Er, Lady-friend robots, again

(The “again” is because I had previously posted on a similar article, and, yes, I’m heistant to put “sex” right up their in the blog title.)

From Ann Althouse, a link to a New York Times article about sex robots.  It’s the usual genre, of seeming to treat robots as sentient, and capable of being harmed (“But it is also illegal to have sex with an adult woman who does not consent, and consenting is not something these robots are capable of”) and, in its final concluding paragraph, seeming to fail to understand the difference between what’s imaginary and what’s real:

“There’s a basic human right that everybody’s entitled to a sexual life,” Professor [Noel] Sharkey [co-author of the report, Our Sexual Future with Robots] said. But is the basic human right to a sexual life the same as a universal entitlement to a young, attractive woman? Because that is what it is being subverted into here.

There is a big difference between the right to dignity and privacy, the right to consensual sexual activity, and the idea that every man has some fundamental right to a woman’s body. By replicating women as realistically as possible, this is what such robots attempt to provide — down to every detail except the pesky necessity for an actual woman’s consent.

In making this statement, Sharkey seems to be saying that men simply don’t have a right to a sex robot, because the female sex in some way collectively has a copyright, almost, on the female shape and the experience, however artificially simulated, of having sex with a woman.

Now, to be sure, prior to this sweeping statement, Sharkey and the Times‘ author Laura Bates make a specific claim about the impact of sex robots:  in the same way as

Research has shown that heterosexual men who are exposed to pornography and men’s lifestyle magazines and reality TV programs that objectify women are more likely to be accepting of violence against women.

so, too, the ability to purchase and “rape” a sex robot is, they believe, will cause men to be more predisposed to act violently or abusively to actual woman.

Is this a valid concern?  It’s the same issue as with hand-wringing over whether first-person shooter video games will cause kids to become violent, about which everyone can cite a study that proves what they want to believe.  (As a mom, I draw the line for my own kids, at whether they’re shooting at robots or clear humans, and whether the shooting causes blood and gore or just a Star Wars-style collapse to the ground.  It’s arbitrary, I know.)  Yet at the same time, bondage is supposedly increasingly mainstream, or, at least, added to the category of “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” and I have not read any feminist writers complaining that consensual bondage will cause men (or women) to be more likely to be violent in other situations.

A further concept that the authors present, reading the actual report itself, (if I’m interpreting their point correctly) is simply that rape is so morally offensive that it is equally morally offensive to simulate rape:

Patrick Lin told us in an email (February 15 2016),

If robots don’t have rights, then they don’t require consent for us to treat them in a certain way, whether it’s kicking them or having sex with them. But again, we could still be obligated to seek consent, even if they don’t have rights. If it’s important to society that we teach people that sex requires consent, then it’s not absurd to build in those norms in human-robot interaction. We’re socially conditioning people to act in better ways. So, consent here isn’t about the robot per se, but it’s about what our action says to society.

Now, the authors continue on by imagining somehow “gaining consent” from the robot, which is a bit odd.  But it’s at least useful to see that they are evaluating the overall question of morality, rather than the question simply of what the government should or shouldn’t permit.  Because there are certainly real issues of morality, in the same way as there are already real concerns with men retreating to porn — and not just because it impacts their would-be or actual girlfriends (which is a real issue, per Rod Dreher’s “The Terrible Cost of Porn,” not for the squeamish), but because it prevents them from having a whole, meaningful life.

It’s a whole Theology-of-the-Body issue, about whether human sexuality is meant purely for physical pleasure, removed from the mutuality and self-giving of a committed (let alone married) relationship, and whether those relationships should be oriented toward the giving of pleasure to another or simply a reciprocal exchange oriented towards getting a sufficient amount of pleasure ROI.

But it’s also a social isolation issue.

A man who receives sexual gratification from a robot, and sensory enjoyment from a VR video game, would presumably become more socially isolated, which is problematic for society as a whole.  There are likewise repeated reports of men finding greater satisfaction in video games than “real life,” and studies attributing the decline in working hours to this effect (though, to be sure, (a) video games are not necessarily socially isolating; my middle son’s primary way to “get together” with his friends is virtual, chatting with them on his headset while he plays, and (b), I sometimes idly wonder whether the more crime-ridden parts of the country couldn’t benefit from more video games, to get those kids stuck in basements, or apartment bedrooms as an alternative to shootouts in streets).  And it’s not an issue of these men failing to “do their duty” by boosting the GDP and becoming marriageable; it’s an issue of their long-term well-being, even if they feel, at the moment, that their being is perfectly well playing video games to such a degree that it impairs their lives and their future.

But at the same time, there’s mix of cause and effect here:  as sex robot users would likely comprise, or at least, include individuals who can’t find companionship in the usual manner, and feel rejected by society for their general social awkwardness.  After all, for all of the lamenting that men are basement-dwelling losers, society is increasingly demanding from men top-notch skills in relationship-building and high earning potential, while we nurture women and girls and set men up as sexist villains.

Of course, I doubt that those who object to sex robots on feminist grounds see any of this.  They seem trapped in the narrow issue of whether a man has a “moral right” to own an artificial female body.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHelen_O’Loy_(Astounding_Fiction%2C_1938).jpg; By Ed Emshwiller [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons