Reddit MRAs are all in a tizzy about the evil feminist plot to deprive them of sexbots that don’t yet exist.
Playing the part of “the feminists” in this scenario: two European robot ethicists — that is, two human beings who study the ethical issues raised by robotics — who have launched what they call a Campaign Against Sex Robots. Their concern? That sex robots will “contribute to inequalities in society” and “further objectif[y] women and children.”
As a position paper on the Campaign’s website argues,
extending relations of prostitution into machines is neither ethical, nor is it safe. If anything the development of sex robots will further reinforce relations of power that do not recognise both parties as human subjects.
It’s not clear that there is anything to the campaign beyond this position paper, a bare-bones website, a crappy logo, and its two organizers, but the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit are treating this like some kind of sexbot Pearl Harbor.
In a post to the subreddit that’s garnered close to 1300 upvotes, one Redditor sounds the alarm: Feminists already trying to ban sex robots as “demeaning to women”, to control male sexuality.
Naturally the discussion was full of the thoughtful analysis and good sense that we have come to expect from the Men’s Rights Movement.
Yes, that’s right. The guy who reacted to a news article about a two-person campaign to ban hypothetical future sex robots by pounding out a slur-ridden polemic talking about how much he’d like to punch “these mentally bipolar cunts … hard in the face” is complaining that other people are too easily offended.
Tilting_Gambit, meanwhile, explained the pussyconomics behind it all.
![richardnorth 135 points 1 day ago Many in the manosphere predicted this would happen many years ago. This article is like clockwork. It's completely unsurprising that they're gonna start freaking out over men being able to get sexual satisfaction while bypassing all the bs, drama and baggage that comes with real women. permalinkembedunsavereportgive goldreply [–]Tilting_Gambit 100 points 1 day ago It's why women slut shame and cock-block. They like to keep the value of sex high so that men pour more resources/effort/time into pursuing it. If women ever just allow their sexual inhibitions to disappear then men are no longer the pursuers in relationships and women don't get to select their partners with the same frequency. Women don't know they don't want other girls to put out, but they benefit greatly when the value of sex is high. Exactly the same with hypothetical sex AIs. If men are getting sexually satisfied by robots then they're not going to pursue women with the same intensity. In economics terms, the demand for women would drop and therefore the price men are willing to](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/sexrobotecon.png?resize=527%2C488&ssl=1)
And since most women don’t have anything to offer men beyond sex — at least in the eyes of quite a few Men’s Rights Redditors — a plunge in the price of sex will render many of the utterly worthless.
There was much agreement on this point.
Much much agreement:
![heDongerNeedsFood 24 points 1 day ago When it comes to sex, these robots are competiton for real women, plain and simple. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]Demonspawn 38 points 1 day ago They are competition for women who offer nothing more than sex. The sad state of western women is that the vast majority of them offer little more than sex. They have bought into feminism and shed their feminine qualities as they ape being men such that the only thing they have to offer men (who desire feminine qualities in partners) is sex. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]5th_Law_of_Robotics 9 points 1 day ago Which the fact that so many women vociferously oppose porn, prostitution, male masturbatory aids, etc suggest that those women think all they have to offer is sex.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/5tlaw.png?resize=527%2C376&ssl=1)
A couple of Redditors broke down the math:
![yayimadeit 63 points 1 day ago My friends and I were just discussing this the other day. It's my opinion that if they can get a decently priced robot that can give sexual pleasure that is 60% of what a real woman can give then it will end society as we know it. Most men would settle for 'ok' sex in exchange for having it when they want it, as often as they want, and with none of the financial risk that a marriage carries. For untold generations women used sexuality to ensure they were taken care of. That's about to end, and it's going to be a very, very ugly transition. Oh, and my friends think that 60% is too high. They would settle for less if they got the positives outlined above. Ugh, it all makes me really sad too because this is going to happen and no feminist scholars are going to stop it. Men will walk through fire to get laid and someone somewhere will offer this no matter how outlawed it would be. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]intensely_human 23 points 1 day ago If the robot can change in appearance, I think it can get away with 30% of quality. Sex with the same woman year after year approaches 10% quality level or lower, IMO. The difference in level of arousal between having sex with your wife and having sex with a woman you've just met is incredible.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/60percent.png?resize=526%2C502&ssl=1)
ExpendableOne suggested that we wouldn’t even need to destroy women with sexbots if non-robot women were just nicer to nice guys like (presumably) him.
Toysjoe wonders what the feminists will try to ban next.
ATTENTION FEMINISTS! CODE RED!
THEY KNOW!
(Non-feminists, just ignore that last bit. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.)
HoundDog, meanwhile, has concluded that sexbots are pretty much unbannable, and is quite looking forward to the newly chastened women he thinks the sexbot revolution will create.
Somehow I don’t think that the disappearance of these guys from the dating marketplace is going to make many non-robot women all that sad.
See the rest of the thread for much more of the same, including gratuitous references to Anita Sarkeesian, attacks on non-STEM academic fields, and one dude who seems to have a sexual fetish for C-3PO.
H/T — A bunch of people sent me this one. Thanks!
EDIT: Added a link to the Reddit thread which I somehow had neglected to put in here.
My first attempt at posting a gif and I link to someone’s individual Pinterest account. Slow clap for me.
@Pandapool
I checked this out on Google. Color me stunned.
You know, Campaign Against Sex Robots, I think one excellent way to help assure that sex robots don’t add to real women’s objectification would be to NOT call it “prostitution” if someone pays to have sex with one. The word you’re looking for there is “rental.”
I’d like to think that sex robots could actually contribute to women’s re-subjectification. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where the only sex objects really are literal sex objects? And not, you know, people?
I also think both Manospherians and CASR would be shocked to discover just how much of a market there would be for sophisticated sex robot rentals for women. I mean, if it has a pretty shape, a nice voice and vibrating bits in the right places, all you need to offer women is a reasonable price and a discreet and clean opportunity, and you’d definitely have takers.
@Belle D
“I wonder, is any country trying the approach of decriminalizing individual sex work but criminalizing the fuck out of pimping? Maybe to the point of being super stringent about anything looking like a brothel?”
Yes, we have this in Latvia. To the point that there is an officially acknowledged street in Riga (the capital city) where prostitutes can hang around while waiting for clients. Brothels, on the other hand, are categorized as a form of sutenerism. However, the mechanisms for ensuring this law are often failing, as there is little ways to check if the prostitute’s income isn’t actually controlled by a pimp. Meanwhile, the brothels usually label themselves “massage salons”, and there is little the police can do, because erotic massage is not forbidden, and the line between e.m. and sex is not regulated.
@rv
Oh, surely it is a win for females. MRAs will totes be happy with their new toyz and leave us alone. No longer will they decry our sexual inhibitions/sluttiness, gold-digging/careerism, uptight demand that men wipe their asses/filthy slovenliness, etc.
Indeed, the menz will be always satisfied & we females will live our lives free of insults, catcalls, manipulation, dirty tricks, assaults, kidnapping, rape, and murder.
Thank you, rv, for pointing this out!
I thought this approach was fairly common in western countries. For example in Finland you can’t legally sell advertisement space for sex workers, or security or any other support services. Apparently you can’t knowingly rent a flat to someone who does sex work from home.
We haven’t technically criminalized clients, but recently the clients are required to ensure (beyond reasonable doubt) that the sex worker isn’t a “victim of human trafficking or procuring”. Procuring technically includes what I described above. It remains to be seen whether this is remotely enforceable.
Most major sex work organizations push for the decriminalization of all sex work related activities, including brothels. Which makes sense to me?I’m not aware of any other industry where we tell workers me “sure, you can keep working, but I’m going to need you to do it outside and completely alone. You know, for your protection.” How is that helpful?
BTW, while sex trafficking and procuring are crimes and there’s plenty of victim rhetoric around sex work, Finnish justice system has been really slow to recognize even actual trafficked sex workers as victims of a crime, rather than witnesses to crime.
It’s not that long since everybody thought, “we don’t need a law against human trafficking because that only occurs in sex trade and is already covered by our anti-procuring laws”. There was some international pressure, and a law was introduced. Then we suddenly noticed that a) trafficking is also common in construction and restaurant business and b) trafficked sex workers might actually need victim protections, maybe.
I don’t know what kind of regulation is best for sex trade, but I do think I have some good basic guidelines:
1. Decriminalize sex workers, if you haven’t already. Also gay/trans/drug user ones.
2. Criminalize sex trafficking and fucking enforce against it.
3. Also treat trafficked workers like victims, not witnesses who just happen to be illegal immigrants in your country.
4. In police work, take seriously sex workers’ problems with violent clients and whatever random crime is committed against sex workers.
New Zealand has decriminalised sex work and extended legal protections to sex workers on the same basis as they do to any other workers. A woman recently sued the brothel owner where she worked for for sexual harassment *and won*. A worldwide first, I believe.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/9777879/Sex-worker-gets-25-000-over-harassment
People trying to use Japanese women as some kind of ideal of femininity that Western women have abandoned are somewhat funny to me, somebody who is somewhat familiar with Japanese culture.
Yes, the Japanese porn and sex industry are pretty prevalent. But not only is Japanese culture somewhat more conservative in nature than most, but there’s still a strong anti-foreigner bias in certain places, including their red-light districts. Word is that most red-light shops in Japan don’t admit foreigners.
Also, one thing that I occasionally hear about is that Japanese people refer to foreign men who come over to try and get a Japanese woman as “Japasen”, and it’s not supposed to be a compliment.
It’s funny to me that these men think any woman would be interested in a guy who would prefer to fuck an anthropomorphic fleshlight over a live human being. As if that’s anything but creepy and pathetic.
Like, go ahead, take your sexbot and never bother us again. Please.
@painteyelash
He knows where his breads buttered.
There is an ancient urban legend, once even told as fact by an eminent medical examination, about the man found dead with a tetanic grin on his face in the embrace of a vacuum cleaner, which was still on.
Examiner. My attention was momentarily diverted by a cat named Winston Churchill.
Well I mean if someone invented sexbots they would be band if they were ever made with enough intelligence to not want to be sexbots. But besides that they would just be sex dolls right? Which are already legal :p
There’s an evolutionary aspect here, right? One cannot, through a sexbot, propagate one’s genes. The MRAs could literally fuck themselves out of existence.
@SuitableQuill
Which sounds like a dandy idea to me. The only problem is that stupidity and assholery tends to spontaneously crop up elsewhere.
Remember the Maiden Aunt hypothesis: One can reproduce one’s genes not only by reproducing oneself but also by helping one’s relatives to reproduce. As a result, a society with a certain proportion of childless adults might be more effective, and therefore spread its genes more widely, than one where everyone is pumping out as many kids as possible.
I read a paper once which theorised that this is a possible genetic reason for homosexuality, and a reason why it comes up more often in younger siblings. It’s not a falsifiable hypothesis, of course, but it’s a cool idea.
@EJ
I know one reason why homosexuality is an evolutionary advantages is while the breeders are out breeding and caring for their own young, a same-sex couple can adopt offspring that has been abandoned or parent’s have died, meaning the offspring can survive and spread its genes to the next generation.
So… because women have demanded a role outside that of sex, with a side of unpaid housemaid, they no longer have anything to offer but sex?
It’s almost as if all the MRM thinks women are good for is fucking (over).
This sounds kind of like those forced 4-chan false flag things they do from time to time, like the “free bleeding” thing. And didn’t they do something about banning mothers’ day or something? Just something designed to sound ridiculous to create grist for the MRA outrage mill… I have a really hard time believing that anyone seriously, unironically has decided to campaign about sex robots that don’t even exist.
Seems to me that sexbots will provide a vital public service by limiting MRAs’ access to real women, thereby keeping them off the streets.
“I am so f***ing sick and tired of women dictating how I should act and feel…”
I feel this strange lack of sympathy, why is that… Oh yeah, because women put up with that crap from men millennia.
It is amazing to me that these guys spout the C word dozens of times in one hateful screed and still expect to be taken seriously. It amazes me more that they still expect to be taken seriously after making such a fuss over something completely hypothetical, something that is imagined- the possibility of sexbots. Not only are they making a fuss about something that is imagined, they are behaving like it is the end of the world that someone has misgivings about sexbots and their welfare. Not only are these guys hateful bigots, they have no grasp on reality.