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
@Rabid Rabbit
How NSFW? (very very very is too vague!) I know I could click and see for myself, but right now isn’t the best time, plus I want to see whether it’s “kick everyone out of the house before watching” or “make sure the kids stay in bed, and the over 18’s can either put on headphones or go into another room if it bothers them” status. 😉
Some of the guys who comment on PUA blogs do far more overthinking and brain hamster-dances over their attempts to interact with women than the women they’re trying to interact with probably do. I’d feel bad for them, but I’m only willing to be kind to those who are well behaved. For all their opinions of women never giving good advice about the subject of women, that’s just the start of a long list of things they get wrong.
Yeah, remember that guy who had that YouTube account full of his successful “flirts” and they were literally all things like him buying groceries and the checker saying “have a nice day?” The women’s responses ranged from normal, polite interaction with a stranger to clearly alarmed and attempting to get away as fast as possible without seeming rude.
It’s a comic rather than a video, so there’s no sound, but you probably don’t want anyone to catch sight of what’s on your screen.
I love that they think this might cause women to want to compete with ‘sexbots’ for the attentions of these wankers. Going along with their ‘logic’ for a second (God help me) wouldn’t it be easier for women to just use male sexbots who wouldn’t care if they were fat/had minds of their own/short hair or whatever and would might even be better in bed? 😉
I’m very very happily married to a feminist, and I’d be prepared to bet a year’s income that my sex life is several orders of magnitude superior to Tim’s and has been for well over a decade. And it doesn’t need any sexbot involvement either.
@ david, alaisvex, grumpy and everyone else commenting on the unlikeliness of success with PUA methods
Sadly, there are two classes of victims who expect and tolerate shitty treatment, namely people who have been abused and suffer from the usual psychological effects, and women with internalized misogyny/ who are proponents of toxic masculinity.
I believe the success of PUA methods, such as it is, is mostly due to this. They’re basically screening mechanisms for women who will put up with abusive behavior, and also scripts for establishing an imbalanced power dynamic from the very beginning. If you start a relationship on equal terms, it’s hard to make it abusive later without the victim walking out.
Normal humans are not attracted to low self esteem or submissive behavior. Feminist (ally) men don’t tend to be attracted to sexist women. This makes it less likely for potential PUA victims to learn about happy, healthy relationships by chance.
PUA methods have evolved through trial and error, and work exactly the way you’d expect based on that. All they can do is identify targets with predictable, exploitable vulnerabilities, and then exploit. But unfortunately they do that very effectively.
And it doesn’t help that our culture supports them in this by conditioning girls to accept subjugation from birth.
Aww, I overslept and missed a troll.
Still, some stuff I want to add:
I’ll overlook “Tight vaginas,” but “Sharp breasts”? I get that there’s no such thing as an MRA who knows how vaginas work, but Jesus, most at least have a rough idea of what boobs look like. o_O Are you Rob Liefeld, by any chance?
Gay germs, too. Alan Turing. In fact, the history of the computer is almost entirely women and gay people, with the occasional cishet white guy thrown in for diversity…
Unrelated update on Subway Jared: It’s not just child porn allegations anymore (and you know it’s going to be nauseating when I have to say “Just” there), he’s a Internet predator and child rapist.
BRB, showering forever.
*An Internet, even.
I think this one is a bot himself. GOT HASSLE-FREE JIZZ CLEANUP TIDE DETERGENT MEN’S CLOTHES TOASTER PORN SEX VIAGRA.
@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
I’d never even heard of him and he’s creeping me out.
Doesn’t look like he’s a child rapist, though, from that report, unless it changed since you posted it, as it mentions that the age of consent in that state is 16. He’s plenty of other things – predatory, manipulative, skeevy and apparently interested in soliciting sex with minors as well as fantasising about it. Not yet a child rapist – or at least not yet found out to be a child rapist.
I always wonder about these post, since we basically have sexbots now. There is something called real doll (which I talked about before in a different post) which are supposed to be really life like and have personalities built in. Several years ago they mage the news a few times because they had at the time 20 something personalities and 3 were rape victims. One even developed stokhom sendrome over time.
So sexbots already exist and already have problems. Not to mention that the idea of them getting more advanced will play into they becoming smarter and more aware and at a certain point it would be abuseive to build them.
People always talk about them being made to take the place of gfs and wifes and bfs and stuff but at that point they would need at least some intelligence, and to build something with intelligence and force it into a sexual relationship seems abusive to me. Since it isn’t given a choice but would have the ability to make that choice if it was allowed to.
Unrelated:
@M, my thoughts are with your nation for the horrendous tragedy they suffered today. Hopefully Australia will find a way back from this sad event. Do you know if Abbott is going to address the nation in its hour of need?
(60 for all out, for shame.)
@Robjec
After reading your comment and thinking about it, i realized that, wow, we’re in the future! And it’s a terrible one 🙁
And on a semi related note (posted ealier) wouldn’t artificial wombs remove the need and debate around abortion, because if you didn’t want the child you could put it in an artificial womb and it would be given up for adoption, meaning you aren’t forced to carry and the fetus isn’t killed. Wouldn’t that solve the issue for both sides of the argument?
@spacelawn
yeah. It’s definitely not the robotics asimov wanted. 🙁
@EJ
Bloody Christ, you had me worried that I’d missed something important there. =P Pfft, who cares about sports.
@M:
Cricket is important. Until the southern hemisphere begins to use Splatoon to resolve all our differences, cricket is what matters.
Chiming in late re: robots/AI:
https://youtu.be/Eh-FZcydhy0
The most heartbreaking tale of robot AI ever. If this doesn’t make you cry you have a heart of stone:
” For all their opinions of women never giving good advice about the subject of women, that’s just the start of a long list of things they get wrong.”
(1) They don’t know how to listen to women, or anyone else for that matter.
(2) They are full of misogynist notions they’ve picked up from other guys, and what women tell them doesn’t fit in with what they think they already know.
(3) If they take what women say seriously, they’ll have to change their ways — perhaps radically — and that’s just too much work. Video games never turn you down, and you can have all the pixellated boobs you want.
@mola the ocean sunfish: You have a very good point there, and that’s what makes the PUA stuff more than just a harmless con-game. It targets women who are already suffering and exploits the damage that has occurred previously in their lives.
Not quite. This assumes that we’ve also developed Star Trekian transporter technology that could beam the fetus out of the woman’s body intact without health risks. Attempting to ‘draw’ the fetus out of the womb intact via, in essence, surgical methods, is almost certainly still going to constitute putting the woman’s health as beneath that of the fetus–an unacceptable outcome. At the absolute barest minimum, fetal extraction would need to be no higher-risk for the woman than an abortion would be, and preferably far lower.
I’m sure other people have mentioned this; If men decide to have sexbots women probably will too. And that’s completely ok. It might even be a good thing. What I don’t get is their hatred of women. I think one day sexbots, you could consider vibrators to be sexbots and women don’t decide to not sleep with other human beings just because they have toys at home. If these guys leave women alone that will be a good thing. But I suspect that for many folks what they want is a connection and empathy. I was reading something about people feeling emotional satisfaction from talking to robots. Mainly elderly folks and children because they don’t get enough care and attention from other human beings. I felt sad reading that. But Heartiste and the other ickmen are just full of hatred and see other people only as tools. They would love more slavery in the world.
@sn0rkmaiden:
It was a chortle. Sorry.
“What is my purpose?”
“You pass butter.”
*looks down at robot hands* “Oh… My god.”
“Yeah, join the club, pal.”
Oh, Rick and Morty.