Sex with robots: masturbation?

Alastair Philip Wiper, "Pleasure Points" (thestoryinstitute.com/pleasure-points); Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Crystal Quintero (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Calm down. They're just robots, humanoid toy dolls for "adult" entertainment (RealDoll).

Is this perversely pathetic behavior?

“We don’t recommend or-- sex. There are gears in there. I mean, you can mess things up; you can mess yourself up. She’s got the mouth, and everything moves, but we don’t recommend it. It’ll kind of ruin the whole thing.”

So begins my journey under the covers of the past, present, and future of California’s adult entertainment industry.

Jeff, my guide at RealDoll, is explaining the technicalities of the new [sex] robot heads that the company has just begun shipping with their realistic, life-size dolls, dolls that you can have sex with, if you want to.

Do rubber slave dolls dehumanize?

Twenty years ago RealDoll Founder Matt McCullen began producing dolls in this San Marcos, California workshop, and now the company makes around 30 [sex robot dolls] per month.

“My background is in art, mostly sculpture,” explains McCullen. RealDoll was born when he wanted to make a more realistic mannequin for shop windows.

“My initial efforts were beautiful women… I wanted them to be positionable so that they wouldn’t be rigid… so you could manipulate them into different poses. Then people’s imagination got the better of them and they were going, 'Hey, I want to have sex with that thing.'” More

iCub has a humanoid hand, Genoa Science Festival 2009

Cost to lonely consumers

Choose a mouth, any mouth.

A regular doll body, which is fully customizable from n-pples, to lips, to type of v-gina (there are more than ten), costs an average of $7,500. And a robotic head will add an extra $8,000 [total $15,000 + tax] to the bill.

Alone and lonely? “If you've got the robotic head talking to you, it's not just you talking to her and she's sitting there. Now she can talk back to you,” explains Jeff.

Do aliens already walk among us?

“Because a lot of people are lonely, they want somebody there, you know? They've lost their wives or boyfriends, girlfriends.”

The robotic head can have very basic conversations and relay a range of facial expressions.

And this is just the beginning, as more reactive and tactile elements are added to the robots such as more moving limbs and areas that become warm and moist when stimulated. More