Читать книгу Bent Street 4.1 - Tiffany Jones - Страница 17

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?