![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn an article entitled "Robots are potential tools to treat and study sexual behavior," MIT Media Lab researcher Kate Darling describes a variety of empathy experiments in which individuals were encouraged to hurt or even damage robots that were designed to look "cute." People reacted with horror and refused. Which is more or less what we'd expect from 80% of humanity.
It's the other 20% I worry about. A recent twitter thread described a young woman who had never learned to enjoy sex. "You know like when you come home and you're drunk, or you're too tired, or you don't feel like it, but he's there, and he wants to, so you just...kinda...let him." Her roommate gently schooled her on how fucked up that was. But lots of guys are like this. And that's the problem. In Laurie Penny's The Horizon of Desire, she writes that giving consent "... is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process," I immediately thought that a lot of guys don't want a woman's attention, that's too much work, to do the emotional labor which is, after all, her job, not his. They just want relief. They want to get off. The really shitty part of this is that dudes get and enjoy the pair-bonding hormones without having a vocabulary for why they should respond to them, and they completely lack any training or map for what they should do with them. Guys are told "You'll just know what to do," and we know that's not true.
Sex robots will probably exacerbate this problem. One of the largest groups pushing for them are traditionalists who want a tool to help them coerce women back into traditional roles and, if the women won't go willingly, will at least be an adequate substitute, until and unless we both teach human beings how relationships are actually supposed to work, and we construct robots that won't allow their humans to be quite so self-debasing.
It's the other 20% I worry about. A recent twitter thread described a young woman who had never learned to enjoy sex. "You know like when you come home and you're drunk, or you're too tired, or you don't feel like it, but he's there, and he wants to, so you just...kinda...let him." Her roommate gently schooled her on how fucked up that was. But lots of guys are like this. And that's the problem. In Laurie Penny's The Horizon of Desire, she writes that giving consent "... is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process," I immediately thought that a lot of guys don't want a woman's attention, that's too much work, to do the emotional labor which is, after all, her job, not his. They just want relief. They want to get off. The really shitty part of this is that dudes get and enjoy the pair-bonding hormones without having a vocabulary for why they should respond to them, and they completely lack any training or map for what they should do with them. Guys are told "You'll just know what to do," and we know that's not true.
Sex robots will probably exacerbate this problem. One of the largest groups pushing for them are traditionalists who want a tool to help them coerce women back into traditional roles and, if the women won't go willingly, will at least be an adequate substitute, until and unless we both teach human beings how relationships are actually supposed to work, and we construct robots that won't allow their humans to be quite so self-debasing.
