Love and Sex with Robots_The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships

by David Levy

  “A mutual adult consent meet. No bullshit about it.”

  “It’s a completely business transaction.”

  “The beauty, I think, of paying for it as opposed to picking up somebody is that I feel I didn’t need I need to repay the favor. I didn’t need to pleasure him. I could just lie there and absorb it all. If I’d wanted him to go down on me for the entire two hours, then I could have said it and he would have done it.”

  “It is so much easier than having to go out and pick one up, and then if that’s all you want, you’re left with him there and you can’t get rid of him without being extremely rude.”

  “I tend to go for long periods without sex, basically. Not through choice, but through not finding anyone I fancy. So I find I end up in relationships for two or three months with complete assholes just to have sex.”

  The Future of Prostitution

  With women only recently beginning to swell the number of clients of prostitution, the world’s oldest profession is currently thriving and showing every sign of continuing to do so. A study on sexually transmitted infections found that the number of men in Britain who have paid for sex had almost doubled between 1990 and 2000. Of 11,000 men interviewed in 1990, 5.6 percent admitted to having paid for sex. By the year 2000, the figure was more than 9 percent.

  I do not believe that this trend will continue forever. Robots will be able to satisfy the myth of mutuality for people of both sexes, to provide variety, to offer sex without complications or constraints, and to meet the needs of those who have no success in finding human sex partners. And for those women who are joining the ranks of today’s sex tourists, beautifully toned malebot bodies can be made to order, with whatever vital dimensions are desired.

  When sexual robots are available in large numbers, a cold wind is likely to blow through the profession, causing serious unemployment. As long ago as 1983, the Guardian reported that New York prostitutes “share some of the fears of other workers—that technology developments may put them completely out of business. All the peepshows now sell substitutes—dolls to have sex with, vibrators, plastic vaginas and penises—and as one woman groused in New York, ‘It won’t be long before customers can buy a robot from the drug-store and they won’t need us at all.’”

  Paid Sex Surrogates as Therapy

  Sex surrogacy isn’t for everyone, but it seems that trying to resolve serious sexual dysfunctions just by talking them over is like learning to drive a car by reading about the history of automobiles. You have to practice.

  —Randy Lyman23

  In 1970, William Masters and Virginia Johnson published their pioneering book on sex therapy, Human Sexual Inadequacy. They had developed a successful method of treating sexual dysfunction by suggesting that patients be engaged physically rather than just verbally, thereby creating the basis for modern sex therapy. Their method was to work with the couple, teaching both partners about their bodies and their sexualities. In this book they also described their successful treatment of single men. The only difference between their couples method and the approach required to help single men was that in the latter case the place of the woman in a couple was taken by a surrogate partner, thereby enabling men who did not have partners available to participate in the Masters-Johnson couples-therapy programs. The practice of professional sex surrogacy deserves a place in this chapter, because it is another example of paying for sex, albeit for reasons that are different from those that encourage people to employ the services of prostitutes. Yet the reasons for hiring surrogates to help treat sexual dysfunction will, with time, add to the reasons for indulging in sex with robots.

  Surrogate therapy is a three-way process, with many of the sessions involving the client, the surrogate partner, and the patient’s therapist. It is the therapist who decides when the client is ready to work directly with the surrogate on their emotional and sexual problems, who introduces the client (usually male) to the surrogate (with the therapist present), and who consults with the surrogate when the therapist feels that the client is ready for intimate and private contact with her. And while the client is attending sessions with the surrogate, he is still being counseled by his therapist, who is also in regular contact with the surrogate.

  The treatment process is designed to develop the client’s skills at physical and emotional intimacy. All of the most common sexual dysfunctions and their causes can be treated by surrogate-partner therapy, including premature ejaculation, nonconsummation of a relationship, erection difficulties, performance anxiety, and fear of intimacy. The surrogate and the client typically progress through a series of “structured exercises in relaxation, introspection, communication, nurturing, and sensual and sexual touching.”24

  Sex surrogacy is bound to be controversial, because it involves sex as a paid activity. But physical sexual activity is only a relatively small part of the surrogate’s typical duties during the therapy process. Raymond Noonan, whose thesis for his master’s degree is the standard work on sex surrogacy, surveyed 54 sex surrogates and found that the average surrogate spends approximately 34 percent of the session time talking with the client, in order to provide sexual information, reassurance, and support. Almost half of the time (48.5 percent) is spent on experiential exercises that involve the body, but in a nonsexual way, teaching the client how to feel, how to be aware of the sensory input during sexual encounters. Only 13 percent of the session time is typically spent on physical sexual activities: intercourse, oral sex, and sexual techniques.

  In regard to the controversy that attaches to sex surrogacy, Noonan emphasizes that although “the use of surrogates remains controversial, with complex legal, moral, ethical, professional and clinical implications,…when performed under the supervision of a licensed therapist, [surrogacy] is completely legal throughout the U.S.”25 And in the online magazine InnerSelf, Barbara Roberts points out that “the fact that money is paid for the services of a prostitute, a sexual surrogate or a sex therapist is not the issue. We live in a society where monetary exchange for goods and services is the rule. The intent of those who insist on comparing sex surrogate assisted sex therapy with prostitution is to demean and discredit both. It is a reflection of our basically repressive culture regarding sexuality.”26

  As a profession within the therapy profession, sex surrogacy has never taken off in a big way, though it does boast its own professional association, the International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA), with its own code of ethics regarding the welfare of both client and surrogate. It appears that in 1977 Masters and Johnson abandoned the recommendation of sex surrogacy, most probably because of a severe nationwide lack of surrogates. Noonan estimated that in 1983–84 there were only about three hundred surrogates practicing in the United States, most of whom were in California and most of the others on the East Coast, but despite the small number, this appears to have been a peak time for the profession, partly because of the subsequent fear of AIDS and partly because most therapists are afraid to recommend the use of sex surrogates to their clients in case of an eventual legal action should the client contract a sexually transmitted disease in the process.

  One obvious application of sex surrogacy is in the initiation of young men into sex, a task that in Europe at least has often been the remit of a prostitute. Barbara Roberts, who is a practicing surrogate in California, has found that sex surrogacy has begun in a small way to take on this burden:

  In modern Western societies the messages about sex are extremely contradictory and confusing. We have no traditional rites of passage nor meaningful ceremonies to initiate young people into informed adult sexuality. I hoped that my work might establish standards that could help people of all ages have less confusion about sex and intimate relationships.

  Much to my professional satisfaction, there were several enlightened parents who paid for a full course of sexual surrogate assisted therapy so that their sons could be initiated into the wonders of their own sexuality. How lucky to have been those young men’s
girlfriends or wives! I often wished that parents would take that same enlightened view toward sexual initiation for their daughters, but it was not yet the time for that. I predict, however, that this day will eventually come.27

  Clearly, sex surrogacy has great potential as a method of treatment, because of the caring, sensitive manner in which a good surrogate can approach the client’s sexual problems. The UK Sexual Healing Centre in Bedfordshire* has achieved a high degree of success in treating premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, and the inability to consummate a relationship, and a lesser though still significant improvement in resolving the underlying psychogenic causes† of performance anxiety and fear of intimacy. But despite the proven benefits of surrogacy, the paucity of human surrogates currently militates against this form of treatment’s becoming mainstream. The solution to this problem should not be difficult for the reader to spot. It is to employ robots as sex surrogates, programming them with the necessary psychosexual knowledge, teaching skills, and humanlike sensitivity.

  The Moral Justification of Paying for Sex

  Many people instantly dismiss the idea of paying for sex, often on the grounds that it is in some way immoral, or because of the commonly held view that only sex with someone with whom one shares genuine affection can be a worthwhile and enjoyable experience. The purpose of this chapter has been to highlight a number of morally valid reasons that paying for sex can be justified, and to demonstrate that for those who do pay for sex, whether frequently or rarely, it can be a positive experience even though they know that their sex object has no genuine feelings of affection for them. This indicates that those who consider experimenting by having sex with robots should have no qualms on the basis of the robot’s presumed lack of affection for them. Even if their robot exhibited no affection, whether genuine or otherwise, this is no reason to assume that the sexual experience will not be an enriching one for the human. And those who doubt the veracity of this assertion can find comfort in the knowledge that their robot will be able to exhibit affection for them at any desired level. It will all be in the software.

  7 Sex Technologies

  Vibrators Are a Girl’s Best Friend

  Anyone who has doubts that women will find it appealing or even possible to receive the most incredible, amazing, fantastic orgasms, courtesy of sexual robots, should think again. Think vibrators.

  The electromechanical vibrator was invented in the early 1880s as a means of fulfilling a task that hitherto had been accomplished by physicians and before them by midwives. It had been recognized for at least two millennia, and described in medical texts going back that far, that women suffer from a variety of complaints particular to their sex, complaints that collectively went under the name “hysteria,” from the Greek for “womb disease.” It was also recognized that the most efficacious remedy for hysteria was to bring the patient to orgasm, a task that fell to the medical profession. In The Technology of Orgasm, a fascinating and comprehensive account of the history of the vibrator, Rachel Maines quotes a 1653 medical text by Pieter van Foreest that recommends the following:

  When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, erocus, or similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.*

  This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen* and Avicenna,† among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious, as Gradus‡ proposes; it is less often recommended for very young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is better to engage in intercourse with their spouses.1

  Why not simply recommend masturbation to women? A very good question. The answer is simply that sexual mores dictated masturbation to be a sin, but it was fine when exactly the same act was performed by a midwife or physician!

  Thus, for centuries, the manual massage of women’s genitalia was a task frequently undertaken by doctors and midwives, though some physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries recommended instead horseback riding combined with up to three hours of massage as a method whereby young women could achieve orgasm. All sorts of devices were devised throughout the centuries in attempts to make this task easier and quicker to perform, many of them being manually operated—water-powered and steam-powered devices—which required some measure of skill and effort by their operator. Furthermore, these devices were often heavy, unreliable, and relatively inconvenient to use. Clockwork vibrators, for example, tended to run down rather quickly, and often just at the moment when the woman needed them most, while a steam-driven vibrator invented in the United States in 1869 was inconvenient for doctors to use because they repeatedly had to shovel coal into its boiler.

  By the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, physicians had pushed out midwives from this function, realizing that bringing their female patients to “paroxysm” was a nice little earner that added to their regular incomes. It was then that serious demand grew for machines to facilitate the task. Many physicians devoted most of their working week to this aspect of their profession, and the number of women a doctor could service using a machine was significantly greater than the number he could cope with manually. Any physician whose consulting rooms boasted a vibration device for this purpose could therefore increase his turnover of patients and hence his income.

  The successors to the clockwork and steam generations of vibrators were electrically operated and therefore considerably more effective than their precursors, and once they became available, it was possible through their use for women to experience multiple orgasms. The first electromechanical vibrator was a battery-powered device invented in 1883 by Joseph Mortimer Granville, a British physician. He had previously experimented with clockwork percuteurs,* “but except for the treatment of neuralgia—and in bad cases of that intractable malady—I do not recommend these instruments.”2

  GRANVILLE’S CLOCKWORK PERCUTEUR

  Granville’s annotated drawing of his clockwork device is accompanied by a description of how it is operated. In the illustration, D is the pivot used to wind the clockwork mechanism. When the percuteur is wound, a pointed ivory hammer (B) makes percussive movements on the appropriate part of the body, though instead of the ivory point, a flat-headed hammer or brush can be substituted. C marks an ivory button—while this is pressed by the finger, the hammer continues in action, and when the pressure is released, the hammer stops. The other button, marked A, causes the length of the stroke to be increased and the speed of vibration slightly reduced, while at the same time the force of the hammer blow is augmented.

  Granville explains that “the percuteur worked by electricity is, in every way, superior to the clockwork instrument, except as regards portability. In consulting-room practice, the electric instrument answers every purpose most efficiently. The general practitioner will, however, need to provide himself with the clockwork percuteur for use at his patient’s house; and, as I have said, although seemingly very weak in its blow, and troublesome, because it requires to be frequently wound, it is by no means ineffectual.”

  THE PERCUTEUR WORKED BY ELECTROMAGNETISM, AND THE BUNSEN’S BATTERY, AS SUPPLIED BY WEISS & SONS

  The electromagnetic version of Granville’s percuteur went into production in Britain in 1889, manufactured by Weiss & Sons Instrument Manufacturing Company. The terminals of a battery were connected by cables to the vibration device at its terminals, marked E. F was the on/off button. Two screws, marked A, could be adjusted to alter the movement of the hammer, for example by changing its rate of vibration. The screw marked B was for attaching different hammers and brushes to the instrument to create different sensations in the patient. C was a brass cylinder through which the rod of the hammer or brush passed. D was a tube, made of vulcanite,* which was attached with a screw and regulated the length of the stroke made by the hammer.

  Accompanying the instrument was a set of hammers and brushes of different sh
apes, sizes, and purposes, as shown here.

  HAMMERS AND BRUSHES EMPLOYED WITH THE ELECTRIC PERCUTEUR

  There is a bent hammer, marked 1, large and small discs (2 and 3), a hard brush (4) that Granville described as “very effective,” a light brush (5) “for relief of superficial pain and to redden the surface,” a pointed hammer (6), and a flat-headed hammer (7).

  Granville went to considerable lengths to profess that his invention should not be employed as a means of sexual relief for women, but instead recommended that it be used only on the muscles of men:

  I should here explain that, with a view to eliminate possible sources of error in the study of these phenomena, I have never yet percussed a female patient, and have not founded any of my conclusions on the treatment of hysterical [fe]males.* This is a matter of much moment in my judgment, and I am, therefore, careful to place the fact on record. I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state or the characteristic phenomena of mimetic disease.3†

  Granville further emphasizes his protestations in the conclusion of his book:

  I do not, because I cannot, strongly urge recourse to the method in a considerable number of troublesome afflictions in the treatment of which I have not yet had any large experience of its use. Among these may be mentioned hysteria and the mimetic diseases, and disorders of the sexual organs….

  But in the very next paragraph, before going on to recommend the use of his instrument in the treatment of epilepsy, Granville admits “that the memetic diseases may be successfully treated by nerve-vibration, I have little doubt.”

  Thus, to all appearances, Granville was distancing himself from the suggestion that his invention could be employed for the sexual arousal and satisfaction of female patients. It does seem inevitable, however, that once Granville had mentioned these possible but nefarious uses of his invention, others would try out these uses. Cynics might therefore suggest that drawing the attention of his medical colleagues to these possibilities in his book was precisely what Granville intended with his description of how the machine functioned. Certainly, the medical profession in the United States and other countries was quick to realize the delightful effects that the invention could produce in women, firmly establishing the vibrator as a must-have item for many. Those women who would frequently visit their doctor for sexual relief could now economize by purchasing a vibrator, since the cost was no more than that of a few visits to the doctor.