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

what if I have a tennis partner that I dont really like but I get a really satisfying game of tennis with him
am I using him as a tennis utility and is that wrong?

New economic conditions, changes in technology can all give birth to new ways of doing things in the personal/domestic sphere of life.*

Yeah, while a huge, not so sexy underclass is left to rot and all our gadgets are made by children in Chinese factories for a wage of £1 a day. But at least we can upload some selfies and masturbate to strangers on webcam. What a huge advance for humanity.

There is a middle ground between being madly in love and sexual exploitation, it's not even a narrow middle ground. I have no emotional connection to taxi drivers, they provide a useful service to me, and incredibly I still see them as human and can treat them with courtesy and respect. If some taxis became automated and self-driving I would still see human taxi drivers as humans, I wouldn't treat them like a computer because other taxis are computer controlled. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection but also without demeaning them. If I had sex with a robot, it wouldn't change my view of men in general.

Answer me thus: would be okay if taxi drivers became automated? Would it matter?

I'm sure it would matter to the taxi drivers, but change happens all the time and some jobs have always disappeared while completely new jobs become necessary. When street lamps became electric, I'm sure there were disgruntled lamp lighters, but it was a good change in other ways.

So...what would happen to these taxi drivers? Is there no ethical problem with taking people's jobs away? When electric street lamps came in in what...I dunno...the late Victorian/Edwardian era..people would have been left to starve or forced into workhouse conditions. They would've been fucked.
Then in the 20th century we got the Labour movement and the welfare state. That's all going now and we're heading backwards.

My point is this. A taxi driver does not just exist to serve customers. Taxi driving is a job, an identity, a livelihood, a source of camaraderie and belonging that should be protected by laws and unions. Similarly sexual relations are not just exchanges, transactions. Your view of sexual relationships is a neoliberal one - a view of people as commodities who we utilise for our own ends. Got to go to work now.

Taxi driving is a job, an identity, a livelihood, a source of camaraderie and belonging that should be protected by laws and unions

what really, even if we have new more efficient ways of doing things?
No doubt stone age life also provided an identity, a livelihood, a source of camaraderie and belonging, that doesnt mean we should stick to that.
We can make new tools, think new thoughts, find subatomic particles, explore string theory etc etc

Humans are infinitely plastic, we adapt endlessly and can find an identity, a livelihood, a source of camaraderie and belonging out of many different things.

where's your bleedin' imagination fgs

maybe the taxi driver could get a new job, discover new skills, find a whole new world for himself
Or maybe just sit in his cave banging rocks together because he lacks the mental dexterity to imagine different ways of organising life

I can't get all that bothered about hypothetical taxi drivers being made hypothetically redundant, they are perfectly capable adults. Redundancy is unpleasant for everyone, but they are not vulnerable or unskilled people.

But the taxi driver conversation has made me realise that we will have to agree to differ on just about every aspect of society. Your idea of a perfect society is almost certainly not mine, and your fear of how bad future society might become is far less optimistic than my best guess. And we really, really have different views about relationships and sex, which is fine.

How bizarre that you are hanging out on an overwhelmingly female oriented website then. Obviously you can, not saying you can't, but rather curious if you dislike women that much.

A certain type of feminist bears some responsibility for this cess pit of sexual commodification that is modern society.

Ha ha ha

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0518y18
Good item on Women's hour about it.

maybe the taxi driver could get a new job, discover new skills, find a whole new world for himself
Or maybe just sit in his cave banging rocks together because he lacks the mental dexterity to imagine different ways of organising life

I think we're coming from a completely different page politically. I'm a socialist, not a liberal. You think people should adapt to market forces; I don't.

The idea that there was once a moral code that kept everything lovely and friendly is uttter utter bollocks. Women were subject to a punitive moral code whereby their sexuality was entirely controlled by men. Men were subject to no moral code at all - it was entirely legal to rape your wife FFS!!! Men could have as much pre-marital and extra marital sex as they wanted. Women who were discovered to have had pre marital sex, on the other hand, could have their lives literally destroyed.

The idea that everything's gone to shit comes from men who don't like the fact that their fathers and grandfathers easily picked up a sock washing sex receptacle from the bunch of non-humans known as women who had no other option but to marry. Now that women have other options, guess what, they don't want to wash someone else's socks and open their legs on command. And so men wail and lament and hark back to the good old times. Well they weren't any fucking good for women.

it's a discrimination, then i need a perfect sex doll man!

Spot on Sparrowhawk!
The good old days = the days when women could be controlled because they were beholden to men

Any man who buys a sex from a woman or a robot is a loser. It's no wonder they can't have a consensual, equal and meaningful relationship, they have to buy it for goodness sake.

You only have to read posts on ukpunting to see the kind of male specimens we have living amongst us in society.

What about a woman who prefers to be single because relationships just dont work for her but buys sex toys?
Is she a loser?
how is she different from a man who can't find a partner and has a sex bot? He's not buying sex from the bot, any more than a woman is buying sexual pleasures from a vibrator, it's a piece of equipment like
a toaster

One word -

Westworld.

It will come back to bite them on the bum...

peace a woman's sex toy is more equivalent to a flesh light.
A sex robot made to look like a woman with limited interaction skills is not the same as a vibrator.
It's interesting though how threatening vibrators seem to be to masculinity. It's almost as if men believe that the sole purpose of a relationship is to supply orgasms and if women can get orgasm from a machine, she won't want a relationship.
If men prefer a "relationship" with a sex robot, good luck to them. I don't want anything to do with those kind of men.

Interesting thread and well said Sparrowhawk

I would add that women are losers in sex because you are damned if you do participate (i.e. asking for it when it comes to rape) and damned if they don't (spinster and a virgin at 36 thread - haven't read it - how weird not to participate in PIV).

I'm not in the least bit surprised regarding the sexbots. But to suggest it will keep 'creepy men off the streets' is to perpetuate another rape myth. Most rapists are normal men and are known to women.

I did own a vibrator but I found the whole thing so repellent after the first use. A dismembered part of a male anatomy to give me pleasure? I threw it into the recycling bin and went back to my imagination and fingers.

Elendon

I have often wondered about vibrators. Like you, I had one, but the effort involved in trying to simulate sex made it pointless.

The vibrating bit is very effective in terms of orgasm, but actually imitating PIV sex? Not so much.

That's just me though.

I found this part of the article very revealing:
When I asked if he thought people would one day use sex robots instead of prostitutes, the question offended him. “Yes, but that’s probably last on my list of goals. This is not a toy to me, this is the actual hard work of people who have PhDs. And to denigrate it down to its simplest form of a sex object is similar to saying that about a woman.”
So he basically implies sex workers are sex objects or toys, and of less value than his poxy robot.