When I first read this article, my initial reaction was... "So What?" One of my favorite recurring subjects on Cracked.com is the subject of how sex ultimately drives innovation. A funny theory is that it won't be human's motivation to solve some major world problem that ultimately drives progress towards advanced robotics, but human sexuality. People's desire to create something that advances their own sexual pleasure will ultimately drive our advances in robotics.
But my second response to this article was "how might sex robots impact violence against women.
Now, when you imagine a sex robot you're probably thinking of this:
(PICTURED: PAIN)
(PICTURED: PAIN)
But what we are actually talking about, is something like this:
(Pictured: Sadness)
Sorry, I don't want to start off by judging people:
(Pictured: Innovation!)
But yeah, that kind of looks like a woman. (How many beers before that uncanny valley starts to look like a an uncanny pothole?)
Ok, back on track. Lets get to the point. A simple web search reminds us of the impacts pornography has had on our culture. According to "Stoppornculture.org", after viewing pornography, men are more likely to report decreased empathy for rape victims, have increasingly aggressive behavioral tendancies, support rape myths to a higher degree, report anger at women who flirt but then refuse to have sex, and report increased interest in coercing partners into unwanted sex".
You may be a porn watcher, and this data may not describe you. To you I say, congratulations! However, you'd be lying if you said these results weren't correlated with the porn that is out there. 88.2% of top rated porn scenes contain aggressive acts. Usually, porn focuses on the pleasure of men rather than women.
These statistics (of which there are many more), are the result of men watching films with scripted narrative. Now imagine the effects were the pornography interactive.
The underlying ethical question that I believe Kathleen Richardson is asking is, how will an robotic sex doll (which by virtue of its marketing must be open to all sexual acts), impact violence against women. Regardless of your feeling on pornography, it is undeniable that porn crafts an unrealistic picture (or movie) of what real sex looks like. At the very least, the women in porn scenes (mostly) consent to what happens in those scenes. Even if you are watching a video where a character does something they don't want, at the very least someone could reasonably tell himself that the actress agreed to it. In that way, the most aggressive concepts of masculine sexuality are kept in check with morality.
With sex robots, there are two questions we have to ask ourselves. What are the repercussions for women when we have objectified them so much in pornography that they are now actual, physical objects? And finally, how does real sex begin to look when men are never challenged to think about the realism of what they are seeing? In a word where sex robots could potentially be as accessible as online pornography to adults, what happens when you actually own your sexual partner, and consent is a non-issue?
Perhaps they could create a robot that you had to get consent from. Maybe she'd say "you have to buy me dinner first!"
(Pictured: FIRST DATE!)
