one.”

On a similar site, LemonDate.com, users are charged $9.95 a month to browse dater “reviews,” but they have to know what site a person is registered on as well as their precise screen name and state of residence. They can also sign up for LemonDate personals, a dating forum that stresses truthfulness.

“I’d completely stopped using online dating for a while because I felt like people were so dishonest,” says LemonDater Denise Wagoner, a bookkeeper in Irvine, Calif. Wagoner had good reasons for abstaining. Five years ago, she uprooted her life in Albuquerque, N.M., and moved to Colorado Springs, Colo., to be closer to a man she’d met on American Singles and had been dating for two years. Weeks after the move, she learned he was engaged to someone else, and had five other girlfriends, to boot.

“But then I found LemonDate,” she said. “I’m an honest person and have nothing to hide — what I’ve described myself to be is exactly who men have met. If I’d had something like this, maybe some other woman could have warned me not to fall for the man I fell for.”

A handful of other sites approach the whole business of finding an honest date in the same way they approach, say, finding a good plumber. At the San Francisco-centric NiftyGuy.com, people can write reviews of pretty much anything, be it a manicurist in the Tenderloin, a dentist in Berkeley, or a date — either an online one or the real flesh-and-bones kind.

“This guy thinks inviting you over to his house is a ‘date,’” writes “Alethia” about someone named Simon in San Francisco. “He’ll show you photo albums of him and his friends, watch TV [with you and give you] a wimpy massage.”

She also describes a University of Southern California student as “stalker-esque” because he sent her an instant message complimenting her looks upon seeing her in the Face Book, an online college community. In retaliation, she posted his full name on NiftyGuy — middle name included.

And herein lies one of the problems with rating sites. How can you separate truth tellers from those who are simply seeking revenge? While not as blatant as the Dick List or CheaterNews.com, any rating site can be used by an angry — and possibly spurned — dater who wants to make sure his or her ex maintains a healthy post-breakup diet of ice cream and tears. When the USC student found out that he had been flamed on NiftyGuy, he asked the site’s founders to take down the post. So far they haven’t. “I expressed my disapproval of having my full name on the site without due respect to my individual privacy,” he said in an e-mail. “In principle there are two things I object to on these sites: They don’t take appropriate steps to ensure individual privacy and the reviews seem to be out of hate not honesty.”

I know these issues well. Last summer, a friend and I started the Web site Breakup News with an eye to reporting the facts of a breakup, the way wedding announcements often report how a couple fell in love. But it wasn’t long before our readers were issuing warnings about their exes and posting their Match.com IDs, photos, and in some cases phone numbers (which we removed).

“Beware, ladies, beware,” wrote one 19-year-old of her ex. “He’s a lying, cheating, dirty loser and no girl should even think about giving him the time of day.” One man said his former wife gave him herpes. Another announced that her ex was a closeted Republican. “I was hoping he was being ironic, because he was ridiculously good looking,” she wrote. And another woman divulged that her ex had a third nipple. We made no attempt to sort the liars from the truth tellers, because, alas, there’s no site you can go to check the veracity of someone who says she’s telling the truth about a liar.

We regularly receive e-mails from men and women around the country who ask us to remove the information their ex has posted, and we usually do. They inevitably find the site by Googling their own names; many of them are single, and chances are that people with whom they’ve set up dates have Googled them as well and have then called to cancel. It’s a frighteningly possible answer to the age-old question: Why can’t I ever meet anyone?

Even some non-dating sites are getting into the ratings game. Opinity.com and Trufina.com, both of which focus on business transactions, recently added free dating verification services. Opinity, started by an amateur photographer who wanted to get better information on people selling camera equipment online, will tell you your potential date’s “reputation” on Amazon and eBay, just in case you decide you want to buy a used Cuisinart from him or her. At Trufina credit reports are used to verify names, addresses and age. The site will issue you a certificate to prove to someone you are the person you profess to be, and encourages users to tell potential dates they’ve been “Trufina’d.” (It could be the new “I’ve been tested.”) If that’s not enough insurance, you can always head to True.com, a dating site that pre-screens all its subscribers to make sure they’re not married and don’t have a criminal record. People apparently don’t mind undergoing such scrutiny in order to get a date. According to the Internet measurement site ComScore Networks, the not-yet 2-year-old True.com had five times as many unique visitors last month as JDate and Nerve.com, combined.

But can a site tell you if your date will hate your cat or love your parents? You’re going to have to figure that one out on your own.

Indeed, these sites threaten to completely alter our approach to dating, an area where a certain degree of deception has for millennia been the norm. (Yes, it was good for me. Really, I’ve never felt this way before. No, you don’t look fat.) While rating sites may be able to weed out the snaggletoothed and smelly, they could also needlessly rule out a real catch who might have harmlessly varnished the truth by giving himself an extra inch of height.

“What about subjective criteria, like sense of humor?” asks Esther Kustanowitz, a singles columnist for New York Jewish Week and an online dating blogger. “I may not think someone’s funny, and someone else will — that’s a matter of chemistry and personal taste, not truth and deception.”

What’s more, does knowing the whole truth necessarily mean we’re going to like someone more? Love frequently needs the kind of blur created by lies or half-truths in order to blossom. After all, once you get to the “Till death do us part” stage of the romance, there will be plenty of time to discuss overbearing parents and urine aim.

There’s one site that’s taken the trend toward truth in dating to an extreme. At Esquire’s Brutally Honest Personals site, more than a dozen brave souls have posted nothing but the absolute truth about themselves.

“I work a lousy, low-paying job and live with my parents,” 24-year-old Rachel Tropp wrote in hers, which she posted on a whim last year. “I don’t spend much time on my appearance; I’m skinny and small-breasted. I have moles in odd places and should probably clip my toenails more often. I prefer sitting around playing video games to doing things. I drink a good deal and make fun of people I don’t even know.”

Apparently, the truth was more attractive than she thought it would be: She got more than 300 responses.

“The responses fell into two categories: really desperate guys my age, or skanky guys in their 50s who thought I had low self-esteem and felt like they alone could convince me I’m attractive,” said Tropp, an administrative assistant in Los Angeles. “One guy e-mailed me offering to buy me breast implants.”

She went out with only one of the younger online suitors, but she rebuffed him when he tried to bed her at a Halloween party after they had only “hung out” a few times.

Had she done any research on him before meeting him?

“Lord, no!” she said. “People are way too frightened. Most people aren’t going to be evil serial killers or lecherous married men. Actually, a lot of them might be lecherous married men. But still, just go out for a drink! Just meetsomeone. One in-person date isn’t going to kill you … probably.”