And there is an important role that the digital plays in navigating this new terrain. Digital media has played a huge role during the pandemic but, in terms of certain types of intimacy, I don’t know if it’s the same as bodies in spaces. I don’t think digital media always produces a diminished form of authenticity but outside of social distancing the overwhelming tendency has been for digital and physical intimacy to be entangled in different configurations in different cultures. It will be interesting to see how the human desire to be physically connected to other people, in a space with each other, will play out during the remainder of the pandemic. It will be interesting to see what happens in a post-pandemic world and what role technology will play in our intimate lives.
MY QUEER LOVE BOT
JENNIFER POWER
There is a scene in the Marvel film Guardians of the Galaxy 2 where Yondu, a space pirate with blue skin, stands at a window and zips his fly while pitching an anxious stare into the distance. It’s snowing outside. Behind him, several robot courtesans (aka Love Bots *employed* at the Iron Lotus brothel on the red-light planet Contraxia) wander past. One is sitting on a bed twirling her hair. She looks sad. Yondu turns to watch with vague disgust as she manipulates the panel on the side of her head and switches herself off, seemingly for a post-coital rest.
The Love Bots of Contraxia are styled like femme rockstars, albeit somewhat depressed rockstars with yellowy skin—clearly dressed to entertain the parade of uber-masc space Ravagers who come to Contraxia for ‘time out’. The Love Bots are all leather corsets, shiny neck collars, thigh high boots, green lipstick and thick mascara. They each hold the same absent expression.
It strikes me that the Love Bots of Contraxia epitomise contemporary images of sex robots. In recent years the media has regularly baited us with headlines inferring the imminent possibility that human-like androids created for sex and driven by artificial intelligence will soon be commonplace. The UK Mirror recently ran with the headline “Lifelike sex robots that ‘have a heartbeat’ and ‘breathe’ could go on sale this year” (Best, 2020). Sex robots, sometimes referred to as sex bots, erotic bots or erbots, sit on a bizarrely fine line between science fiction, reality, and voyeurism that is both fascinating and ethically disturbing. Perhaps most disturbing is that common media depictions of sex bots draw on the darkest imagery of sex work—the bots are essentially positioned as sex slaves (or at best, a pimped-up Stepford Wife). Like the Love Bots of Contraxia, the sex bots we are currently being promised are almost always styled to engage the stereotype of cisgender, heterosexual male desire—white skinned Barbie dolls with large breasts and passive, wide-eyed stares. Always available for sex.
Bots in Servitude
Robots, like all machinery, are created to service humanity. In servitude, bots will (or already do) land in places where humans serve other humans—domestic ‘help’, harsh work in heavy industry, repetitive factory tasks, and in sexual services. When created for sex, bots have potential to be the ultimate sexual partner. They can be programmed to do anything, be anything, and fulfil fantasies that are beyond the capacity or desire of humans. Sex bots might also play a role in love and nurture—providing companionship to otherwise lonely humans or people who can’t, or don’t want to, seek intimacy in human company.
Sex bots could take any form, but reality bites in gender and cash. In a world where sex is sold for profit, most sex bots, like latex sex dolls before them, are designed in a way that is highly gendered (an interesting queer presupposition in itself given the gender of a bot has no biological basis) presumably to ensure their marketability. Sex bots have been prescribed with the image that many mainstream commercial sex services tend to favour—passive women, women in service of men, women whose bodies exist only for the pleasures of men and profit. Moral and ethical concerns with the representation of women via sex bots have led to calls for them to be banned. It is feared that such representations will further entrench sexual exploitation of women and fuel sexual violence. Calls for a ban often focus on the murky ethical ground of the representation of sexual assault against women via ‘female’ sex bots programmed to resist sex and enact rape scenes (Danaher et al, forthcoming, Sparrow 2017).
Misogynist representation of women is undoubtedly a reason to cast a critical lens on the question of what sex bots mean for women, humanity and ethical sex. However, a blanket rejection of sex bots based on the assumption that they can or will only ever be objects that represent the sexual denigration of women, risks falling into a highly sex negative paradigm—a stance aligned with calls for an outright ban on pornography, a position that shuts down any space for feminist or queer porn and disavows women’s desire for porn (Kubes, 2019). It also shuts down the possibility that bots could come to represent different forms of gender and sexual expression.
Theoretically, bots could be integrated into creative, democratic, feminist, queer positive and sex positive cultures in the way that other objects designed for sex, such as the dildo, have been. Dildos are arguably a symbol of queer-ness, although this is by no means their origin. Dildos are an ancient technology that, in different forms, has been part of many different cultures across the world. Their use has been prescribed to treat female pain, hysteria, trauma, sexual dissatisfaction and loneliness. Female pleasure is one small part of their history. Dildos are a product of heterosexist culture, reflecting the centrality of the phallus and penis/vagina intercourse in expectations of heterosexual sex. They marginalise other forms of sexual expression and ignore the clitoris as the main locus of pleasure for many women (Das, 2014). However, culturally, dildos are also objects of fetish and perversion. Strap-on dildos are a symbol of resistance to female passivity—objects that queer gendered bodies, challenge traditional sexual scripts, and acknowledge penetration as a source of pleasure for heterosexual men (Das 2014). The form of the dildo is both central and immaterial to its cultural status—its basic form has not changed substantially for centuries. But in a weird paradoxical twist in its narrative, appropriation of the dildo into queer culture and queer representation means that it is concurrently a symbol of female oppression and a symbol of queer liberation.
Sex bots of course differ from dildos in that they overtly reflect human form and mannerisms. Potentially (perhaps in the near future) a sex bot will be a machine that looks like us, talks to us, laughs, cries, and responds to our touch. A dildo can be ‘queered’ by the cultural context in which it is located and the person/s to whom it is attached. Can we say the same for a human-like sex bot? Can a human-like sex bot be ‘queered’? If we went to the designers and manufacturers of sex bots with a list of requests for our queer sex bot, what would that be like?
How to Design a Queer Sex Bot
Perhaps