Verliefd op een robot (Fall in love with a robot)
By Mwenza Blell and Jamie F. Lawson
Sex robots may be coming to a bedroom near you, is that a good thing? Will people who have sex with robots fall in love with them? Will sex robots mean an end to rape? These questions mask a complex array of social attitudes and norms towards the whole business of sex and romantic attachment.
At their core, the questions are easy to answer: Firstly, no, sex robots will not end rape. Research has shown that rapists are not, by and large, people who lack consenting sexual partners, on the contrary. This is why rape is considered by many researchers and experts to be about power rather than sex. Yet the idea remains that it is a simple matter of frustrated desire and the idea has recurred in many places, most notably in David Levy’s 2007 book Love and Sex with Robots in which he claims widespread use of sex robots will end a whole range of complex social ills, including rape.
Secondly, yes, people will have sex with and fall in love with robots. Humans have already demonstrated that they can extend their romantic and sexual desires beyond the range of the exclusively human to the extent that it would be odd if they stopped at robots. Nikolai Tesla was in love with a pigeon. In 1979 a woman married the Berlin Wall. A gentleman in Washington state claims to have had sex with over 1,000 cars. Flick through the pages of the classic sexological work Psychopathia Sexualis and you will find countless examples of people attracted to objects rather than people. Point your browser at lovehoney.com and you'll find page after page of devices, mechanical or otherwise, which have been designed purely for humans to have sex with.
Of course, we don't tend to think of people as having sex with sex toys when they use them, particularly when they use them by themselves. We tend to think of that as masturbation, which is not commonly classified as sex - even when someone else is involved. But definitions of sex are not as straightforward as we might like to think, and very quickly get bound up in the way Euro-American society is organised. Most people, for example, tend to agree that penis-vagina intercourse counts as sex, but everything else, like mutual masturbation, is to some extent up for grabs. Penis-in-vagina sex is the traditional marker for that virginity loss, whereas the status of oral or anal sex are so unclear that people can, sometimes, engage in many acts of both without losing their virginity; which raises questions about how gay men and lesbians are meant to ever lose theirs. Queer people, in particular gay women, are routinely challenged, often by straight men, on the basis on whether or not they have had sex at all, if they have never had sex that involves a penis. It is as if the society in which we all live is strongly resistant to acknowledging that sex can take place in any form that does not involve a pair of complementary genitals: one penis, one vagina.
Even when it is acknowledged as existing, sex that doesn't involve that pairing is often thought of as being undesirable or dirty. What our society considers to be 'good' sex (i.e. sex that is morally acceptable) is sex that happens between men and women (just one of each, thank you), involving a biological penis going into a biological vagina with the ultimate aim of making babies. Any form of sex that is not these things, that is had for pleasure rather than for reproduction, has been and continues to be target of social disapproval. Society is uneasy about gay sex; it is disapproving of kinky sex, and it is very suspicious of sex with objects and machines. So it’s not in question whether it is possible for humans to have sex with or fall in love with robots, because that question has an obvious answer. What the questions are really asking is "can we tolerate humans having sex with and forming attachments with robots? Can we allow people who form these forms of attachment into our community? Do they get to be citizens in our sexual world?”
Read the published version (in Dutch) here: One World Magazine