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Designed by men, for men: Why sex with robots does not have appeal among women
(english.elpais.com)
Speak for yourself. Gimme that drama free dick.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Technology
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In these sexual relationships, availability and consent will always be taken for granted, something that’s never taken for granted in a sexual relationship with another human being.
People could get used to interacting in a way in which the other person isn’t taken into account as much, meaning that sexual partners could be instrumentalized for the purpose of having sex. That is to say the ‘human-humanoid’ interaction could be transferred to the relationship between two human beings.
…
Unfortunately, however, these advances aren’t being accompanied by deep reflections about the consequences that sex with robots can have.
never taken for granted
In healthy relationships anyway
They don't ~~that~~ have that much appeal to me as well, and I'm a dude.
[off topic]
From the movie Cherry 2000. In the movie the hero has just lost his sex robot and is trying to date human women for the first time in a while.
It's a favorite campy classic of mine. I love bad movies.
I also think it's one of those films with a great idea but terrible execution that could be remade.
I want to see a remake where Cherry 2000 actually has agency and consciousness and at the end of the film the two women run away together leaving the creepy guy behind.
I always thought a remake could have Chris Elliott as the creepy guy and he would kill it in such a role.
Sex with a hella sexy robot? Nice.
Using a hella sexy robot to fill the emptiness of no intimacy or authentic mutual connection? Not nice.
For some reason sex with a robot doesn't feel gross to me — until they start using it to fill a hole (hehe)
What about for people who struggle to have emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy throughout their lives because of medical issues or mental health issues?
My ex has a brother who is now pushing 40 and has never even held a woman's hand. He has severe mental disabilities and will never live life on his own without some kind of caretaker. We know he looked at porn, partially because he refused to ever let people fix up his computer, usually out of fear of people seeing his porn.
Does he not deserve emotional and sexual intimacy? There is a high likelihood he will never have it otherwise.
In this current age of western dating Sex Bots at least cut out all of the bullshit for many men and give you basic companionship with the perks of sex, which is a lot easier for some than dating.
I guess a vibrator isn't a type of sex robot?
Just saying that these sort of toys were way more normalized for women long before they were for men.
A man with a fleshlight was a gross weirdo, a woman with a vibrator is a strong independent woman taking control of her sexuality and not settling for the weakness of flesh in men.
This was my thought. Its the same way all our technology has grown. Honestly I think brain interfaces could eclipse robots like this before they are that great. As scary as that is.
Colloquially, the word "robot" always implies a certain amount of anthropomorphism. So no, I don't think a vibrator would count, as basically no vibrators on the market try to look human-like.
But that definitely is a weird difference between male and female sexuality - the sex toys women buy most are the very effective and utilitarian ones: Vibrator wands, Rabbits, Air pulse Vibrators etc.
While the most popular tools for men tend to focus on "realism"(?): Fleshlights, Sex Dolls, things like VR and POV porn. And I guess sex robots would fall into that category too in the future.
I can absolutely see the weirdness-factor of someone who is desperately trying to emulate a partner rather than just accept masturbation as a solo activity and optimize it from there 😬
A robot doesn't need to be anthropomorphic, an assembly line robot is still a robot. It does however need to be able to perform some actions autonomously, for which a vibrator hardly qualifies.
It does however need to be able to perform some actions autonomously, for which a vibrator hardly qualifies.
Fuck Machine has entered the chat
An assembly line robot (like welding or material handling, I've worked with ABB, Fanuc, Motoman, Panasonic) are still called robot "arms" with the end portion often called the "wrist" so there is a degree of anthropomorphizing even if it's not the whole body. And they do resemble an arm, however with 6 axis motion the motion is more like from your hips to your wrist than shoulder to wrist.
Overpriced pornstar-branded fleshlights aren't the only masturbators in town and it's not like there's no life-like dildos either. The long and short of it is that the mechanics of a lubed hole are superior to that of a hand and you're not looking at the entry point all the time so noone actually cares what they look like.
Yes, the branded stuff does exist, humans, male female, doesn't matter, enter parasocial relationships news at 11. Can you imagine how well Justin Bieber dildos would sell.
Of course this is a thing lmfo.
Dildos and vibrators were first a medical devices for hysteria.
Dildos have been around a lot longer than that. https://allthatsinteresting.com/history-of-the-dildo
My understanding is that "hysteria" legitimized the use of the vibrator (not unlike how "weight loss" was used in the 1980s to prescribe fentanyl), but they were around before that, and probably would have found another way of entering the mainstream.
Make robots look like bears or dolphins?
Holy shit
But FREE browsing! How revolutionary.
I've seen this more and more, it's fucked up and probably illegal
Think I've seen this twice now in the past couple years, but yeah it's likely not compliant with the cookie law in EU
This is perfectly legal, the law only says that the user must freely choose to allow the website to save said data. You can opt out here and not use that website.
Lots of German Web sites do it.
Illegal where? What law does it break?
In EU with their GDPR/cookie laws. I’m pretty sure hiding the declining of tracking or cookies behind a paywall is not supported under those laws.
I wish. In the end it all depend on how individual countries interpret the EU law. In France it was decided that "either let us shit all over your privacy or pay a subscription" was okay and in the spirit of the law.
It's bullshit IMO, but lots of sites ran with it. So those I refuse to interact with now.
This is very common in the EU. The majority of news sites do it. I believe it's technically legal because they aren't under obligation to provide a free access at all
It’s not but I guess they know that nothing really happens to them doing this.
1984
Idk what's the big deal, honestly. Remember the memes about yt premium, "I either give you my money, or my data, but not both"? Well, it's kinda like that. The caveat is, their payment provider likely still collects data, and some info is saved on the backend anyways, but that's another can of worms.
Asshole design is asshole design. They're essentially saying here that they'll sell your data whatever you choose, opting out is not an option.
Obviously there's easy ways to bypass this but it's not an excuse for them
Edit: also, their "cookie (and data sharing ) policy":
Clicking on "accept cookies" you're agreeing WAY more than implied
To me it looks more like they're saying they'll monetize their work no matter what, tho. One way is through direct payments by those who consider their articles worth paying for, then they don't need to sell userdata or show ads; the other way is selling userdata. Well, there's also non-targeted advertising, but mb it doesn't worth as much or something (and targeted ads already pay close to nothing from a single viewer, afaik).
Where I personally draw the line is when such subscriptions still include ads (looking at you, "ad-free" disney+) or have unnecessarily large costs and so on. I mean, if they charge close to what they're making with ads and selling data, we could get most websites ~tracker-free for probably a couple of bucks a month each. This, in turn, lessens the power of ad network owners, which again makes the web better. Although, mb I'm idealizing too much, idk.
Just enable reader view in your browser.
All it took was one search to find plenty of contradictions to that post title.
I thought onlyfans was the cheap and easy desire "fast-food"-like product for women. Or instagram or whatever social media gives people the impression of being center stage. Not robots.
Isn’t the answer quite obvious?