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.
If you go to a site like Gaijinpot you start to notice a weird divide there. There are (primarily) two types of guys on that site: The guys who want their submissive “geisha girls” (and hate the women in their own country), and the guys who have been married to Japanese women (and no longer are) and can’t stop talking about how awful they are.
It’s … kind of hilarious. Because those latter guys WERE those former guys once. But a crappy attitude toward women and a lack of cultural understanding led their marriage down the tubes.
And while some (maybe a lot) of Japanese women can be entitled or play head games or be really immature at times, you also have to look at the reasons why (social factors) rather than demonizing them as a whole for being that way. (And as you might imagine, a lot of it has to do with Japanese attitudes toward women.)
But like I was saying about the skirt thing (they must wear short skirts so men will look up them and there can be NO OTHER REASON), these sorts of guys aren’t really interested in looking at social factors when they can just get their hate on.
Amidst all the fail in that post, this struck me as particularly horrifying:
WTF?! Am I wrong in thinking that that sounds like it would cause major genital trauma? Thanks for the Nightmare Fuel, Ian.
So, the herbivores of japan sound a lot more like me than they do like MGTOWs. A rejection of traditional attitudes towards masculinity backed by a lack of interest in overtly pursuing a relationship just because it’s the thing to do.
Your experiences sound very much like my own, Polliwog. Thank you for letting me know I’m not crazy to think this way.
🙂
Pi male, maybe he’s using literally the way Rachel Zoe does.
takes it up her vibrating butt
lol
I love how his idea of an advanced sexbot is one where you can change the boobs. Like, the basic crappy one only walks, talks, cooks, fucks, sucks, endlessly handjobs, does vibrating anal (can we call that vibranal please?), and looks almost exactly like a real broad.
On the ADVANCED one, you can make her boobies bigger.
@Catfish – *bows* thank you. I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitstaff! Sorry for any nightmares I have inadvertently caused!
I have never had a male friend express a romantic or sexual interest in me. I doubt any of them have ever had those feelings about me. I have only rarely felt any kind of interest like that in them (I can think of 3, if you stretch the definition of “interest” fairly widely). So, yeah, this whole “men and women never want to be just friends” thing is total bullshit IMNSHO.
Re uncanny valley, I think real dolls look creepy as hell, but there’s a market for them, so I reckon there would be a market for moving talking robots as well. But we’re hardly talking MOST men here.
And btw, as I said earlier… Turing thought we’d have machines that could pass the Turing test in a few decades, but we’re still not even near that stage. Realistically walking robots are also hard as hell to make. My own completely non-expert prediction is that they’re gonna make human-looking robots that can walk on two legs in ten years or so, but we won’t see robots talking and behaving convincingly like humans for a veeeeeery long time…
Btw this post made me laughing out loud.
Also, given the current demographic situation in Japan, if and when robots that can respond to people’s moods and perform complex caring tasks are a thing then they’ll probably be targeted at the elderly, not at angry men who want a sex toy. A home help and nurse bot for older people who want to keep living at home is a more realistic application for that kind of technology, given that the AIBO is already a thing that exists.
(Well, existed.)
@deezers:
This reminded me irresistibly of Bill Bryson’s book Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, in which he finds himself walking along Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYt2SBxL9Fg So, check this out: They’ve worked like hell to create human-looking robots with facial movements. For most people they’re probably deep down in the uncanny valley (I know they are for me), but maybe not for the real doll crowd… Still, they only move their heads. Creating a robot where the movements of the entire body coordinates in a natural way will obviously be much more difficult. And then, if we add that it’s gonna walk too… even more tricky. COOKING? Seriously?
But yeah, even if they do manage to create a robot that realistically walks around while both doing hand gestures and facial movements and talking, it’s still not gonna behave like a real human at all, since AI research NEVER EVER seems to crack that nut. Which is really disappointing to a sci-fi nerd like me, but I’ve resigned myself to never seeing Turing passing machines during my life-time.
I’m for the sexbot industry. Bring it on. The only thing is: I wouldn’t want it to happen on the other side of the planet, I would want it onshored to the United States. Sexbot manufacture could lead to a boom bigger than the one set off by the popularization of the individual pc. It could give rise to solid s-tons of jobs, roaring assembly lines, software firms developing away like mad and techies and mechanics working 25-hour days. This could be the salvation of the American economy through the next generation and even beyond — a consideration which, I presume, is dear to the hearts of most of us — and Mr. Wood thinks my biggest worry is that, afterwards, I might not be able to get a date? Not hardly. Au contraire, mon frere.. ‘Cuz, I’d have that which is more important than a date, I’d have a job. So: boo, Kyoto. Go, Seattle and Detroit.
The prospect of being displaced by artificial booty doesn’t break my heart: what breaks my heart is that there is no sexbot industry and no prospect of a sexbot industry. That is a genuine pity. In a properly arranged continuum we would have both sexbots and flying cars: too bad we’re all stuck on Earth, grounded, lonely and broke.
Also, I’m trying to find a kind way to say this that doesn’t inflict any collateral damage…this confirms my gut feeling that most of these guys have very little sexual experience, because they don’t seem to understand how complicated sex is from the perspective of “try to make a bot capable of performing these actions and programmed to do them in the way that will be most fun for the recipient”. Like say you program the bot to give oral…it’s not as simple as “open mouth on command”, and I’m not sure these guys quite understand that. Or that they understand the concept of different people liking different things. Can you imagine how much work it would be to program in every single potential option that could be useful during sex, and make the program such that the bot could figure out from context cues which options to go with and which to discard?
Yeah but vibrating BUTTS Cassandra. Sphere heads and vibrating BUTTS.
OT but apparently Toy Soldier has taken his deliberate misunderstanding show on the road, since I just ran across him on an (old) post at Feministe.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/12/18/why-the-good-men-project-debacle-matters/#comment-563126
@ deezers
You know the next development from there would be “I bet your butt vibrates for anyone, you sex bot slut”.
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568586132/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I actually have read a book that featured sexbots for population control. The bots were made of a semiorganic substance with antibacterial properties. They were three feet tall with high voices (because there was no point in trying to avoid the uncanny vally) and for some reson I always pictured them as mini teletubbies because they came in bright colors.
The population of earth had exploded, despite finding other places to colonize. Nearly everything thing not human had been wiped out to make space. So a group of people started making arks and rescuing animals and taking them to new planetary homes. Another group of people built the sexbots and cleverly realized that only the antisocial would want one. Once the antisocial types died out without breeding, humanity could begin anew.
Human population growth dropped eighty percent below replacement level in ten years.
It was an interesting book, but I felt sad for all the little bots that had been abused and were survivng on the fringes of society.
I know the book you mean, and I felt sorry for the bots too. Especially since part of their purpose (just like with the hypothetical bots these guys want) is to be hurt, because being allowed to hurt things is part of what the potential users want.
Oh my gosh, I can see it all Cassandra. What would happen when the sexbots start getting raped?
Alert! I just let a bunch of comments from Mr. Ironwood himself out of moderation; go back to the previous page of comments to see them.
Now that’s a thread I’d like to read!
DING DING DING we have a winner! For all these creeps go on about dudebros and male solidarity and so on ad nauseam, nothing they write suggests they like anyone at all, never mind being able to love anyone. The ones who whine about wanting a relationship with a woman never suggest they’d want to share her interests, provide any emotional support, encourage her in her work or studies, or just enjoy her company and have fun. No, it’s all the mummy-wipe-my-arse + stroking their egos + sex slave that’s their ideal relationship. And I seriously doubt they’re much better when it comes to their much-vaunted male friendships. It’s easy to imagine them in stereotypes of beer-drinking, watching sport and making homophobic, sexist and racist jokes, and cringing from the thought of talking about anything any deeper than that (unless it’s “how the feminazis have ruined my life – I have to wash my own skidmarks and make my own sammiches”).
I dunno, the idea of one of these slimeballs turning the power up so high that it’d have the same result as him shoving his dick into an industrial vacuum cleaner or a blender seems like a really good idea…
Hah, Ian Ironwood is one of John Scalzi’s regular trolls. Small internet.
… What. You, um, you think that all those rigid, engorged, vibrating phallic objects women buy are there to say nice things about their hair?