#133 Who's Afraid of Sex Robots?
“[Sex Robots] further promote the objectification of the female body and as such constitute a further assault on human intimacy.”
Listen Here (transcript below):
Charlotta Odlind
In this interview, Luba Fein speaks with the leaders of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, Kathleen Richardson and Charlotta Odlind to understand how ubiquitous the sex robots are, what they look like, who is the target audience, and why they are so dangerous.
The Campaign Against Sex Robots was founded in 2015 to warn against the dangers of normalising relationships with machines and reinforcing female dehumananisation. The first campaign image featured a broken mannequin and represents dissociation from relationship and the instrumentality of women’s bodies, reduced to parts. The campaign has received international attention and will continue to defend the dignity and humanity of women and girls.
Kathleen Richardson is Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University. She has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and masters degrees in Law (DMU), Social Anthropology (Cambridge) and Development, Administration and Planning (UCL). Kathleen is the founder of the Campaign Against Sex Robots and a founding member of The Fates (The Feminist Academy of Technology and Ethics). She also is Director of WERAID (Women, Ethics, Robots, AI and Data) a research group. Her work has been featured in the national and international press.
Kathleen Richardson
Charlotta Odlind is a freelance writer, coach and women’s rights campaigner based in Brussels, Belgium. She has a BA (Hons) in European Studies with French and Spanish and an MA in International Relations. She has worked on child protection issues at Save the Children Brussels and volunteered with VSO for a year, advising on advocacy and communications strategies in a women’s rights NGO in Kano, Nigeria. Working at FEANTSA (European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless), she was editor of Homeless in Europe magazine. She is Campaigns Manager at the Campaign Against Sex Robots.
Check out the Campaign Against Sex Robots website.
Transcript:
[Sex Robots] further promote the objectification of the female body and as such constitute a further assault on human intimacy.”
Luba Fein from FiLiA in conversation with the campaign manager Charlotta Odlind and Professor Kathleen Richardson.
L – Kathleen Richardson started the campaign against sex robots. This is a worldwide movement for a more ethical, feminist and humanistic approach to computing, robotics and artificial intelligence and future technology.
The campaign was launched in 2015. The campaign goals are:
· To abolish sex robots in the form of women and girls.
· To offer an alternative relational model of sex and sexuality informed by mutuality.
· To oppose the development of child sex abuse dolls and robots as therapeutic for paedophiles.
Recently the campaign has launched a new website.
What is different about the new website?
C – Thank you for inviting us. Basically what is different is we have a new energy in the campaign to make it an easier place to find resources, an easier website to access templates. It will be easier for people to get involved. We’re always looking for volunteers. It’s a new push because we have seen how things have developed. We don’t think the sexualisation and objectification of women has improved and if anything has got worse. We think it’s a really relevant campaign. We do realise that the issue of sex dolls and sex robots is quite a fringe movement still, still quite niche. But we know we are at the start of something, we’re at the precipice of something changing and we really need to build awareness around that.
Slowly but surely we are seeing the normalisation of these sex dolls and we think it’s time to act now because we know how women’s rights have been undermined and will continue to be unless we stand up and speak out about these kinds of issues.
An example, we’ve seen them increasingly being used in public spaces. Why do we think it’s appropriate to put them out there? It’s a kind of 3D form of pornography. You see them increasingly on morning TV shows where they’re kind of seen as rather humorous. But no-one is talking about the harm or what it represents for human rights, so that’s why we think it’s a good time now to get the new website out, a new campaign and making it easier for people to understand the issues, to find articles on our website, to get involved, to lobby their MP.
L – You have mentioned several times, sex dolls. Are they ubiquitous? What do they look like? Is there a target audience for them? Who are the buyers?
K – In my academic work I studied the development of robots. I noticed they began to talk about sex robots being developed in the form of women and girls. This is very concerning because we talk about sexual objectification as feminists, we talk about dehumanisation as feminists and here you have a sexualised, objectified object being put into the world. Although the technology put into the sex robots is very minimal and there aren’t very many of them, the cultural interest in them is very high. The robots themselves are not widespread at the moment. We don’t want to wait for, in 20 years’ time, when they become widespread and see them more in pornography, before we start taking a stand.
The relationship with sex dolls is interesting. When the campaign first developed it was called The Campaign against Sex Robots because it was warning against the idea that you could have relationships with these dolls and they could be substitutes for women, the dehumanisation and sexual objectification.
As the campaign went on, I realised that the sex robots were really sex dolls plus technology. Sex dolls were the platform as the bodies and technology was being added into these sex dolls. We are the campaign against sex robots but we also think sex dolls in the form of women and girls should be abolished too because they contribute to the same kind of harm as sex robots. They are indistinguishable. The primary market for sex robots are the sex doll buyers. A lot of the sex doll companies market their sex dolls as sex robots. This is a way to think about it. 5 years ago we looked upon sex dolls and the men who used them as creepy and dysfunctional. There’s been a huge interest in Artificial Intelligence and robotics in the last 5 years and by saying – our sex dolls are sex robots – the public interest in the topic, exploded.
It didn’t matter that the robots themselves had little technology in them, they’re not very believable entities, they can’t walk or carry out a complex interaction. The sex robots in people’s minds are like science fiction.
So what these sex dolls manufacturers did was, they started rebranding their sex dolls as sex robots.
As a result of the interest in sex robots, we’ve actually seen sex dolls more normalised in our society. So there’s been a rise in sex doll brothels in France and Germany, even in the UK. So you can’t disentangle sex dolls sex robots. A sex robot is a sex doll + technology then you understand what sex robot is.
L – So this market is extremely gendered. We have women and childlike dolls branded as robots?
K – If you go to the sex doll companies, they will always have the token male available. But the primary market for the token males are homosexual men, not other women. With the rise of the absolute horror of liberal feminism which is basically a men’s rights movement. They say that there are some women in the liberal, queer paradigm saying – women are going to embrace sex robots too, it’s going to become part of our sexuality.
The reality is that for last few thousand years, sexually objectifying women is what men have done and they are doing it again in this new way but actually it’s a very old fashioned form of sexual objectification. The reverse does not happen. We don’t have male bodies available to women to purchase in prostitution for example. We don’t have male bodies that women dominate and control and dehumanise and destroy in pornography. You need to have all that if you’re going to generate a female market and that doesn’t exist.
This is a men’s sexual rights movement. Sex robots and sex dolls are about men’s sexual rights. They are not about women, they’re not about solving problems with technology, they are a brutal dehumanising process which women and girls are already being impacted by and will continue to be harmed.
L – To what extent can technology shape our behaviour? Every technology is a human invention to serve existing needs. To what degree can technology in general and in our case, sex robots, change people? After all sexual violence existed before the dolls.
K – The technological determinism is this idea that we produce these technologies, they change us in very specific ways. But actually we know technologies can be used in a variety of ways. People will say – okay there are some people who may want to act out paedophilic fantasies or rape fantasies with sex dolls and sex robots but they won’t all be like that, some people will want to have loving touching relationships with these sex dolls – The reality is that these sex dolls/sex robots exist because of female dehumanisation. It can’t exist in any other context.
If women were recognised as human beings, nobody would have come up with the idea of a sex robot. If you look back into ancient times, fantasies of a completely obedient artefact came from the Pygmalion myth. It’s a sculpture from an Ovid poem, Ovid tells how a sculptor gets tired of prostitutes, women disgust him and he sculps this woman in ivory stone and she comes to life.
So as part of this anti-woman sentiment, it’s existed since Pygmalion. We know that embedded in every single fantasy about a sex robot is an anti-woman sentiment. That’s what we always need to bring out. It doesn’t change because some individual man doesn’t fantasise about raping his sex doll. It exists because of women’s dehumanisation and sexual objectification.
C – which also brings us into why a sex doll is not equivalent to a vibrator, there is no equivalence between those 2 objects.
L – I understand your explanation about how sex dolls and in the future sex robots may impact on human interaction.
I am an abolitionist and our struggle against the sex trade is focusing on the ban for buying sex services. We have promoted banning buying sex services in 8 jurisdictions.
Is it possible to combine our struggle with an attempt to replace some of the demand with robots? Take the punter and lock him in with the sex robots and free the woman?
K – I can see where you’re coming from and sometimes why that makes logical sense because if you read some of the academic papers on sex robots and sex dolls
‘they’re going to end paedophilia, they’re going to stop men raping, they’re going to end prostitution, they’re going to make our sex lives in the future really exciting.’
You can see technological arguments are developed on the basis that there’s something that exists in society, some kind of work and then you mechanise that, you introduce automation into that work so you replace the human labour with an automated, mechanical process.
But human beings aren’t machines and their relationships with each other aren’t mechanical processes. The relationships people have with each other at an intimate level are not transferrable to machines because they only exist inside a relationship with each other. They’re interpersonal.
However, you raise a good point because I think we’ve got to this stage because of the ‘sex work is work’ argument, if ‘sex work’ is work then machines replace work, so logically the machines could replace the prostituted woman.
But the reality is, we know that prostitution is not work, it’s a form of exploitation and dehumanisation of human beings. If you introduce mechanisation into the system, all you would have is wider ways for men to abuse women. That’s all you would do. So even now in the world, there are brothels operating, like in Germany, where you can go and purchase someone to torture and do a BDSM ritual or you can have a sex doll. You can have a real women or a doll. Men have been setting up brothels, you can have a pregnant women brothel, there are so many ways the male sex right is exercised through prostitution. There is no way that male sex right - which is completely hostile to relationships, hostile to intimacy, hostile to mutuality with women - it’s not going to be reduced to a mechanised process. All that will happen is some men who are interested in that mechanised process will purchase that mechanised process. That’s all that’s going to happen.
C – I think it’s important to bring in the parallel if you’re saying – well, why not bring in these sex dolls if it saves women from having to work in prostitution – the argument will be – why not use child sex abuse dolls to reduce harm to children and to reduce paedophilia – It’s quite clear that the use of child abuse sex dolls does not reduce harm to children and it doesn’t reduce abuse. Often what is found is that men who order and purchase sex abuse dolls are also guilty of other harm to children, whether that’s downloading really hard core images of child abuse or having harmed in the past, so I don’t think it’s an argument that holds tight.
K – I think that’s a really good point. Unfortunately, the academic community is driven by, I would say, an anti-women direction, anti-women ethics.
I work in an academic community where we look at the ethics of new technologies. So people without an understanding of how sex abuse works, they come up with the idea you can put them on prescription and give them to people interested in children and that would stop them abusing. They even have the gall to use terms like ‘a virtuous paedophile’ have you ever heard of such a thing? Men are virtuous, men can call their sexual behaviour virtuous if they don’t go and rape children. Are we going to have virtuous rapists? Are we going to have virtuous bestiality?
We’ve constructed male sexuality in such a dehumanised and depersonalised way, it needs to be addressed. Male sexuality needs to be addressed. If the ethical arguments are constructed without deconstructing male sexuality, then you end up with these completely irrational, illogical solutions like giving paedophiles child sex abuse dolls on prescription. That in itself would generate a new industry of sex abuse.
There’s an interesting figure. There are now billions of images of children being raped today. So if there’s such an idea of a limit, that every paedophile needs a few images and that’s it. The reality is that you need to continually replenish your fantasy. It needs to be harder, it needs to be more extreme, it need to involve different children, it needs to be repeated.
So the very idea that you could simplify something so complex as child sex abuse, with a doll, is extraordinarily harmful.
L – This is a very strong argument about the variety of sexual abuse images.
Do we have any research on the connection between the use of sex dolls and sex crimes by the users?
K – We’re in the process of doing that research. Like with any male sex fetish and because we organise the world around men’s sexual rights, whenever a topic develops, it’s always primarily driven by what men want, what men need, how they can be protected from anything being taken away from them.
Then you have the liberal feminists and the queer feminists come along and say – women could do this too, women could have sex robots – without having a structural analysis of what’s going on or the harms.
We are planning to interview women whose partners have had sex dolls. So maybe through this podcast, you could put us in touch with some women. We want to know how they’ve been impacted by men brining sex dolls into their lives. When you see a man with a sex doll, it’s not going to disclose everything about his behaviour. But the men who are open about their sex doll use, they openly admit frequenting prostituted women. Some have openly admitted buying mail order brides, an awful term, it’s saying – I want to purchase a woman instead of mutually forming a relationship with someone and having them reject me accept me or not – there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. We would really like to reach those women. They do exist out there.
If you are one of those women, please get in touch with me because we really want to know what happened to you. What’s happening to you is what’s happening to the women whose partners are bringing sex robots into their lives.
L – You mention the liberal feminists, whatever you argue about what men do, they will say women do the same.
Many women use vibrators. Where are the limits between sex dolls and vibrators which are harmless?
K – If you look at the history of vibrators, they were part of the practises of making women more sexually available to men, so they were developed in the 19th century. The idea was that women had this disease called hysteria which was rooted in our wombs and it produced certain behaviours like angriness, disagreement, it made them question men’s power. Hysteria covered quite a lot of things. The therapeutic establishment came with this idea that it was related to sexual repression so one of the methods helping women to overcome hysteria was by massaging their clitoris and inserting their fingers into their vagina until they climaxed. The physicians who did this, their hands would get tired so they developed the vibrator as an alternative.
The vibrator’s primary purpose, historically, was to make women’s bodies sexually more responsive to men. That was the primary purpose of them.
Over time things changed, it became de-medicalised. I’m not going to say women should not use vibrators but I think from what we know about vibrator use – there was a famous sexologist, Shere Hite, who, in the 1970s found that only 1% of women use vibrators. By the 21st century, over 50% of women use vibrators, especially the younger generation. These are largely heterosexual women using vibrators. We can’t de-contextualise or disentangle that from the rise in pornography. Vibrators do the same thing they did 100 years ago, they make women’s bodies ready for sexual access and that hasn’t changed and I think their role hasn’t changed.
I think ultimately if you have an intimate physical relationship with someone – I’m still not convinced vibrators are liberating for women. It’s like low expectations, women’s sexual acts become privatised in this central way rather than socialised and I think the privacy of the act, the mechanisation of the act, divorced from the relationship of sensuality, I think there are real issues around that.
As you can see I’m agonising. I don’t think vibrators are liberating for women, I think they should throw them away.
L – My opinion is different; I think vibrators are used to create sexual pleasure independently of the partner, his existence and his function.
C – You can’t disentangle the vibrator from its history.
If I can go off on a tangent – quite apart from its history and what the implications are for women today. This often comes up, this debate, if you take sex toys away from men you have to dump your vibrator, what I find interesting is: Vibrators are often not in the form or shape of a male penis, I think the most popular ones aren’t, there’s no back story to them, what you find in the marketing of sex dolls is they have a name, a backstory, they might have a sister you’d be interested in, they come from the Ukraine, they study philosophy. There’s a great difference in how they are marketed from vibrators are obviously meant to stand in for women. I don’t think vibrators are obviously meant to be a stand in for men. It’s not like – he’s Derek and he loves rugby – it’s just a very different philosophy in how they’re produced and how they’re marketed.
L – Back to sex robots, I wanted to ask about the legal issue. How can we abolish sex robots? Technically a person having a sex doll does not harm any living creature at that moment. What legal tools do we have to prohibit that? What are we supposed to ban? Development? Production? Marketing? Purchase?
K – These are very good questions. We have talked about this a lot in a group we are a part of. The reality is, another has said: If you read Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Intercourse’ the way AD constructs her arguments to show male hatred of women, she uses literature, there’s not a moral agent in the narrative, it’s a fictional account but that literature is part and parcel of a wider culture of the objectification of women. So not one actual woman has be harmed but it contributes to violence against women. it contributes to dehumanising women.
We have to keep reminding people that women don’t want to be dehumanised but when we talk about race, nobody is introducing racist robots that they can objectify because we don’t have to keep reminding people to stop being racist and to stop dehumanising people of colour.
But we always need to do it. X, Y and Z has been harmed, this was cause and effect. I’m saying the harm is there, buried in the very object itself, it’s purpose, it’s role and how it functions in society in terms of it being the logical end point of patriarchy. That woman herself is totally man made and she is entirely physically a form that he wants and she is stripped of any subjectivity. That is patriarchy on steroids.
One thing we have found is that the cross over between the fictional world, the no moral agent and harm is becoming blurrier.
We looked at in our campaign: if you look at our website, our campaign features a child sex abuse doll. The image for that child sex abuse doll was taken from a parent who had posted images of her children on-line and the paedophiles had got hold of those images and wanted to create a sex doll like the image of a real child. So now you can tailor make your sex dolls or sex robots to your fantasy, to someone in the real world.
A famous example is Scarlet Johansson: Ricky Ma, some nerdy geek decided he was going to create a sex robot in her image. He hasn’t consulted her, he hasn’t asked her permission, he’s just gone ahead and out of his ego centric fantasies has decided it’s okay.
So there’s nothing stopping a woman who has an ex-partner and the ex-partner deciding he wants to create a sex doll in the image of someone, maybe who’s rejected them.
So we are noticing more cross over now between actual women being replicated in the images of sex dolls and sex robots.
L – Another question. I don’t want you to feel like your life’s work isn’t important. It’s very important. I come from a different field, I’m an abolitionist, I know what the sex trade looks like. We have tens of millions of women and children trafficked and tortured and held in brothels, they are suffering and dying, I lost my friend to the sex trade. Many others are completely dysfunctional and will never be happy people with good social functions.
So, in this situation is the issue of sex robots a bit of a first world problem? Maybe we should allocate our resources to the current suffering humans.
K – I’m really sorry to hear your experiences. I would say we are also an abolitionist campaign and we support our abolitionist sisters around the world who are trying to abolish the prostitution trade and the porn trade and the paedophile trade so we’re on your side.
I think the reality is that we are looking at an issue that is a new and emerging phenomena and if we don’t make an intervention right here and now, it’s an emerging phenomenon, quite disparate and niche, a bit strange, most people haven’t made up their mind or can’t see the harm. If we don’t make an intervention now it will develop in an unregulated way. You talked about real women being harmed, there are real women now in pornography being asked to have sex with dolls. There are women in marriages where their husband brings home a sex doll and says that she’s a prude if she doesn’t participate and that it’s all sexually exciting. There are children whose likeness is being represented in these dolls. These are events that are going on.
You could have a situation where, if nothing is done, they become incorporated into pornography and prostitution anyway which we know is already going on. We could find that men turn up at work with a doll in a wheel chair and we all have to go along and pretend it’s his girlfriend. Maybe they’ll change the Hate Crime legislation and if we don’t go along and say – yes, it’s his girlfriend - ..
There are also ethicists of robotics, trying to change the definition of a robot as something in need of rights. This may seem very science fiction and farfetched. About 4 years ago the European Commission wanted to develop some civil law on robotics. In that civil law they started to describe a robot as an electronic person. The people who wrote that report want to reshape the definition of a robot to something similar to a person. The law wasn’t passed. But there are other people trying to change the law as to what a robot is, as a kind of person. If, for example, this did happen and there is a robot in the world that got citizenship, called Sophia, in Saudi Arabia, a country where women don’t have full citizenship, they gave it to a robot called Sophia, if they can do that then could introduce all kinds. The could reimagine this family as father, mother, sex doll and children. You can see men’s dehumanised forms of sexuality normalised on an everyday ordinary level.
Let’s look at the trans issue. A law was passed in 2004 that said they could have a legal fiction. It says for legal purposes they could become the opposite sex. That is a fiction. But it’s a legal fiction that has status in law. Clearly when people agreed to that 20 years ago they didn’t realise that 20 years later that we would be described as menstruators or uterus havers because no-one wanted to use the word woman anymore. These are things that are going on that need our attention now. Not in 20 years’ time. Right now.
L – Thank you. This is very convincing. I feel we didn’t stop the trans issue 15 years ago.
K – I think as well and I really like the work of Sheila Jeffreys. I think SJ is one of the most brilliant feminists still around, writing amazing stuff.
We’ve got to understand the underlying motivation with everything and that’s what her work does. If the underlying motivation is to strengthen male sex rights and sex robots reinforce and extend male sex rights. That’s it. They don’t usher in this new brave world that’s Utopia where abuse no longer exists. They extend men’s sex rights and they do it through this dehumanising entity and that will just generate a kind of reordering of this anti-humanism, this anti-woman culture that already exists. It just spirals off in new directions.
C – To add to that, I’m sure we’d all like to travel back to the 70s and 80s before the explosion of on-line porn to in some way better legislate that. I cannot believe that today in 2021 that the dehumanisation that you can access with a click on the internet. It’s frightening. Maybe what we’re trying to say is: we don’t know where it can go with sex dolls but we already know that study after study has shown that extended use of pornography has neuronal changes in brains. I just don’t know what is ahead of us with men who will order child sex abuse dolls or regular sex dolls and with daily use, what transformation is that going to make even neuronally. What does it say about our relationships in the future?
I think it’s really interesting to be at the point where we are right at the start of it. We can see something is coming. What is our stance going to be today? So that in 20 years’ time we’re not going to be saying – Oh my god, how did this get so out of control? Why are we here in an even worse situation 20 years down the line than we were 20 years ago?
L – Thank you. How can FiLiA help you?
K – We have an event coming up and we’re going to be running workshops all year. The first event is about child sex abuse dolls. We’re very concerned that academics are saying we can put them on prescription for paedophiles. This is actually going on. Saying their harmless because no moral agent is harmed. It comes back to the argument that because it’s an artefact therefore women and children are not going to be harmed by it. We are harmed by what happens more widely in our society.
So we would love people to join us there.
C – We’re always looking for volunteers, we’re entirely volunteer led so if anyone wants to write for us or help us with some graphic design, w would be more than happy to hear from you. We’ve got lots more events coming up. We’ll be putting up templates for letters that you can send to your MPs. You can subscribe to our Newsletter and hear about upcoming actions and events.