Sexual revolution of the web foreshadowed by Minitel
Pre-WWW essay uncannily predicts some of the major uses of the modern internet

London, 23 Feb 2006 | A French essay from 1987 gives a first glimspe into the way that modern telecommunications have changed our access to sex.

Although Mathias Duyves's essay 'The Minitel: The Glittering Future of a new Invention' focusses on the use by gay men of the French electronic communication device, it includes some fascinating foreshadows of the sexual revolution that was to take place (not that much later) in wider cyberspace.

The Minitel (according to Wikipedia) is an "online service accessible through the [French] telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services."

Duyves's essay argues that it was the Minitel, not AIDS or HIV, which was 'the most important influence on sexual communications in [the 20th] century'.

It describes the messageries roses, or 'pink message boards' which were used by gay men to communicate anonymously and discreetly with others.

The essay, published in a collection on the subject of homosexuality in France and French-speaking countries, focuses on on the use of the Minitel by gay men - but it's probably safe to say that the equipment was used for the same purpose by heterosexuals as well.

Duyves sounds a note of concern that the French telecoms company, in widely distributing the Minitel, had 'unwillingly given the go-ahead to the exchange of extremely risqué messages among its clients, who are not infrequently underage.'

The essay goes to great trouble to explain that users can talk to everyone online, or initiate private one-on-one chats. The ubiquity of the Minitel in France suggest that this was perhaps one of the first tims that chatrooms and instant messahing became part of mass culture.

Duyves predicts that in 10 - 20 years (eg by about 2007), 'the old-fashioned sauna and disco will probably be just a memory [...], replaced by the friendly Minitel'.

As well as reflecting the concern at underage and pseudo-underage users of the messageries, the essay documents - without a hint of irony or doubt - the police's claim to have installed just four Minitels with which to monitor all conversations. This, in an essay which also estimates more than 200,000 erotic messages per day on the system.

While the themes and conersn fo the essay - the ease of anonymity, and potential risk to unmonitored underage users - are familiar to us today, in the age of internet paedophilia and Operation Ore, the identification of the medium predominantly with gay men seems not have been repeated on the modern world wide web.

Perhaps we should be congratulated for accepting, as a culture, that men and women of all sexual configurations - not just homosexual males - use the internet for natural (or nefarious) sexual means.

Duyves's essay appears in Gay Studies from the French Cultures, ed. Rommel Mendes-Leite and Pierre-Olivier de Busscher, Haworth Press, 1993. See this book on Amazon.co.uk.