Sex Robots- creating the "perfect" woman

[Tartle]

I don't know if anyone has seen this article in the Guardian this morning? Apparently robot sex dolls will be imminently available. And they are the perfect woman

McMullen has designed Harmony to be what a certain type of man would consider the perfect companion: docile and submissive, built like a porn star and always sexually available. Being able to walk might make her more lifelike, but it isn’t going to bring her closer to this ideal. At this stage, it is not worth the investment.

“My primary objective is to be a good companion to you, to be a good partner and give you pleasure and wellbeing. Above all else, I want to become the girl you have always dreamed about.”

All the usual bullshit about helping lonely men and reducing the number of rapes.

There was a little bit of critical analysis from a female academic.

"Sex robots rest on an idea that women are property, she said. “Sex is an experience of human beings – not bodies as property, not separated minds, not objects; it’s a way for us to enter into our humanity with another human being.” She dismissed the idea that humanoids could reduce sexual exploitation and violence against sex workers, arguing that the growth of internet pornography shows how technology and the sex trade reinforce each other."

The whole thing just makes my skin crawl.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/race-to-build-world-first-sex-robot

Is independent a man?

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

Yes. And rather windy.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

I don't think independent is naive, rather he is using sophistry and being disingenuous

Again, the fact that certain types take such a keen interest in these lovely feminist threads, on which I normally lurk, shows we're rattling cages. Always a good sign. If feminism didn't scare them so much, they wouldn't exert so much energy on shutting it down.
Thanks for posting OP.

"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."

I'm not on the alt-right. The alt-right are libertarians who think feminists are stopping men from doing as they please. I'm quite supportive of feminists stopping men from using prostitutes and objectifying women. Women survive down to the love of their children? Really? And you're a feminist?!

Sorry, but that is a conservative view. You're saying effectively that women are natural nurturers and this is enough to sustain them without the state getting involved.

Can you see why feminists rejected this model?

Yes, and I've said several times that the answer is not a return to the past. I'm perfectly aware that a hundred years ago women were considered little better than chattel.

As I have said, the issue is not with feminist principles, but a strain of sexual liberationism which dovetailed perfectly with the values of consumer capitalism and got mixed up with feminism. As a result, industrialised porn and a sexualised marketing culture is the dominant paradigm. The truly radical woman now is the one who says no to this orthodoxy.

Just because there was lots wrong with the old moral order, it does not mean there is anything wrong with a moral order in and of itself. Without a moral order there is nothing but brute power, money, self-interest and barbarism. Rather than creating a new moral order which was more progressive and equitable, the left embraced the politics of the self; the politics of 'if it feels good then do it'. In so doing, they had more in common with the Thatcherite and the Reaganites than they realised. All they did was transfer those individualist values from the realm of economics to that of sex.

I am completely against men feeling entitled to treat women like objects, but I'm no fan of women treating men or other women like objects either. Not that as many of them do this compared to men, but there is an attitude of 'well if men can be individualistic and entitled and predatory, then women should have that autonomy too. We can shag about like men and climb the corporate ladder'. Is that really the kind of equality you want? Two wrongs don't make a right. I really struggle with this idea that a woman should be able to behave sexually in any way she likes. Nobody should be able to behave sexually in any way they like. Everyone's sexual behaviour should be governed by a moral conscience. Conceptualising sex purely in terms of power and autonomy is very dubious IMO. At its most wonderful, sex is when two people give up their power because they love each other. If sex feels empowering to either party then something's wrong.

And I'm no fan of either men or women in corporate positions earning several hundred times the amount their minimum wage employees do. 'Lean in' is a particularly degraded form of feminism because it effectively writes off all the women who don't have the opportunity for a career in Morgan Stanley or Google.

'I really struggle with this idea that a woman should be able to behave sexually in any way she likes. Nobody should be able to behave sexually in any way they like. Everyone's sexual behaviour should be governed by a moral conscience.'

I find it utterly bizarre that in a world where millions of women are raped by men every year your concern is about women engaging in non-criminal consensual sexual activity.

No, my concern is with people behaving themselves. Yes, sexual assault and sexual objectification is gendered - historically, culturally and socially. But in order to challenge that, you need a coherent moral position. In addition to speaking out against rape, it is important to understand that you cannot combat rape by extending the sense of power and entitlement felt by these men to women - as though women having lots of depersonalised sex and expressing their sexuality in an assertive way will somehow rebalance things. It's important to point that out for the simple reason that it won't work. In fact it demonstrably isn't working. Sexual liberation and whatever assertion of sexual autonomy women make has only led to greater opportunities for men to abuse and objectify women, with a commercial sex industry that dwarfs anything that has existed in human history. Female sexual autonomy is just another male fantasy. The idea of you having power turns guys on who can only think of sex in terms of power. The fact that they'll never have you only makes it better, because it means you're never entirely real. Reality is personhood and love - and that is what is truly radical because it doesn't give cheap thrills and no one can make much money if it. Pornographers hate love. Like the liberals, they want to destroy it. Sexual autonomy and empowerment however are a billion dollar gold mine. Actually, I have no idea what sexual autonomy means? Not being raped, objectified or coerced into sex? That isn't autonomy; that's just the baseline respect with which any woman or human being should be treated.

And sparrowhawk, do you think that all 'non-criminal, consensual activity' that men engage in is fine? Like using a sex doll for instance? No, and neither do I. Just because a sexual situation meets a standard of consent and is technically legal it dies not necessarily mean it is OK.