The success of the Channel 4 renegade-robot drama Humans — playing on AMC in the US — has gotten people talking again about what some see as the key question of our time:
Robots: How soon can we start having sex with them?
One of the more ardent cheerleaders of the coming “sexbotopia” is our old friend Heartiste, the floridly racist and woman-hating “pickup guru.” Weirdly, given his enthusiasm for the subject, he doesn’t seem all that interested in indulging in robot love himself. But he can’t stop chortling about the potential misery he thinks sexbots will cause for non-robot women.
Inspired by a recent Daily Mirror article predicting widespread human-robot sex by the year 2070, Heartiste pats himself on the back for being “the first warning about consequences from the coming sexbot revolution” — apparently he never saw The Stepford Wives — and declares that
sexbots present a real challenge to flesh and blood women and, ultimately, to the sustaining of civilization.
But Heartiste doesn’t seem terribly worried. Who needs civilization when you’ve got sexbots?
As Heartiste sees it, once the sexbots arrive the beta and omega males of the world, lacking the “game” necessary to charm manipulate attractive women into bed, will give up on real women and turn instead to sexbots. Fat chicks will be left in a sexless purgatory, and even the hottest of the HBs will have to work harder to gain the attention of alpha males, whom they will be forced to share with other women.
[I]n a sexbot saturated world, the pressure on women to look their very best for the few men left in the dating market who are still suitable mates will be immense. …
A typical American fatty with attitude to spare has no chance against a sexbot with a pretty face, a slender BMI, and a perfect hourglass shape.
A “slender BMI?” Apparently Heartiste, despite his obsession with the evils of fatness, doesn’t actually know how BMI works. I’m pretty sure robots, made mostly of metal, will end up weighing more than humans of similar shapes and sizes. So even a skinny robot will have the BMI of someone who is “morbidly obese.”
Heartiste being Heartiste, he ends his post with a racist sneer.
Prediction: The vast majority of sexbots produced for worldwide male consumption will be White women with a diverse palette of hair colors. Asian women sexbots will compete with Latin women sexbots for second place. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which race of women will be least represented among the ranks of assembly-line sexbots. Hint: Black male sexbots will probably outsell this last category.
Heartiste’s commenters aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the coming sexbot revolution as he is.
Someone calling himself shartiste — ick — isn’t convinced that sexbots will cause flesh-and-blood women to start genuflecting to men.
[A]nyone thinking this will make girls shape up better check themselves though. The entitlement complex is ridiculous, they will just whine and continue eating. Only if alpha males start using these things will girls take notice, but if they could make a sex doll that can take a mans attention away from a flesh and blood PYT, the human race is doomed to extinction anyhow.
Jack finds talk of sexbots boring.
I’m so lazy that I will probably buy a male sexbot to fuck my female sexbot, and he can listen to her robotic nagging and her honey-do list BS.
PA points out one potential, er, obstacle to the widespread acceptance of sexbots. Hint: It’s jizz.
I remain sceptical about sexbots becoming anything more than an expensive novelty but I’ll remain open-minded on the subject IF they’re designed got hassle-free jizz-cleanup.
King, meanwhile, raises an even more skin-crawlingly icky objection:
Man engages in sex to see his will made manifest on a female body. Woman engages in sex to be the cause of his deep satisfaction, the vessel for his will. If you are fucking/getting fucked by a toaster, you may get superficial release, but it isn’t the profound satiety of causing flesh to transcend its biological strictures.
A fellow named DavidTheGnome suggests that Heartiste and the rest are;t thinking radically enough about the possibilities:
I wonder how long it would be till the truly monstrous deviants begin building giant, anthropomorphic sex dolls. Eight foot tall, mutli-wanged charivari, four armed mortal combat type sheeva outworlders and armored centaur trannies walking down main street, arm in claw with beaming human wretches.
So? If someone wants to have sex with giant Pokemon robots, who cares?
Arbiter raises a much creepier possibility, asking
If there ever would be a sexbot industry, would it be allowed to make tween bots?
Greg Eliot, meanwhile, probably speaks for many Heartiste readers when he asks
Couldn’t we just mess with the brains of real women a bit and flip a few neurons into Stepford mode?
Because that’s what these guys really want.
EDIT: Added links
Alan,
But wouldn’t they just make male sexbots for gay men?
Oh wait!
In MRA land gay men aren’t gay because they’re attracted to men. They’re gay merely to spite women and MGTOW really hard. In a sexbot utopia, men wouldn’t need to be gay! They’d just sex bots and laugh at fatties!
Funny enough, anyone who would want a sexbot isn’t someone I would find attractive in the first place. Celibacy and books is always preferable to being the play thing to a misogynist.
I got a bad news for these guys! http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/women-men-jobs-automation/400364/?utm_source=SFTwitter
AFAIK, there is a bias against paying for sex but they never give your reasoning for it. What they actually say is that men shouldn’t pay for sex because apparently it’s the prostitutes that are wielding power over their clients by making them pay for something they should get for free. Apparently, being a john is feeding the oppressive gynocratic system or something.
EJ,
I think you’re right. I don’t see PUAs talk about visiting sex workers. I do see MGTOWs doing it, but it always seems like a threat designed to make women feel inadequate as opposed to something they really do.
Is it reasonable to assume that by 2070 sex bots might have rights? I mean, if I see a PUA abusing something, I would stop him with all means at my disposal. If by 2070 a robot can be more than a sex doll, it deserves protection from Heartiste and the rest of the PUA’s. Come to think of it, Glados from Portal’s origin remarkably sounds like the story of a woman conned by a PUA.
Does anyone else get the impression that these guys are jealous of our vibrators? I mean, we’ve had sex robots for ages.
They’re probably just upset that we can get off without putting up with their shit.
Just wait til the AI on these sexbots reaches sufficient self awareness to start saying no.
@sunnysombrera:
It’s a power thing then, but with an even more infantile reasoning. Ugh.
@WWTH:
Thinking about it, that’s almost a perfect descriptor of the difference between PUAs and MGTOWs. PUAs grandstand to spite other PUAs, while MGTOWs grandstand to spite women.
@Don,
if there ever are robots with self awareness then they should definitely have rights. I’ve already had this discussion with someone with regards to full human cloning.
@sn0rkmaiden:
That’s a fascinating digression. I’d love to hear your reasoning. I utterly agree when it comes to human cloning, but utterly disagree when it comes to robots.
What is this fascination they have with women who are not the size they want? Don’t they know that if you don’t find someone attractive, no one expects you to ask those people out? And…also, do they not realize that there are people who just don’t care about the weight of someone they are dating? How dare fat people be happy!
@ikanreed
I’d totally get a chorebot if they were available…
I guess PUA don’t think of them because probably none of them do a lot of chores in the first place?
Or maybe they don’t see the point of making bots to de something women are supposed to do for free and on demand… Wait, what?
@Alan & Falconer
You made me laugh out loud…
And today it was the first day I could actually stay in bed, after doing normal mother life for three days with the worst cold I got this year.
Well, after I took my child to school this morning, that is (did I mention it’s winter in the south hemisphere?)
Also, if for some reason I commented on something from another thread, chalk it up to the fever…
@EJ – We’ll get back to the whole simulation of consciousness v consciousness thing.
Right?
If nothing else, it’d leave more time for sexitimes for those so inclined.
@FredtheDog – I think it’s more that they see people saying, “I don’t want to be scorned / dismissed for my size,” and think that they’re demanding their personal approval and attraction.
They have that “everything everyone says and does is about me and my feelings” thing going on that most people seem to be able to move past by early adolescence.
so if, when, sexbots come (no pun intended) – only BOYS can access them? There will be no alpha bots to put these silly flesy men in their place, allowing fatties to be sexually pleasured?
Do these guys ever even think about what they say… or do they just say it?
@EJ, well I’ve seen Blade Runner, I, Robot and AI and basically if they can feel, they’re real 🙂
Solution would be not to make robots with that level of intelligence, and I’ll bet it’ll be a long time before we get there. But if you did create something which can feel and think for itself then you have a duty of care to it. It wasn’t that long ago that children were considered property of their parents, because they created them.
Trouble is if I think like this for too long I start thinking I should become a vegetarian. And if I get a roomba I’ll wind up treating it like a pet:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/vet.png
@ikanread
An enthusiastic YES! to chorebot, one that can do some simple DIY like unclog sinks, clean gutters, fix nail pops and paint, please. Can someone get on this already?
As others have noted, King really revealed to me the core of MRA/PUA thinking. It really is about manipulation, domination, predation, maybe some other -ations out there.
And I find Jack’s post interesting. He imagines a “nagging” female sexbot. First off, I really hate this stereotype. I think it’s so stifling for women because if we really are trying to share chores and errands with our partners, we can’t ask about an undone, heretofore promised task and get some idea of when we can expect its completion without feeling like we are being harpies or actually being accused of being harpies, or even told “get off my back! I’ll do it when I feel like!” and have it seem like a power grab. Basically, it’s a way for society to tell women they shouldn’t ask for and expect people to do their promised tasks.
I guess there are real nags out there, people with inappropriate expectations and who get angry really easily, but it seems this can be used for anyone who appropriately gets angry when stuff is not done as promised.
Anyway, sorry for the digression, why would a sexbot be a nag? Does Jack actually have a fantasy about that?
Did somebody say Roomba?
@scarletathena,
programming your robot to nag you seems like a strange choice, unless you want it to help you quit smoking or something.
@SFHC,
well you don’t see that everyday 🙂
That is definitely the oddest thing I’ve seen all day.
@sn0rkmaiden: I think you’re right, we would end up building robots which are designed to not quite measure up to the level of what we consider “self aware” to be, if only because no company is going to spend millions on researching something they can’t then own.
Morally, I’m of the opinion that anything humans build should be built to minimise the overall amount of suffering of humans (and other life forms, to a lesser extent.) As such, anything we build should be designed to maximise the benefit we and other living things receive from it; whether or not it enjoys it shouldn’t be an issue.
(That said it would be trivially easy to design a robot to enjoy its assigned task, much as we tend to enjoy the “assigned tasks” of feeding and reproduction that evolution has given us.
@davidknewton
I agree, this is infinitely more important to me than what some scummy MRAs think the future will be.
Another thing these chucklefucks never consider is that because some men are attracted to fat women, there would be a market for fat sexbots. Something that would no doubt anger them greatly.
@EJ,
‘That said it would be trivially easy to design a robot to enjoy its assigned task,’
That reminds me of the bread obsessed toaster in Red Dwarf:
Whether or not companies would avoid creating too intelligent robots is assuming they would foresee such problems. History has shown people rarely think that far ahead.