Sex Robots- creating the "perfect" woman

And yeah, most of those people are men.

The sexuality of all people who are abusive, selfish and exploitative. A sexuality that is being allowed free license.

Whose sexuality is really worrying you here, independent?

No, I don't think men are horrible. I think some of them are, and that if people are not taught moral values and do not have a moral framework in which to operate then there will be more if them.

Much of what we do teach to children is being countered pornographers and teenie magazines who give children the message that there is nothing problematic about shagging around indiscriminately.

Tbh it's too late. The internet is out if control. Children are now assaulting one another at primary school. It's fucked.

Things will continue to get worse.

You seem to think men are pretty horrible independent.

Well fine, but then men are just going to think 'I can fuck who I want too' and there will continue to be lots more girls like the one in my example who end up feeling like meat.

We can all do lots of equal opportunity fucking. Shopping and fucking and exploiting. And posting selfies.

Enjoy.

Saying that you have to teach good behaviour to children is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

What I am calling for is a cultural repudiation of the idea that 'if it feels good do it' as a guiding principle of sexual relations

Fortunately we control our own fertility and finances and choose who, when and how we fuck.

So good luck with that one comrade.

Well...yeah. I don't know if you've got kids, but presumably you don't say 'basically do what the fuck you want in life and fuck everyone else. That's your moral education - off you go'. Where do you think a sense of right and wrong comes from? People aren't born with it. It has to be instilled in people. If you have a culture in which people are presented as sexual objects then sexual objectification will be normalised. You can only counter that with a different moral narrative.

That said I'm in favour of stopping people from doing all sorts of things. Porn sites should be regulated if not outlawed imo.

So we should tell people to be nicer to each other?

Well, we can't force them. I'm not calling for any form of external restriction of people's private behaviour. What I am calling for is a cultural repudiation of the idea that 'if it feels good do it' as a guiding principle of sexual relations.. I think we should encourage children to appeal to a moral compass when having sexual relations, and to understand that sex is always with a person - not a utility.

I don't think all forms of lying or cheating should be illegal but nevertheless we should come to a consensus that they are wrong and encourage others to believe they are wrong.

How do you propose we force people to respect each other in their private relationships (beyond prohibiting criminal behaviour)?

Sorry I didn't mean to 'mansplain' anything you might know already. I just had to say it in order to make my point.

Righr, ok..

At the moment our dominant ideology is a kind of liberalism formulated by a guy called John Rawls. It holds that the individual should be at liberty to pursue their own legal self-interest and the state should only minimally interfere with the individuals personal conduct - generally to prevent the individual from restricting the rights and freedoms of others. Paralleling this form of social liberalism neoliberalism. This is an economic doctrine which holds that financial markets should be deregulated and individuals should be free to engage in mutually beneficial transactions without government getting involved with employment regulation, price controls, taxation programmes etc. I'm sure youve heard the famous Thatcher quote 'there is no such thing as society'.

What has this got to do with third wave feminism? Well, like so much else it became neoliberalised into a discussion concerning individual rights rather than issues of moral character and collective justice.

Let's look at the issue of consent, which is a major principle of feminism these days. I have a big problem with this notion of consent - not because I don't believe people who have sex should be 100% willing; I absolutely do - but because consent limits the discussion surrounding the ethics of sexual interaction to a very legalistic, contractual framework.

Imagine this example. A girl is out with some friends and she has a bit to drunk. She sees a guy, they get talking and before long he invites her home for sex. Something inside tells her she doesn't want to, but her friends have been pressuring her to lose her virginity and as this is what they do all the time she feels she ought to. Furthermore, she would love a boyfriend and she wonders whether if she has sex with this guy he might discover some feelings for her. So she says. It happens and he leaves in the morning without giving his number. She feels used and awful.

Now, from the perspective of liberalism and in terms of the feminist principle of consent, everything is fine with that situation. Two people freely in engaged in a transaction. The terms of the contract were clear and there was clear verbal consent.
All the boxes were ticked.

But what is not factored into that discussion is moral character and a social ethic of human relationships rather than cold, calculating transactions in which people are assumed to maximise each other's selfish pleasure.

That is, I would posit that there is something inherently morally wrong with hooking up with a stranger regardless of even when verbal consent is given. There is always a danger of someone being used in such a situation. The idea of a person being used for pleasure is wrong. There are girls who have done a lot of hooking up like this on college campuses in America who are now saying they feel empty and used. Even though they consented and their experiences were not assaultive they still feel used.

But feminism - or much of it - has embraced this kind of individualist, ammoral sexual politics as a source of liberation for women. As I gave said, it is based in an idea of people as consumers and objects with a commidity value rather than multi-dimensional human subjects .

liberalism and moral relativism- which corrupted feminism and everything else
How?

That was not my assertion. The problem was not feminism but liberalism and moral relativism- which corrupted feminism and everything else.

It's not about the law sparrowhawk. There are plenty of things that are immoral that are illegal. We raise children not to lie because it's wrong.

I would reason that the reason women have not committed anything like the same level of crime is that they simply have not had the opportunity to. All the criminal industries have been dominated by men and we've had centuries of militarist states that extol a warrior ethic which finds expression to this day in drunken brawls on a high street on a Sat night. And yes, for centuries or millennial men have been taught that they are entitled to the bodies of women.

But that doesn't mean women won't commit more crime once they have the opportunity. For instance, once women gain more power in the corporate and political strata they will do their fair of nefarious behaviour. I think now there's the internet and sexual violence does not depend on being able to overcome someone physically women will commit more sexual abuse.

Kind of saying (and correct me if I'm wrong) 'men are sociopathic, sex crazed animals but women are by nature nurturing and compassionate so there should be lots of restraints on men but women should be able to do as they like' is a funny kind of feminism because it's undergirded by all the essentialist discourses that feminists used to be in the business of critiquing. Namely that men are inherently violent and women are inherently nurturing and caring.

Furthermore, a moral culture does not have to be patriarchal. If women take charge then they're going to have to work out a new code by which they live by. But there has to be a moral code. Without one women will behave just as shittily as men. Why wouldn't they? Although politics and the corporate sector is still male dominated the women who have had power have proven to be just as much a mixed bag as men. I mean Theresa May - what a total bastard she us.

There's no doubt that society has problems. But your assertion that feminsts' desire not to be possessed by men caused the problems makes no sense to me.

Straw man - you're shifting your argument from "women bear responsibility for sexual immorality by becoming easy to get into bed" (to which we have mostly replied "where's the sexual immorality in consensual sex, easily obtained or not?") to "some women do bad things in a more general sense."

To which I'd reply no one on here has said they don't - but this is a conversation about sexual morality. You think sexual morality involves some sort of pickiness and limiting of the number of sexual partners, or limitation on how soon a couple go to bed, or some other weird set of 1950s values, which you expect women to police because for some bizarre reason you don't think men can - yet men get a free pass so long as they "respect women like they did in the good old days" (where that respect seems to have involved holding doors open whilst being quite happy to accept a legal system which allowed marital rape to be legal). We on the other hand are arguing for a sexual morality which depends on both mutual consent and on recognition of each other's shared humanity, personhood if you will.

It is not the sex bots in and of themselves that are the problem. In some sort of utopian future free of sexual oppression - asymmetric sexual oppression in our current case where men are overwhelmingly the oppressors and women overwhelmingly the oppressed - in such a future sex bots would be as significant as vibrators. The problem with sex bots is that when one actually talks to the men creating and consuming them (as the writer of the original article did) those men reveal that the point of the sex bot is to be a perfected form of a real woman, without a real woman's flaws (expectation of reciprocity, expectation of some sort of recognition of her own personhood and needs and desires) because they see both the bot and the real woman as objects - it's just the woman has annoying software quirks which make it demanding.

The bot is not the problem, the problem is the attitude towards women as sexual objects whose primary function should be to service men revealed by the fact that some men want these things.

Yes, and that was wrong. Some things have changed for the better. I'm not that stupid. I'm not saying 1955 was some sort of utopia and everything was so much better when we hung people and husbands legally raped their wives and there was 'no Irish, no blacks' signs on pub doorways. But then...look at the racism that exists online...the global sex trafficking of millions and the billions of children being raped in videos all over the Internet...are things in aggregate really much better?

I'm saying that rather than target the things that were wrong with the old moral order the liberals decided to tear the whole thing down. That isn't progress. The great march of progress and reform that went from the late nineteenth century to the 1970's in which female suffrage and civil rights were won and the death penalty repealed and the welfare state established...that was a great, moral movement. Over the last thirty years however the left have focussed more on the consumer rights and private desires of the individual tan any collective endeavour to make society more just an ethical. This is not progress. We are going backwards.

Again your argument doesn't really make sense independent. Women are subject to law just as much as men. They don't commit crimes on nearly the same scale however.

But women don't kill two men a week in domestic abuse, independent

Who he saying women aren't morally responsible?

despite the fact that what they do is neither illegal nor morally repugnant, eh?

Is nothing women do illegal or morally repugnant? Len Pen? Thatcher? Vanessa George? The Countess of Bathory? Women are people, and there are female arseholes everywhere. Are you saying women can't be arseholes? That they can't hunger for power and domination? Is that that not what men used to tell them order to keep them in their natural place of the home - because they're the innately nurturing and caring and soft and cuddly fairer sex? Women are capable of doing everything men can do - all the good stuff and the bad staff. And they should be allowed to. They should allowed to do all the great stuff and all the bad stuff...well, no one should be allowed to do bad stuff but women should have the same choice to be as bad as men if they want to and they should be credited with the same level of moral responsibility for their behaviour. And they should be judged for it to the same degree as men. That is equality.