Yesterday we looked at far-right manospheran clod/philosopher Vox Day’s melodramatic response to a Canadian sexbot ban that’s completely imaginary (but that Vox, natch, believed was real). Today, let’s look at an almost 3000-word post by one “Ian Ironwood” of the Red Pill Room, spelling out the dire implications of this imaginary legislation.
ProTip: Before writing 3000-word screeds denouncing something, spend 5 minutes with Teh Google to see if what you’re denouncing is in fact real.
Ironwood opens his argument with this dramatic (if slightly ironic) assertion:
The Sexbot threat to feminism is real.
No one wants to admit it, but it’s coming. Indeed, the only people who recognize it as such are the radical feminists and the radical nerds, and rarely do folks take those groups at face value when they speak. But they both have it right, sexbots are in our future. Indeed, they’re closer than you think, and their capacity to seriously screw with the SMP is very, very real.
For those not fully versed in the pseudoscience of pickup artistry, SMP stands for “sexual marketplace.”
Ian starts us off with a little trip to Japan:
Japan, the undisputed global leaders in male masturbation technology, are [sic] investing literally millions in research into this market. Why? Because of the herbivores.
The “herbivores” are the adult males (I hesitate to call them men) in Japanese society who have opted out of the dating-and-mating SMP entirely. In consideration of the exhausting and complex web of social and financial penalties involved, these men have just . . . given up on women.
Manospherians like to pretend that Japan’s much-discussed “herbivores” are essentially the Japanese version of Men Going Their Own Way. I’m no expert on Japan but even I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification.
Naturally, in Ian’s mind, it’s all the fault of those uppity ladies:
You think American women feel entitled? Japanese “princesses” put them to shame. Their demands and requirements for a husband are often so grandiose or unrealistic that they have turned-off an entire generation of Japanese men to the very idea of marriage, just at the point where their female contemporaries, themselves working in corporate jobs, are starting to consider it.
But when your day consists of going to work in a cube farm and playing the corporate warrior competing with women all day, apparently it saps your desire to deal with them all night, too.
So, naturally, these poor cube farming herbivores are turning to vagina replacements:
Long an important part of international sex culture, the last few decades have seen rapid advances in masturbation technology, including the disposable Tenga “egg” stroker you can buy in a vending machine for those long lunch hours. Japanese dudes whack it a lot, and that’s big business.
And soon – oh, so soon — Japanese masturbation technology will be able to replace not just vaginas but entire women:
[B]y 2018, and certainly by 2020, we’ll see animatronic Sexbots available for purchase that you will not be able to distinguish from a human being more than ten feet away.
Ian, I will bet you literally a billion gazillion dollars that you are wrong about this.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Ian is correct, and let him continue his most interesting – and increasingly NSFW — survey of the future.
Every aspect of the phenomenon is being developed: realistic-feeling skin, realistic-looking eyes, realistic-sounding voice, realistic weight and mass, realistic movements …
The current state-of-the-art is still primitive, but that’s changing rapidly. By 2020 your Sexbot will be able to walk, talk, see, hear, suck, fuck, give you an endless handjob, take it up her vibrating butt and do stuff no mortal woman can.
“Endless Handjob” is going to be the name of my ambient-drone cassette label.
You will be able to order them in any style, from African to Asian to European to Latin and beyond, any height, any weight, and you will be able to personalize them to suit your particular fetish. Advanced models will have changeable bust sizes and other options. Hair, eyes, and accent? Standard options.
I am glad to hear that sexbots will indeed have eyes as an option. It would be sort of weird otherwise. Can they have more than two? Could they have eyes instead of nipples, and nipples instead of eyes? Could you simply swap out various body parts as if your sexbot were some giant sexy Mrs. Potatohead?
Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away with all the possibilities.
Let’s go back to Ian’s post, which is sounding more and more like some sort of sexbot informercial.
And just how much will dudes have to shell out to get a perfectly-programmed girlfriend delivered to their door?
About the price of an economy car. Estimates indicate that the best consumer price-point for a Sexbot is about US$7,000.00 (2013). Leases will likely be available. So will financing. But for the average dude, shelling out that kind of cash for the perfect sexual companion is a no-brainer.
I’m pretty sure Ian isn’t thinking with his brain at this point. Heck, he’s even wrong about the cars: a decent economy car is going to cost you at least twice that, and most of them don’t even have vibrating butts.
Imagine a dude getting home from work in his single apartment. His Sexbot has been pre-programmed to start his dinner and have it ready on demand. She greets him at the door, asks about his day, gets his dinner, and then spends the rest of the evening satisfying him any way he chooses. With a sophisticated AI (one of the major focuses of the effort) she will be able to converse with you on nearly any topic or stay blissfully silent. And you don’t even have to ask about how her day went.
After two years, trade her in for a newer, more advanced model. Repeat as necessary.
And fellas, this stunningly realistic female human being replacement, with a vibrating butt and as many eyes as you want, will be yours for less than half the cost of a cheap car – in as little as six years from now!
And heck, these sexbots won’t just replace women – they’ll even replace women who are whores.
Our children’s generation will look forward to a whole lot of men (if Japan is any indication, over half) depending on Sexbots for their erotic entertainment over actual human beings. Even whores. Because sexbots are safer than prostitutes by any estimation.
Sounds like life for heterosexual-yet-woman-hating men will become some sort of wondrous sexual utopia!
What could possibly stand in the way of this glorious dream?
Oh, you guessed it already: jealous, and probably ugly, feminists – who for some reason apparently want all of the woman-hating straight men for themselves.
Ian trots out that wholly imaginary Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act that we talked about yesterday. The “proposed law” that turned out to have been an assignment in a law school class about law and robotics. The law that Ian didn’t bother to Google before writing his long, long screed.
Ian is as worked up about this imaginary law as he is excited about his imaginary robot girlfriend(s) of the future. “[T]he thinly-veiled, incredibly obvious motivation behind this freakish proposed law,” he thunders, is that
feminists are upset because when dudes can buy a girlfriend for less money than an engagement ring, and then have elective temporary vasectomies to cover their bases for the few times they do end up with a real woman, then the future looks an awful lot like a male paradise and a female hell.
Wait, now all men are getting vasectomies as well? Even though they have no reason to bother with mere human females, what with all their talking and their lack of vibrating butts? I’m a little confused now.
What happens when you’re a woman, you want to be a mom, but not only can’t you find a husband . . . you can’t even find decent sperm? When in order to conceive, you have to convince a dude to commit to providing you with semen, which he can do only AFTER he consciously gets his vasectomy reversed? No surprise pregnancies, no one-night-stands gone wrong, suddenly the only way a woman can get pregnant is if she can convince a man to commit to her? If she can even find one who is interested? …
What happens in our society when a majority of working women can’t find husbands – or even dates, thanks to the Sexbot craze – and end up working and paying taxes to subsidize other women’s childbearing? What happens when a dude with superior genetics can start a bidding war on his balls?
Yeah, but what if Japanese women develop ROBOT SPERM and use it to get pregnant and somehow force men to pay child support for their new human-robot hybrid babies? Did you ever consider THAT, Ian?
I’m not quite sure how all of that would work, exactly, but, hey, the Japanese are awfully clever so presumably they could whip up something like this in, oh, six to eight years or so, right?
But let’s just assume that my idea of robot sperm remains a pipe dream, and that Ian’s pipe dreams somehow become reality. He continues:
The temporary vasectomy is literally just a few years away. Throw in Sexbots, and suddenly men have reproductive power the likes of which they’ve never dreamed, even at the height of the Agricultural Age. They will decide when they conceive as a conscious choice, not as a whim of Nature. Have a bad date with yet-another desperate woman who only wants you for your sperm? Kandi the Asian 19year old Sexbot will make it all better.
Why is her name Kandi? Is that a common name in Asia?
And that’s why feminists are trying to ban them. Not because they “objectify” women, but because they make women largely redundant to men. Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines.
I’m sorry; I just love that last sentence there so much I have to repeat it:
Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines.
Ian dreams on:
Sexbots will actually cure a plethora of social ills: STDs, AIDS, unwanted pregnancy, sexual frustration, loneliness, heartbreak, child sexual exploitation, and more. Far from making men objectify women . . . it will merely make them ignore them. Men with Sexbots won’t treat women poorly, because more likely than not, once they have the “perfect” programmed girlfriend at home, there really won’t be any reason to interact with women unless you’re at work.
Yes, because aside from sticking his penis in them, there is clearly no possible reason why a man would ever want to have anything to do with women.
Just imagine a society where any man can get his ashes hauled at any time, in any way, without having to ask a live woman to participate. Just imagine a society where women can’t get “accidentally” pregnant anymore. Not only is the impetus to marry absolutely killed, but even the impetus to mix with the opposite sex. And that’s what is scaring feminists, not the potential for objectification.
Yes, I’m sure feminist women are crying themselves to sleep at the notion that asswipes like Ian will refuse to “mix” with them any more.
Happily, for him, Ian concludes that the (wholly imaginary) Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act won’t stand up in court. Because of NAFTA, or something. (I kind of skimmed this bit.) But then he’s back to imagining the wondrous possibilities of a sexbotted-up world. Which apparently involves a lot of robot dismemberment.
Just imagine the result if sex with “realistic” Sexbots is actually made illegal . . . why not just pop an alien head on? Or a animatronic animal head? Or just a silvery glass sphere? That’s the real danger for women when it comes to Sexbots: their ability to be customized in ways no woman would ever consent to.
Uh, I’m pretty sure no living creature, regardless of gender, would consent to having their head “popped off” and replaced with a sphere.
Can’t have a “realistic” full-body Sexbot? Then just buy her from the waist down. And then next year spring for a separate torso and head. You can use them separately, or together!
Who needs a human girlfriend when you can just fuck a torso?
Cant’ have a Sexbot that portrays a minor? Get a really, really small model, and no one knows what happens in your imagination.
How thoughtful! So even pedophiles will have a place in Ian’s sexbot utopia.
So while imaginary feminists propose imaginary laws to fight the coming sexbot utopia, Ian will be licking his chops.
I, for one, will be welcoming our new Sexbot masters. It’s going to tighten up the SMP worse than gay liberation did. And it’s going to make shallow, poor-quality women completely and utterly undatable, and leave them little or no options to reproduce. And the women who do reproduce will do so only with the permission, consent and acquiescence of men.
I’m beginning to wonder if this “red pill” is actually some sort of hallucinogenic.
aim33: Pecunium, no-one has a “right” to another person.
Good thing I didn’t say that then.
I said that if they have someone who wants to have a relationship with them (that whole “reciprocal interest I was talking about in the Manosphere thread) then the two of them have a right to pursue it.
And to deny them that is immoral.
Women being culturally expected to nod, smile and say dear dear, yeah that’s totally the same thing as socializing with men.
Going just a bit further back, women attempting to socialize with men were seen as likely to become hysterical because, to steal an EA line:
How big is a lady’s brain?
It’s really very small, a simple thought is quite a strain.
In other words, not expecting women to just put up with men is socializing women to socialize with men on equal footing.
Also, I’m getting really annoyed by ABNOY’s continued gender binary thing. I really shouldn’t expect more from him, but it’s annoying me nonetheless (why must that word be 11 letters when tamen is 5? English, be more like Latin please?)
Pecunium — things I should’ve expected but nonetheless please me? You knowing the difference between sapient and sentient (you think ABNOY manages the former?)
Last I checked, there were TWO biological genders in nature, male and female. Should I be criticized for being true to nature?
“No, it doeesn’t bear repeating. It ought not be said so much as once. MRAs, no matter how fucked up, are people.”
My apologies. I will now return to the land where everything isn’t taken literally.
And Abnoy demonstrates his complete ignorance of biology once again.
Fuck off, moron. You don’t even know the difference between sex and gender.
ABNOY, wrong again! You need to go study some biology, start with simple things like asexual biology, work up to sequential hermaphroditism and when you get that, add intersex biology to your list. Once you’ve covered all that work your way through this list or skip straight to gender binary.
And stop reminding me of NWO.
Things that are obvious to non-assholes — forcing someone into a gender box based on biology is assholery. You pissed me off enough in the first place ABNOY, but I just thought about my genderfluid not-an-ex being stuck as zir biology gender and dude, you do not fuck with the people I care about.
Great Ceiling Cat, it’s been the day for swipes, intentional or otherwise, at people’s partners!
@Abnoy: “But most women are latently bisexual anyway so they wont mind ????and more sex will make the male organ bigger since its a muscle after all”
WTF? (I thought that after I busted a gut laughing at how ridiculous this statement was on all fronts.)
Last I checked, the male organ isn’t a muscle.
Who would seriously want to lease a sex bot? A used car is gross enough. Imagine a second hand sex toy.
I get freaked out when I have to wear used bowling shoes, for gadz sake!
I feel bad that Abnoy hates his mom so much.
Oh, awkward:
“Last I checked, there were TWO biological genders in nature, male and female. Should I be criticized for being true to nature?”
Abby didn’t understand Argenti’s reference to gender binary thinking. I think this site’s too advanced for you, sonny. We all know it, but you don’t. You probably also think girl’s are genetically programmed to like pink. You need to hit some books before you start posting here.
I’m going to guess he’s 15 and still thinks girls are yucky. Any takers?
He seems to think programming something to express “love” is the same as or even preferable to actual love so yes, probably too advanced.
Why the fuck do MRAs have this slavish devotion to the natural world, and the way that nature ‘wants’ us to act? When has that shit done anything good for us?
inurashii — 1) I have no fucking clue, and rarely if ever. 2) Biology, UR DOING IT WRONG.
3) Sequential hermaphroditism, please take everything you thought you know about biology, add a fish, and go wut?
Just going on a limb there, but…
Wouldn’t a sexbot utopia actually be of more benefit to the ugly feminist women if we accept Ian’s vision of male-female relations and the only appeal of interreaction is sex and procreation? I mean if they make all those wondrous vibrating-butted sexbots, surely the male model will be released too, vibrating parts included. All those great robots who go on for hours and will never ask you for a threesome or freak if you bring in a second male sexbot. Why would we ever need men? Our sexbots not only will ask us about our days but will totally 100% agree that Cindy from work was being out of order. Then they’ll say “You’re the most wonderful woman in the world” when we ask “what are you thinking?” They’ll also pick up their clothes and do the laundry after sex and cook us a nice dinner and put candles on the table. And if you have a headache? Feel free to purchase the Friendzoned bot who is such a nice guy but not quite a stud and who will listen to you all day. How about the gaybestfriend bot who’ll also go shopping with you?
Procreation? Here comes the childbot who plays quietly all day without the need to go through pregnancy. And please note, the childbot is only available for purchase by women because we passed a law to stop bot pedophilia – the same law we used to ban the smaller models of female sexbots. You can upgrade your childbot for a cuter model or trade for a younger or older model if you want to play dress up with your little girl or miss the cute baby years. And thanks to the childbot support act, every man in the country will be asked to pay taxes to support the childbot’s repairs, housing and custom clothings.
And since we’re all corporate career shark women now, we can afford all these wondrous models with our salaries, stolen from hardworking men who surely deserved that promotion but didn’t get it because of positive discrimination. That or somehow we managed to also pass a law forcing men to still pay alimony to us without ever having to marry them!
@ inurashii , they don’t know how nature wants us to act. They don’t know anything about the natural world. And they don’t really bother to find out so maybe they aren’t as devoted as they appear, they just like the way the word sounds?
Everybody everywhere acting the same way all the time in a species with such a wide distribution, large population and habitat variation isn’t really the norm for the rest of the natural world at all so why do they think it is natural for humans?
When they say in nature/natural/natural world etc I replace it with “in my imagination” and tut a little at the lack of science in their so-called scientific explanations. Makes more sense.
If the sexbot is sentient and self-aware, what’s to stop it from preferring another man to you? Isn’t that one of your big concerns when it comes to human women?
All mocking aside, you know that this is your problem, right? Love, and dating, and sex, and all of it are not always easy. But you know that most of the world’s heterosexuals don’t feel “…forced to endure each other’s company…” right?
You should maybe take a break from dating.
Also surely something being “sentient” and also “programmable” for love are surely completely at odds?
If something is sentient then surely you cannot “programme” it and surely it is capable of loving of it’s own free will and also choosing not love?
And if you could “programme” a robot to love you then surely that means that a) it cannot be sentient and b) that is not love.
It would be impossible to make a truly sentient being, as a sentient robot would be, love you. A truly sentient robot would surely be capable of love but not at your demand, only of its own free-will.
What is more, to attempt to force a sentient being to love someone whether it wishes to or not would be utterly immoral and a form of slavery or brainwashing, just as it would be for a human.
You could perhaps have robots programmed to go through the motions of love, it could be programmed to call you any pet name you wanted, learn your taste so it could get you birthday presents you’d like, remember you favorite meals etc. but it would only ever be for show, only be a pretense of love.
Abnoy, if you truly want love you can’t buy it or programme it into someone, if you tried to then it would not be love. Love from another person or being can only come freely, by choice, without being forced or tricked into it, hell you can’t even force pets to love you so how on earth would you force a “sentient robot” to do so?
Historophilia:
Sadly, you can.
In its extreme, it’s called brainwashing. More subtle versions are called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Using either to make something love you or fuck you is deplorable and usually illegal. As it should be, and as I hope it will be if we ever get sentient synthetic beings.
@inurashii
I think I briefly mentioned brainwashing, but surely, if someone is brainwashed into loving then that is not real love?
And yes I hope to god that it is made illegal if we ever get to that point in AI, the idea of programming a sentient and sapient being to love you or want to sex you is something I find repulsive.
Surely that’s the reason people like Abnoy want bots to be sentient though? Can’t impose your will on a being that doesn’t have any will of its own. It’s the idea of forcing something to do things against its will that they get off on.
Either that or he just doesn’t understand what sentient means.
@Cassandra, it could genuinely be either, but I’d put a few bob on him not actually knowing what sentient means.
“I think I briefly mentioned brainwashing, but surely, if someone is brainwashed into loving then that is not real love?”
No, see Stockholm Syndrome.