Breaking with religious teachings that the sole function of sex ought to be procreation and that any other erotic pursuit was sinful, Reich offered a new and defiantly humanist perspective, asserting that sexual pleasure was beneficial indeed, necessary to human flourishing, and that, when it came to orgasms, the more the merrier.

NEWYORKER: Novelty Acts

People concerned with the potential loss of free speech on the Internet would do well to reprioritize their efforts on this actual loss of free speech being experienced purely as a function of a human being's sex.

CNN: Facebook rejects rape culture. Can you?

And a second line of reasoning leads to the idea that art has quite a specific function that of showing off to the opposite sex.

ECONOMIST: Come up and see my etchings

But as Schneier points out systems like these are likely liable to "function creep" where a technology is brought in for one purpose, to profile your sex while viewing an ad for example, and then begins to push the boundaries.

BBC: Big Brother is watching you shop

In June this year, Habbo Hotel, a popular social network for children, temporarily suspended the chat function on its service, following claims paedophiles were using the virtual hotel to groom youngsters for sex.

BBC: Yahoo to axe public-chat rooms feature

Many of these women end up in the hands of brokers who collect fees for peddling them to the "boarding houses" of China's sex trade or sell them into forced "marriages, " in which they have no legal standing and function as virtual slaves.

FORBES: North Korean refugees lead lives of hell in China.