Image by XKCD's Randal Munroe. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Canadian economics professor Marina Adshade brings a slightly tongue-in-cheek assessment of an evidently not tongue-in-cheek academic paper, Yeoman, Ian and Michelle Mars (May 2012). “Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism.” Futures Vol. 44: p.p. 365-371. Naturally you have to pay out the wazoo ($41.95, possibly Canadian) to read it.
As one might expect of people who write about the economics of sex with androids, the authors are wedged so far up the "no-sex" class paradigm only the bottoms of their toes can be seen. Here's their take on the impact of android sex on marriage dynamics. Emphasis mine.
Another implication is that android sex would change the dynamics within marriage. I personally don’t see wives happily waving their husbands good-bye as they head out to spend $10,000 on android sex (which is the 2050 price suggested in this paper) any more than I see husbands cheerfully sending their wives off to do the same thing.
But if they did, and sex with an android was acceptable within marriage, how might that change the way that couples negotiate? The authors of this paper argue that wives only have sex with their husbands in order to encourage them to help out around the house. Does access to android sex then mean that women have to go back to doing all the chores?
Source: Big Think Proxy
Righto then! "Wives," obeying Rule #1 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire, have no innate, independent libidos and so, claim the authors, being free of wanting sex because they're human beings and humans enjoy sex, "wives" are able to barter sex for things women "naturally" enjoy instead. Like help with chores!
Welcome to the malevolent, dehumanizing dominant paradigm of transactional (heterosexual) sex.
Note: In her review Adshade recites a list of things the authors say men and women would do with androids. There's no evidence the authors imagine married couples sharing androids with their partners. My guess is if you were to bring up the idea of group sex with androids the authors would blush and sputter that that would be perverted.
Note: If you've got access to an academic library you may be interested in reading the actual article. If so I'd be very interested in your impressions.
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I started reading this
Submitted by Mori (not verified) on Tue, 2012-04-10 06:44.I started reading this article via my university and halfway through I came upon the sentence, "We can love animals; we do love machines, so a logical next step is the proposition of having sex with one or even marrying one." Hmmm. If I hadn't been a little skeptical of this paper's logic when the third paragraph stated, "If the basis of this paper is science fiction, then there must be truth in the proposition as science fiction is a genre of fiction, of plausibility, in the context of the future", it certainly occured then.
As far as I can tell, the
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Tue, 2012-04-10 13:07.As far as I can tell, the University of Washington has this article (there are several journals called <em>Futures</em>, so it's not easy to be quite certain from the catalog). If so, it's available electronically, but you have to be on campus.
Did you ever read a story called "Helen O'Loy"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_O'Loy
I've always thought the main hook of that story was the moment when the reader realizes that, although it isn't openly stated, the robot must actually have a fake vagina (there's some line like "I couldn't give him children, but in <em>every</em> other way..."). Which, honestly, ewwwww. It's amazing how often science fiction writers think they're being all New Ideas and not seeing just how tied to their own era they are in their cultural assumptions.
I think your first link is borked.
“If android lovers programmed
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Wed, 2012-04-11 11:56.“If android lovers programmed to deliver are the gateway to the kind of mind blowing sex few people currently experience, it is likely that our attitudes to robot sex will change.”
Okay, that is the biggest damn if I've ever seen. It seems to me that if such technology were on the horizon, isolated elements of it would already have been adapted as sex toys. Has anyone even succeeded in building so much as a vibrator that feels like a tongue yet?
And surely mind-blowing sex starts within oneself anyway, and isn't going to happen just because of someone (something?) else's technique, however good? Particularly if the other person/thing can't in reality experience pleasure, when experiencing the partner's pleasure is half the point for most of us, and about ninety percent of the point for some. I don't think very many people would buy robot cats that would purr any time they liked (or if they did it would be as a replacement for another toy, not as a replacement for a real cat). The point is that the cat is actually happy -- otherwise a purring noise means nothing.
I suspect I would get more and more creeped out at this human-sized human-shaped Thing acting as if it could really have sex with me. Eventually it would seem more like rape. (Horrid thought: could androids be programmed to rape?)
On a calmer note, I liked the idea (in the comments at Adshade's blog) of a hair-styling robot. Given that I have dead straight hair (I'm not sure this would be as easy with curly hair), it's always puzzled me why I couldn't just get my hair cut the way I liked once and then have a computer analyze the varied lengths, so a robot could do it the same way next time.
Actually, on thinking it
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Wed, 2012-04-11 19:01.Actually, on thinking it over, I suspect the kind of guys who think androids can deliver mind-blowing sex are the kind who think the main ingredient of mind-blowing sex is A Girl Who Cain't Say No.