This is a story about sex dolls — specifically, male sex dolls. By the way, totally NSFW.
I was horrified and offended. Not by the sex dolls, though, or the fact that some people really want these things — that’s fine, whatever floats your boat — but by a comment the owner makes. She’s asked by the reporter where these dolls are most popular, and she says “Texas, Minnesota, and Michigan…Republican states“.
I will have you know that Minnesota is not a Republican state.
I may have to sue for the damage to our reputation.
Last time Michigan went Republican for president was 1988.
Right, neither is Michigan.
Also, I’m pretty sure that’s nowhere near being the world’s first male sex doll, as the title asserts.
Not sure if anyone else is feeling it too but for me that doll is right in the middle of the uncanny valley.
They always are. This particular phenomenon was not one I wished to see manifest equally across the genders. >_<
Yeah, I felt the same way — it looks like having sex with a corpse. Which I am not into. At least the dolls will give the necrophiliac community a more acceptable outlet for their interests.
It’s a dildo with a body attached to it, PZ.
Having ‘sex’ with this kind of doll will involve a lot of imagination, just as with any other kind of masturbation.
Necrophilia is as relevant to this, as dismemberment fetishes are to dildos.
PZ:
I may be remembering wrong, it’s been a long time since one of your first posts on Real Dolls, but I don’t remember any comments like this over them. I think there’s a fair amount of bias shrieking in the back of brains over the dolls being male. It’s all toys, and while it seems to be a bit ooky but okay for dudes to have their real dolls, this is closer to playing necrophile. Right.
She might have meant it as a conjunction and not to elaborate on the list of states: “… (and) Repunlican states.”
And while both Michigan and Minnesota are pretty firmly in Democratic hands for presidential elections let’s be thorough and point out that Minnesota produced Norm Coleman, Tim Pawlenty and Michelle Bachman. Michigan outside of Detroit and Ann Arbor is basically Kentucky except with more militia groups.
Also Michigan elected the execrable governor…
While we’re on the subject, does this remind anyone of the new Westworld?
Someday these things will start moving…
@multitool: RealDoll is already working on robotics. They have some appropriately creepy videos on youtube.
Caine,
In this case, I think you are remembering wrong. Here are three threads on RealDolls, Fleshlights and other (semi) anthropomorphic sex toys. There’s PZ claiming that men who would build sexbots are “creepy and warped,” with “standards…so low that you will be satisfied with a vaguely anthropomorphic form with a hole to stick your penis in,” and saying that RealDolls in particular are “‘life-like’ (more like corpse-like).” There’s commenter Zibble saying, specifically in reference to men using female RealDolls, that “even if it should be legal to buy a Real Doll, it’s an obligation of society to pressure people into growing the fuck up out of the juvenile desire to want a lifeless sex partner. It is a signifier of some real fucked up shit”. (You were actually on that thread, disagreeing with him.) Other commenters argue that a man using a Flashlight is more problematic than a woman using a dildo, because “one looks at the people using fleshlights” and sees that they’re misogynistic types who actually want a substitute for a woman, whereas women who use dildos don’t feel that way about men.
So yeah, as a couple of commenters on those threads pointed out, I think the bias around here tends to be against men using female-shaped toys, whereas it’s more okay for women to use male-shaped ones. That’s partly because people worry about the first case feeding into male tendencies to objectify women, and partly because liberals aren’t immune to the mainstream patriarchal belief that a real man wouldn’t settle for anything less than an actual woman. (Whereas women aren’t “supposed” to like sex with men that much anyway, so they can’t be blamed for preferring a mechanical partner.)
Err, no. It’s not that I think either men or women should not have these things, it’s that they’re creepy and dead looking. A vibrator is one thing — humans have been using sex toys for as long as they’ve been around — but basically what these are is not a substitute lover, but a kind of inert corpse that doesn’t rot on you. And that goes whether it’s a male or female sex doll.
That’s where it gets weird, that people are spending tens of thousands of dollars on something that is more cumbersome and less functional than a Hitachi magic wand.
Maybe she’s basing that on self-admissions by the buyers, or on the addresses she’s delivering them to. The studies on which states consume the most and what type of pornography (using credit cards and internet searches for data) contradicts the words coming out of political mouths.
At least it’s not “Weekend at Bernie’s”…. {shudder}
There are a couple of novels (I forget the titles) where the first sentient robots are, in fact, in the sex industry. (The titles start with smaller-case I or e).
Such pioneers of AI would not get a favorable view of the human race.
In a 1981 novel by Stanislaw Lem (“Peace On Earh”) the robotic bodies are instead remote-controlled, providing a telepresence (for instance, for a prostitute who wants a separate body to interact with clients. Hygienic).
I know it’s like Velcro or Kleenex at this point, but Hitachi as shorthand amuses me. There’re so many better options now! Even Priceline’s helping normalize the presence of non-threatening, low-tech ones.
Frankly, while I must admit that it strikes me as a little odd from a personal standpoint (which is just my opinion and in no way should be considered a universal moral imperative) ), I am not concerned about people using sex dolls like this – in and of itself, it breaks no (sensible) laws and does no harm. It is not as though consent on the part of an anthropomorphic chunk of silicone is really an issue, and people may have all kinds of reasons for favouring this option over any alternative arrangement. For example, one can be absolutely sure that one’s doll will never be sexually or otherwise violent toward you, and is also somewhat unlikely to post intimate images of you online when the relationship comes to an end. For some people, that surety of personal safety would be a major consideration.
Indeed, I am even less concerned about women using male type dolls than I am about men using female type ones, since male form dolls don’t have the potential to feed into our society’s established malaise of the objectification of women and general male entitlement in the same way.
I’ve been saying for a while now that when the sex robot era actually arrives, despite the MRA fantasies, women are the more natural market for them than men. There’s already much more cultural acceptance of women using mechanical aids than there is for men. And for women, a bot is not capable of raping or hitting or emotional abuse, it can’t get you pregnant or give you an STI, it will go on as long as you need it to until you’re satisfied, and it will never demand a sandwich.
@15: “There are a couple of novels (I forget the titles) where the first sentient robots are, in fact, in the sex industry. (The titles start with smaller-case I or e).”
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Clockwork Girl and Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children and Neptune’s Brood are exemples that spring to mind of great novels where a sentient sex doll is the main character.
But I can’t think of one where they are the first sentient robots.
PZ,
So are a lot of children’s dolls, but we don’t assume that the kids are really hankering to play with corpses. Like Anders says, dolls and toys (sexual and non-sexual) are imagination aids. When they’re made more realistic in various ways, that moves them farther into the uncanny valley for some of us, but for others it just makes the imagination part easier.
I don’t see why we’d assume that a RealDoll user actually wants a corpse for a partner, any more than a blow-up doll user wants a weightless partner with no bones, or a Playboy reader wants a tiny two-dimensional paper girlfriend who doesn’t move. There probably are necrophiliac RealDoll users out there somewhere, because there’s everybody out there somewhere, but Ive never seen any aficionados suggest that as part of the appeal, even in conversations with each other.
That’s in the eye of the beholder; you don’t know whether they’re substitute human lovers until you ask the people using them. Stacy Leigh, who does really cool (and really unsettling) fashion/glamour photography with RealDolls, has talked to a lot of those people. She says, ”The more I delved into researching a doll to purchase, the more I realized that these dolls meant more to some people than mere sexual objects. I wanted to show the dolls the way the men who loved them saw them. I wanted to humanize the dolls. Because as far as I can tell, more people are feeling the pinch of technology and turning to surrogate relationships. Love dolls are the crude beginnings of robots, and something that looks so alive can trick the mind.”
People spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lot of things. A sports car is more expensive, more cumbersome, more dangerous and worse for the environment than a RealDoll, but I wouldn’t characterize everyone who owned a sports car as weird.
Ivo, I found the title.
It is “vN” by Madeline Ashby.