This is kind of neat to be honest.
To be honest the idea doesn't really bother me that much, what's more let's say they do manage to come up with a system that lets people have sex that is just as satisfying as the real thing physically. I can't see this without neural interface technology, but let's say they do.
What this means is that all the effort spent pursueing that need can be invested anywhere, someone has the urge, of either gender, they can give themselves perfect, fully satisfying orgasms. It would take a lot of the tension out of social dynamics, and allow a lot of people to focus on doing other things, and not worrying about rejection or their physical appearance constantly in case they get that need. I think the usefulness goes well beyond the "hopelessly unappealing nerd" demographic and into something everyone will use, whether they admit it or not.
Of course there are other issues involved in this. Among them the simple fact that women have a lot of their power rooted in sexuality. There have been a lot of things written about the "dildo factor" and how women can satisfy themselves considerably better than guys can through masterbation. A lot of our social dynamics are based around this kind of general imbalance (if you think about it) and the simple fact that sex is something that everyone
is driven to need. There has been some speculative fiction that has ran with the idea that the biggest opposition to the development of a truely effective male masturbation tool would be women's rights groups because actual "sexual liberation" from this cycle would strike at the base of power a lot of women hold onto. While other reasons would be stated, including things like "exploitation" (if there are visual constructs involved) this is probably what it would boil down to.
Oh sure, REAL sex is always going to be better for emotional reasons if nothing else, but removing the driving NEED due to there being an acceptable alternative would be interesting.
What's more, one has to wonder once we achieve this goal, where all the creative energy which tries to use every new bit of technology sexually is going to go. Freed from that all consuming pursuit, we might see an explosive (heh) leap forward in energy being used elsewhere. Or perhaps the dawn of the apocolypse as development ceases and we all wank ourselves back to the stone age (unlikely, but it would be amusing). Just imagine aliens landing and finding our fallen civilization, was it warfare? Atomics? science gone out of control releasing zombie viruses? No, it was satisfying home sex games which caused us to forget everything until society fell apart and they stopped working, causing people to crawl out of their homes to find the true state of society and begin cannibalizing each other....
