Sex Robots- creating the "perfect" woman

Independent, how old are you? You seem to have an incredibly naive understanding of how things used to be. Back in the 50s if you were a woman you basically had no rights or freedom. If you had previously marital sex you were heaped with shame and if you committed the heinous crime of having a baby out of wedlock then you would often have the baby taken from you - a hideous thing that caused lifetimes of grief. Women had little choice but to get married. Once married they could then be beaten or raped at will and no one would help them. Can you see why feminists rejected this model?

Some of these things are barely related.

A vibrator is, for some people, sexually arousing. Lingerie is sexually arousing to some people. They're both commodities and both are the result of technology.

Why is a vibrator, or for that matter a sex doll without computerised elements, being put in the same category as sexting or porn?

Is sending sexual messages via Facebook messenger more commodified than sending them via royal mail, or by messages written into fans at balls in the past?

Feminists - or many of the them - have (and with some justice) rejected romantic, monogamous relationships between men and women as oppressive, 'hetero-normative' and restrictive of a woman's autonomy

Where?

Monogamy and the family are at odds are with the values of this economy

Good.
That's why the fact that women survive and nurture is down to our strength and love of our children, alone, and not alt right posters like you.

And the truth is, as other posters have said, we've all been living and surviving despite rape and sexual assault being part of our gendered experience, it's not feminism and 'the left' who rape and assault, comrade. It's men.

Your rage is reassuring, our autonomy clearly threatens, otherwise these sex dollies wouldn't be in production.

As previous posters have pointed out, people have all manner of close, loving and meaningful relationships that are not centred around romantic or sexual relationships.

I'm not saying people are going to stop having living relationships - just that there is a shift towards sexual utilitarianism in our culture, and tech has got a lot to do with it. It's not just vibrators and dolls etc; it's porn, sexting, cybersex, hook up apps, sites in which help you find someone you can have an affair with. An endless arrayof commodified sexual experiences delivered on corporate platforms.

Interpersonal, people being single and possibly masturbating does not mean that they are more likely to view other people as instruments of pleasure than people in relationships do. You seem to be bringing together disparate facts and leaping to an odd conclusion. As previous posters have pointed out, people have all manner of close, loving and meaningful relationships that are not centred around romantic or sexual relationships.

I don't really have an issue with men owning a fleshlight. I think you're confusing dildos with vibrators. The defining feature of a vibrator is that it vibrates. A penis does not vibrate. Many vibrators in no way resemble a penis.

If you are defining a vibrator as robotic on the basis of it being mechanical, that is a very wide and broad definition of robotics. It is very much getting away from the ability of a robot in this article to mimic forms of human spoken communication.

You seem to have put together a version of the present and future that you want to keep describing in an extremely verbose manner. Very little of what you're saying engages with the ethical issues around creating humanoid robots that communicate verbally with humans in highly gendered ways.

Timmytoo those male robots are not being bought/used by women, mainly.

This is the third article in the Guardian on this subject over the last couple of years and on none of these occasions have they allowed comments to be posted. I wonder why?

They have the same for women. I watched the documentary the other night and they've designed robotic well endowed men for women's use.

Much hypocrisy about this.
Vibrating penises, in every shape and size, sell by the thousands every year all across the country. Men don't even get to be dismissed as sex objects by this multimillion pound industry, they are reduced to just their sex organ.
Can you imagine a world where every night of the week and all over the country there were parties going on where men were gathering to look at, handle , compare and buy imitation vaginas?

Can you imagine where men were encouraged to have a drink and let their hair down while they laughed and joked about which vaginas where the best and which they preferred?
Can you imagine the company advertising all this to attract men with the tag line "The most fun you can have with your clothes on"
Can you imagine how it would be accepted that many of these men, married men with children, were buying small vaginas from this company, specially designed so that they could keep them in their bag in case they feel the need.
Funny I have seen any protests about this.

Women already are embracing sex robots. What is a vibrator but a form of sexual robotics? Okay, it isn't life size but the fact remains. I keep asking this question which no one will answer, but would you consider male sex toys that are prosthetic vaginas and anuses but without a life size figure OK? And if not why not?

What if the infrequency with which women rape is the actual human standard that men are extraordinarily deviating from?

That's a good question, but we all know women who are aggressive and violent in nature, even if they do not have the same opportunity or anatomical capability to express that violence. We all know that Hilary Clinton would no doubt be firing tomahawks too if she were president. We all know that girls can be vicious bullies. We all know that a company dominated by women can be racked with ruthless ambition, competitiveness and spite.

Its flawed thinking that women imagine men are going to embrace sex robots. To me it speaks more to the paranoia of some women about being dis-empowered from the role of sex gatekeeper. But no human man can duplicate what a vibrator does for a woman. Seems to me its a great pointer to a future where its women engage with robots more than men.

tartansnowman thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Feminists - or many of the them - have (and with some justice) rejected romantic, monogamous relationships between men and women as oppressive, 'hetero-normative' and restrictive of a woman's autonomy. In direct paralell, an economy has evolved which dictates immediate consumer gratification and individualsed material success to be the be all and end all. Monogamy and the family are at odds are with the values of this economy. Capitalism used to need the family structure because it needed women in the home while men made up the industrial workforce. But now the family is at odds with capitalism. Capitalism requires people to be atomised consumers doing insecure work and prepared to be continually itinerant; and it is perfectly happy for women to serve the market as well as men.

In such conditions, the very nature of sexual and romantic relationship will change. Of course people do continue to fall in love and have families, but it is my prediction that this will slowly change. Overall, monogamous relationships will become less stable and long-lasting. They will be seen as encumberances that restrict economic and sexual autonomy. This is where technology comes in. Technological capitalism can provide or facilitate sexual thrills without the restrictions or moral burdens of interpersonality. It can provide not be only men but women with sexual experiences that are more and more seperate d from love. I'm sure there are plenty of women these days who say 'I've got my career and vibrator; what do I need a man for'? Conversely, in Japan the population is plummeting because men are choosing to stay at home watching porn rather than have relationships with real women.

So we have a culture in which people don't want interpersonality but autonomy. There can never be total autonomy in an interpersonal context. A sexual relationship entails a loss of autonomy, a giving of oneself to another and a commitment that limits one subsequent choices. Late capitalism however says that nothing should standvinbthe way of the individual's desures. Discernment and restraint are antithetical to consumerism. Depersonalised sex and the spread of the pornographic style are intensely self-centred, just as the market desires. They express and celebrate an understanding of happiness that seeks instantaneous emotional and physical highs – whether obtained through drugs, spectacles, food, gambling or sex.

Thus, a more masturbatory of sexuality will come to dominate our culture - one in which human beings are viewed as instruments of pleasure rather than inherently valuable ends in themselves.

"But that doesn't mean women won't commit more crime once they have the opportunity."

This makes no sense unless you assume that the current male level of violence is natural and women's unusually strong resistance to it is unnaturally out of balance.

What if the infrequency with which women rape is the actual human standard that men are extraordinarily deviating from?

Independent doesn't seem at all like redpill theory to me.

Independent, I am unclear as to what you mean by 'sex.' At some points you seem to be including masturbation in this definition.

It seems to me that a person's sexuality is a major part of who they are as a person, and that most of their sexual experiences will be conducted alone, not with a romantic or sexual partner.

In a rush to condemn a society that is highly individualistic, you seem to be condemning the entire notion that it is essential that we are recognised as autonomous human beings. If there is one thing that absolutely should be seen as belonging to the individual, and which has been continually denied to women, it is sexual autonomy.

With regard to robots, the issue is not one of them being some kind of continuation of vibrators. It is not that they are material or mechanical that is the concern. Such mechanical and/or material facsimiles of women already exist. The issue is the computerised element that gives the possibility for either AI or for the speech of such robots to pass the Turing test.

There are major issues around women or other human groups being represented in a sexualised way by computer programs that can give a convincing impression of personality and human response. Indeed, if many men already do not see women as fully human, the whole notion of such robots passing the Turing test becomes morally concerning. Do real women actually pass the Turing test in the minds of such men?

If robots are able to act convincingly as women, there will be consequences for how actual women act in a world where such robots exist, and there will be consequences for how men interact with actual women, be we increasingly interact with technology as if it was human, and so technological 'characters' become part of our social world.

You seem to be coming at this entirely from the perspective that we increasingly treat human beings as commodities (which we do) but are missing the whole point of robots which is what happens to society when we treat commodities as people.

On a separate note, I would certainly be very tempted to use humanoid robots to replace many kinds of human interaction - romantic, sexual, friendship, maternal. I can see myself being even more tempted during periods of grief when I was at a low point (the Black Mirror episode where the woman's husband dies and she gets a robot version being an illustration). The reason I would not want such interactions is because of the alarming mental health risks to myself.

Yes. And rather windy.

yes
I think he's trying to use 'amused mastery' here but it all sounds very disingenuous to me

Is independent a man?

his general approach...it all sounds very 'redpill'
he's probably using this thread as the basis of some sort of 'report'' to help enlighten the other members of the community

Is Independantthinker's
stance a well known viewpoint that you've all heard before?

Lots of posts which seem to boil down to women's promiscuity is threatening the moral fabric of society. And tch - there's no respect these days.

we're so grateful to you Independantthinker for spending so long on here kindly setting out your redpill theories about life the universe and everything
and flattered!
we must be very important to you, all the time you spend typing away just to enlighten us

The men who molested girls in the 70's could potentially be brought to justice. There is no way they can catch all the millions of men (and some men) abusing children online now. The police have admitted they cant.

You know that "online" is not a place in the real world, do you? Those men still abuse children in real life, i.e. the exact same place where they did before.
Yes, the fact that they can put the filmed abuse online for other sadist males to watch is horrible. But it doesn't change the fact that the abuse still takes place in real life, and those who do it can be caught just as well (or not) as before.

And in no way is any of the male sexual violence feminism's fault.

Probably not even liberal "feminism's". Yes, liberal, "sex pozzie" pseudofeminists applaud patriarchy in its oppression and exploitation of women - but they're just cheerleaders. If there was no pro-porn, pro-prostitution "feminism", those women would not identify as feminists at all. If men didn't want to rape, no amount of applause from sex pozzies would make them do so.

... and women not being virtuous enough very certainly has nothing to do with male violence against women and children.

In between 1998 and 2004 convictions for child pornography increased by 15'00%.

Of course the world was thus, and I'm sorry to hear about your experiences - experiences which I'm sure were all too common. But the internet means there is abuse on a massive, industrial, global scale. And it cannot be regulated. The men who molested girls in the 70's could potentially be brought to justice. There is no way they can catch all the millions of men (and some men) abusing children online now. The police have admitted they cant.

As more and more people become displaced by climate change and war it will get worse.

Anachronistic moral panic alert! I remember a couple of boys at my primary school trying to pull my trousers down and sexually assault me (I fought them off). That was 42 years ago.

I remember my teens in the late 70s and early 80s when it was absolutely routine for older men in positions of authority to groom and sexually molest girls in their teens, and this was thought so normal it was not reported (thinking in particular of the adult staff on residential courses for my main hobby as a teenager).

I had friends who were date raped, I had friends who were raped by strangers. We had the whole sexual double standard thing of either being a frigid virgin or a slapper.

I'm not quite sure the world is going to hell in a handcart all of a sudden due entirely to the evils of the internet and women who aren't saying no often enough or early enough or because a ring hasn't been offered to them.

The world was already pretty hellish for women in my youth.