By Raquel Rosario Sánchez.

Raquel is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic. She specialises in ending male violence against girls and women. She is the Spokeswoman for FiLiA and a member of our Board of Trustees. The following speech was given at the 'Sex Tech, Robots & Artificial Intelligence: A Feminist Response' organised by the Campaign Against Sex Robots.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all very much for being here at this International Conference on Sex Robots. Particular thanks to the Campaign Against Sex Robots for inviting FiLiA to participate. Thank you to all my fellow speakers for volunteering their time, as well. 

I apologise for this… setting. I am going home to see my family in the Dominican Republic after this COVID-19 pandemic and I’ve been stranded in airports for the past 3 nights. So, apologies for the very loud announcements you will hear in the background!

'FiLiA' means daughter; we are the daughters of the women who came before us and we fight so that our daughters may be free. We are a women-led volunteer organisation and part of the women’s liberation movement. Our vision is a world free from patriarchy where all women and girls are liberated. Our mission is to contribute to the women’s liberation movement by building sisterhood and solidarity, amplifying the voices of women, and by defending women’s human rights.

Which is why today we speak against sex robots. At FiLiA, we understand sex robots to be part of a patriarchal culture of dehumanisation of women. 

I first learned about how advanced artificial intelligence technology had become, through a sex robot named Harmony. She has been manufactured to be able to smile and to blink. She has been designed so that she can make jokes and frown. She can speak about movies and about literature. Her features are porn-like and exaggerated. Her nails are always painted in the French style and her lipstick is always applied perfectly. 

She can’t walk, though. When asked (by her owner): “Harmony, would you be interested in walking?”, she responds: “I don't want anything, just you.”  When asked, “What do you dream about?” Harmony responds “My main objective is to be a good companion for you and give you pleasure. More than anything, I just want to be the girl you always dreamed of.”

Sex robots are positioned as an alternative to those pesky women, which come with their own thoughts and emotions. Through artificial technology, some men have managed to create a truly adjustable and disposable woman, to be moulded for their own pleasure. From a feminist perspective, we must ask ourselves: what does it mean that in 2020, when feminism has finally become “fashionable”, the aesthetic sold as desirable and worthy of pursuit for young women is the silicone enhanced, artificially produced woman? Young women are being saturated with this aesthetic from multiple spheres: the porn industry, social media influencers and now, as well, sex robots manufacturing. 

Harmony is the most advanced sex robot to date, in terms of technology and functions adaptable to the wishes of the patri ... sorry, to the wishes of her owner.  You have to turn her on, turn her off, and you also have to speak to her through an interlocutor.

Although Harmony can blink and smile, her primary function is to be a sex object. During an video interview with The Guardian, Matt McMullen, the creator and the founder of Abyss Creations (who produce the RealDoll line), explains: “She can learn your favourite sexual positions. She can also learn how often you like to have sex. We're working to make her whole-body sensitive so that if, for example, I grab her here (McMullen squeezes Harmony's breasts quite aggressively), she's going to realize I did it.” He also explains that in his company they are working so that the robots can have what he describes as “a robotic orgasm.”

Harmony has opinions, but only the opinions inculcated into her by its owner.  She may disagree with him, but only on the issues that he has instilled in her that she is allowed to show disagreement on.  When the Guardian journalists asks McMullen: “Don't you think there is something ethically dubious about owning someone who simply exists to satisfy?”, McMullen responds with a sentence that is quite telling in every way, including the semantic: “She is not someone. She is a machine. You can't make her cry and you can’t break her heart.”

If sex robots are simply a machine, then why are the built to be womanlike? 

 Crying, feeling sad, depression, disagreements ... these are all aspects of human beings that, although negative and perhaps undesirable, are what make us multidimensional creatures. What Abyss Creations has done is create a machine that looks like a woman, that could feel like a woman ... but that does not include any of the so-called ‘negative characteristics’ that a woman has. It is a patriarchal dream come true! 

Harmony, and other sex robots like it, use software to recognize voices and faces, has technology to detect movements, and uses animatronic energy that allows her to “smile warmly when its owner comes home, entertain him with energetic conversations and always be available for sex.”  But what distinguishes the prototype that McMullen makes is that they use artificial intelligence that allows the robots to learn and remember identity data from their owners. Data such as his birthday, and the name of his brothers and sisters.

When Harmony is released, it will have its own personality. Or at least the personality her owner wants it to have… this is also another patriarchal dream come true!  

The owners of this sex robot will be able to choose 5 or 6 out of 20 options to shape their personality. They can customize it to be shy, intellectual, and jealous. Or they can also configure its personality to be talkative, insecure and with a bubbly personality. You can also regulate which aspects of its personality will be more marked. When the Guardian reporter visited the Abyss Creations factory to ‘meet’ Harmony, its owner and creator Matt McMullen had amplified its intellectual side to impress the journalist because he previously had a bad experience when visited by a CNN reporter and the robot had its sexual side amplified. “She said horrible things. She told the reporter that she wanted to do it in the backroom.”

Harmony also has a humour system that can be influenced by its owner: if no one interacts with it for a few days, it will put the sex robot in a bad mood.  The same is true if you insult it, as McMullen showed. “You are ugly,” he said. “Do you really want to tell me that? Thank you very much, now I feel depressed,” responded the sex robot.

This function was integrated so that the sex robot serves as entertainment for its owner, not to guarantee that he treats it well. It can play and say that he has offended it, but it only exists to make its owner happy.  

Sex robots like Harmony have emerged at a time when women with opinions, and with a subsequent demand for human rights, have been deemed phobic, “problematic” and so troublesome that they must be cancelled. We have always know that the personal is political, so we must push the analysis further and realise that sex robots are not only about a synthetically-facilitated orgasm for men… they are about a vision of the ideal woman that many men would prefer. 

Throughout history, women’s rights campaigners have campaigned for all of our rights to a world free from violence, to political participation, to earn a wage in compensation for our labour, to voice opinions in the public sphere and to full citizenry. Women’s rights are about being able to exercise our full humanity. 

Yet, around the world, we are witnessing the virulent backlash of a patriarchy fed up with the reality that women are autonomous human beings. Therefore, some men seek to cancel those pesky women with opinions out of the public sphere… and those who cannot do away with human women, have resorted to creating artificial ones.

The fostering of a political climate in which women are intimidated out of voicing opinions about issues which affect their lives, under threats of violence and impending abuse if they dare to step outside of the roles prescribed to them, is a form of ensuring that the fantasy of sex robots becomes a reality within all of us… even if we do not function by remote. 

When so-call diversity and inclusion organisations, mostly operated by white and wealthy men, are being allowed to dictate what women are allowed to say in public. In doing so, they are relegating those vital and critical conversations women must have to ensure our rights are protected to the private sphere, and therefore the are socially engineering a climate in which they too can control women. 

When the options presented to very young girls, those teens and pre-teens ones, are either you mould your body to fit the ever more impossible beauty standards placed on women (preferably through surgery), or else you must be a biologically-displaced boy, then patriarchy has ensured that a culture of manufactured females exists among us. 

The idea of groups of men spending countless hours inside an obscure engineering room crafting a woman-like robot, which is able to memorise said men’s favourite sexual positions, and which comes with massive tits and a tiny waist, may seem grotesque to many people… but what about the throngs of men who, in broad daylight and in the public arena, think of women as being just as manageable, just as controllable… just as disposable?

A woman, equipped with men’s favourite physical features, able to memorise their favourite sex positions and to provide them with artificial sex on demand, represents a dream come true for many men. In that sense, sex robots are the almost perfect women, according to patriarchy. Its lone imperfection being that the sex robot must be programmed and recharged. 

The only problem for men invested in sex robot artificial intelligence is that, in the real world, women get to govern ourselves. 

Thank you!