Girl on the Net

“This is perhaps the closest I’ve got to one of my own ideas: that of a sex duvet made from soft and strokeable fabric that vocally rumbles as it is touched and that curls around me as I sink into it. My sex robot will be changeable at a whim: perhaps one day a bed made of breasts; another day, a series of vibrating and moving penises that talk dirty to me. Maybe sometimes both. Because that’s the joy of adaptable, personalisable sex robots that aren’t human, that aren’t gendered – they can just be what feels good at a particular time.” – Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots

When you think of a sex robot, what does it look like? Chances are you’re picturing something human-shaped. It will have limbs and a face and probably only one set of genitals. It’s likely to be a woman, even if your sexual preferences don’t tend towards women. Just as when you type ‘sexy’ into a Google image search, you’ll see a line-up of slim, young women, so when you google ‘sex robot’ the images will reflect broadly the same thing. Sex robots, in popular culture and in the imaginations of those who build them, are usually women, and very specific kinds of women at that.

But that’s not what sex robots have to look like, as evidenced by the fantastic one dreamed up by Kate Devlin in her new book Turned On, described above. I should say up front that I love Kate’s work, so it was inevitable that I would love her book, and I totally did. It takes you on a journey through the relationships humans have had with things like dolls and statues, the desires we want fulfilled by sex robots, the questions we ask ourselves about how we will (or should) relate to them, as well as some cool behind-the-scenes stuff about the modern sex robot industry. Each chapter is also illustrated with a gorgeous picture drawn by none other than Stuart F Taylor – the creative genius behind most of the images on this here blog. It’s a very fun book. You’ll finish it with a lot more knowledge than you started with, as well as a tonne of fascinating questions to pose to people when conversation dries up at parties.

You could open the book at pretty much any page and walk away with a question to ponder: humans may be able to love robots, but will robots ever love us back? What do we actually mean by the word ‘love’, as it applies to our relationship with objects? What are the ethical implications of creating robots to fulfil fantasies that are dangerous or taboo? How much like us do we even want robots to be anyway?

Kate’s spoken to lots of different people who have had a go at providing answers, but so many of the questions are still open, because when it comes to developing technology that we build relationships with, there are still so many possibilities. Given this, the key questions I want to ask – and I’d like you to ask, every time you see a news article with a headline like “Meet the man who test drives sex robots” or “Sex robots may literally fuck us to death” – are:

1. “What do these sex robots look like?” and
2. “Who are they for?”

What do sex robots look like?

In our collective imaginations, sex robots usually look like women… but they don’t have to. Highlighting the fact that they don’t have to is really important, because so many of the questions we ask about sex robots are prompted by our preconceived ideas about what they should be, and therefore who will use them.

Kate’s strokeable, shapeshifting blanket looks nothing like the sex robots that are used to illustrate our pop-culture discussion. My ideal sex robot would probably be something more like a swing to be suspended in, with multiple appendages that could be used to hug, touch, finger, fuck and spank me depending on what I fancied at the time. Given these non-humanoid conceptions of sex robots, let’s run through a few of our favourite sex robot questions…

• Is it cheating if you fuck a sex robot? Not really, it’s a blanket. A blanket that can shapeshift and grow dicks, sure, but far less likely to prompt feelings of jealousy in a partner than one which looked like a favourite celebrity or – God forbid – an ex.
• Will sex robots replace human partners? Probably not, if they’re dick blankets. Even if my dream sex robot, the intelligent fuckswing, could talk dirty to me, it’s unlikely that I would ever see it as a replacement for human warmth and comfort, because now it isn’t humanoid, it is genuinely difficult to get my brain around the idea of it as a ‘person.’
• Can sex robots withdraw consent? Why ever would it? This sex robot is essentially just a tool to please me, and let’s face it, it doesn’t look distressed or upset by what’s happening because – and I cannot stress this enough – it’s a dick blanket.
• Do sex robots encourage men to treat real-life women like sex objects? You know what’s coming here, I hope: no, because it’s a dick blanket (or a tit blanket, or a combination of the two, which creates a veritable forest of fun to roll around on). No one’s going to believe real, human women can do this, so the question becomes a nonsense.

These probably seem a bit trivial, but although right now it’s just fun to say ‘dick blanket’, I want you to keep the dick blanket in your mind when you’re chatting to people about sex robots. Because with this area of sex tech development, like so many other areas of sex, we’re in danger of falling down a ‘straight male gaze’ hole that it’ll be really hard to climb out of.

The possibilities for this kind of technology are so much broader than just ‘how close can we get to a robot that looks and acts like a human woman.’ In her book, Kate looks forward to a design-led phase of development, where we throw out ‘realism’ in sex robotics and instead embrace unique physical forms, far better designed to pleasure us than clunky, half-successful copies of what humans can already do. Sex toys have already gone through this change – by and large we don’t expect most toys to simply copy what human genitals look like: toys from Hot Octopuss to Tenga to Doxy to Zumio look nothing like what you’d find in your pants. They aren’t genitals – they’re tools to use.

If we’re not careful, all the thought and creativity will be poured into sex robots that reflect only a very narrow slice of human sexuality – that of the straight guy who wants to fuck a young, slim woman – and our sex robot landscape will look as skewed as the homepage of any major porn site.

Porn, sex robots and the straight male gaze

When we discuss the impact of porn on our daily lives, often the questions we ask are very… yeah I’m going to go with ‘cisheteronormative’ (i.e. centred around the idea that cisgender, heterosexual people are the only people who exist). They also make the assumption that men have ‘active’ sexuality – where they will pursue and desire sex – while women are mainly responsive to men’s needs. Does porn harm women by giving men unrealistic expectations? Does porn harm men because it’s just so sexy that they can’t help themselves, watching porn so much that it eventually causes their dicks to stop working? I often get asked about my thoughts on ‘porn’ as a broad genre, and almost every time the questioner is assuming that I know what they’re talking about: straight, mainstream porn of the type you’d find on the homepage of Mindgeek sites like Pornhub. And every time I have to say ‘well, it depends on what porn you’re referring to.’ Porn itself can be an incredibly varied thing, and there is porn catering to every different kink and quirk and sexual preference under the sun.

Porn, like most other sex stuff, has grown out of a society that relentlessly focuses on straight, male sexuality, and marginalises everything else. Sex robots are growing out of the same society, and so not only do most of the sex robots that are currently being manufactured aim to please the gaze of straight men, so our pop culture understanding, and the way we frame the sex robots debate, focuses on that narrow slice of sexuality too.

But if you were to split the world’s population into ‘straight men’ and ‘other’, ‘other’ would be the majority. Maybe in 50 years’ time we’ll understand that more thoroughly, and stop framing any and all sex stuff around these guys as default. But in the meantime what would help a lot is if we could start questioning the gendered assumptions we make about new forms of sex tech – including sex robots.

What does this sex robot look like? And therefore who is it for?

Like with every single aspect of human sexuality, the more we learn about it, the better we understand the sheer variety of human desire. The more apparent it becomes that the playing field is so much broader than we could possibly have imagined. In her book, Kate talks about experimental sex tech stuff – like the Goldsmith’s sex tech hackathon where ‘sex robots’ consisted of a series of inflatable plastic tubes, or a beautiful fanning peacock’s tail. And the further I got through the book, the weirder it seemed to me that sex robots are still usually seen as just poor copies of human women. Like with porn, our ideas are so deep-rooted in the past that we’re struggling to see the future. Kate’s book is an excellent way to start exploring other possibilities, and shake off some of the preconceived notions you might have around what a sex robot can – or should – look like.

So pick up a copy, learn more about our sexy robotic companions, and then commit yourself to asking the question: what do the sex robots we’re talking about actually look like? Who are they being made for? Sex robots aren’t limited by biology, the way humans are, so ask yourself: what choices have been made in the development of this? Who is being catered to, and who is being ignored? These choices matter – they form the basis of what technology gets built, who gets to use it, the questions we ask about it, and the very way we conceive of what a ‘sex robot’ could be.

If we keep asking these questions, and pushing for technology that’s more inclusive – more creative – than simply a copy of a thing that we think straight men might like, maybe one day we’ll have sex robots that do unique and magical things.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we’ll even get a shapeshifting dick blanket.

Cover of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots