I realize this blog seems to have had a one track mind recently, and I'll get back to other topics shortly. But if the coming sexbot revolution is going to be as sweeping as some seem to think, it's going to have some devastating social effects.
I'm not talking about what some feminists are suggesting, that sexbots be banned because they will cause men to lose respect for women.
I'm talking about issues like, will spouses allow each other to keep a sexbot? Expect a lot of magazine articles to come out with titles like:
Why I won't allow my husband to have a sexbot
I was devastated when I found my wife had been seeing a sexbot
Is it cheating when your lover uses a sexbot?
How I made peace with my husband's sexbot
And Why I bought my wife a sexbot.
Will people become addicted to their sexbots? Will there be rehab facilities for these addicts?
Will people develop emotional attachments to their sexbots? A recent movie, She, portrayed a man who fell in love with a robotic voice; we were supposed to see him as a crazed fool. But if, for argument's sake, that's possible, wouldn't it be far more likely that people could develop romantic feelings for something they actually have sex with?
Will people see sexbots as a good way to "practice" and get better at sex?
Will doctors prescribe sexbots the way they used to suggest the "uterine paroxysm cure" for hysterical women?
Will a certain type of person absolutely have to have the latest model, the same way certain people couldn't bear to have the iPhone6 once the iPhone7 was out?
Will rich people accumulate harems? Will those harems spark jealousy?
Will certain older, classic models become collector's items?
Will sexbots become the new status symbol -- the new cars, so to speak -- where someone's self-image is inextricably tied up with the model he "drives?"
Will the availability of sexbots cut down on the incidence of rape?
If people have their sexual needs completely fulfilled by sexbots, will bars and nightclubs become quaint relics of the past?
Will sexbots make men feel insecure? I know what I'd feel like if I walked into some potential paramour's apartment and saw a handsome sexbot with a huge penis that never went soft: a third-rate substitute.
And how will wives feel if their husbands favor, say, the Blake Lively model sexbot, which stays forever young, effectively mocking them as they gradually age?
We may be living in the Dark Ages now, but one thing which won't change is human nature.
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30 comments:
FFS, is there anything feminists *don't* want to see banned? My first instinct was that the feminists would support sexbots since they'll probably, as you suggest, drive down rape statistics. I should've remembered that the feminists are just plain anti-sex, however consensual.
- Gethin
Gethin --
I had to think for a second to figure out what "FFS" meant, but got it from your context. I'm not even sure feminists are so much ant-sex as they are ant-male. But, I suppose, being anti-male encompasses heterosexual sex.
No, they're against any sex, not just hetero sex. The ones that claim to be lesbian aren't so in the dictionary sense: they're actually just celibate. Sheila Jeffreys - an arch feminist - defines lesbianism as the political rejection of sex with men, and specifically said that sex with women isn't necessary for a woman to call herself lesbian. Pretty much anything to do with sex is "disrespectful of women" in their eyes. Wouldn't surprise me if they have scientists working to abolish the orgasm.
- Gethin
The chief drawback I see with sexbots is that they are yet another technological/scientific means of avoiding normal social and sexual development. Now we have myriad ways of confounding nature's built-in safety checks. In the not too distant past, in order to reproduce, humans had to show that they could function socially and sexually, otherwise no mate and no children, gene pool remained unclouded.
Beginning with sperm banks which began by letting single women, including the intensely neurotic who could not sustain a relationship with a man, have children without fathers, to surrogacy which allows children with no mothers, we have removed almost all of the self-correcting mechanisms which protected children. We have produced a couple of generations of low testosterone man children (and neurotic woman children) trapped in perpetual adolescence.
Now, between streaming porn and robots, we may be removing the chief motivating drive for men to wish to achieve anything. Pretty soon many people will have no reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Gethin --
Ha!
When you think about it, the politicization of sex -- the idea that lesbianism is a "political rejection of sex with men" -- is incredibly silly at its core. These things are not regulated by politics, they're simply instincts which answer only to themselves. We might as well try to regulate how often people go to the bathroom. It's just a natural need, and our bodies tell us when we have to go. Adding politics into that equation makes no sense, any more than claiming that who we want to or not want to sleep with is a matter of politics.
LBD --
Forget about sexbots, the agricultural, then industrial, and now technological revolutions have changed the parameters of human evolution so much that what we're selected for has very little to do with what we were for most of our evolutionary history. We've been around, in form that could be called human, or at least porto-human, for roughly four million years. The agricultural revolution only happened 10,000 or so years ago. So for 99.75% of our evolutionary history, we were selected for our ability at hunting and gathering. Intelligence, physical fitness, sharp senses, and alertness were all selected for.
These days people are selected for being too stupid to use birth control. (Just look at the difference in reproductive rates between the upper class and the underclass.) And we're being selected for a willingness to let welfare support our kids. Those who work hard and scrimp and save in order to provide a good lifestyle for their children, and as a result don't start reproducing until their 30's, reproduce less.
We're headed in a pretty dysgenic direction; and, yes, adding sexbots into the equation is only making it more so.
This is what I don't get about birth control: why are only condoms and 'the pill' being actively promoted when there are long-acting IUDs and implants available? I knew a woman who first became pregnant aged 17 because she was supposed to be on 'the pill' but forgot to take it. She was a bit thick and smoked throughout the duration of her pregnancy. She divorced the baby's father within a year of the wedding, and spent many years being unemployed (I assume she still is now). I doubt her son turned out to have particularly high IQ. Surely if medical professionals would be more active in promoting IUDs, we'd see far fewer of such pregnancies? It generally doesn't happen amongst people with high IQ: high IQ women do stick to taking 'the pill' consistently (or at least get emergency contraception the morning after), so it really is a matter of being too thick and irresponsible to use birth control properly, leading to a dysgenic effect.
- Gethin
Gethin --
"Eugenics" is currently a dirty word, but it's an extremely practical policy with great benefits down the road. Unfortunately, given the current climate, you can't even breathe the word without being banished from polite society.
I think we've gone even further down the dysgenic rabbit hole, and not only in terms of actual genetic evolution. No matter what the society in the past, its members were expected to be able to interact with one another according to the prevailing mores. Mr. Caveman had to be able to manage a few friendly grunts to the other cavemen and eventually to that one special cavewoman, otherwise nobody would be willing to include him in the wildebeest share-out, and all the cavegirls would be busy washing their hair when he came cave-hopping.
Mr. Puritan had to be able, at the minimum, to come up with a few choice quotes from the Book of Proverbs at the water pump when appropriate lest he be shunned and left out as arrow fodder when the Iroquois were restless.
Now the requirements for conformity to a social norm are so minimal as to be nonexistent; furthermore public policy supports the, to put it kindly, "unusual" at the expense of everyone else.
BTW, Idiocracy is one of my favorite movies ( no surprise).
LBD --
Cleverly phrased. I've never heard "that one special cavewoman" or "wildebeest share-out" or "arrow fodder" before.
So true about the "unusual" being favored at the expense of others. You'd almost think that the people who were promoting that agenda didn't have the best interests of the West at heart.
Your examples leave me wondering if I'm that "unusual" person, though, at least by today's standards. This blog hardly qualifies as a "few friendly grunts" to the other cavemen; most of my grunting, at least on this blog, is quite unfriendly. And I'm not the guy who quotes from the book of Proverbs, I'm the guy who points out why it's silly. Guess I have to watch out for those Iroquois. (Ironic, considering I look like one.)
Idiocracy seems to be a huge cult hit; I think I watched ten minutes of it once, and it didn't grab me, so I switched the channel.
You never heard it before because I made it up.
Except more people support the idea that you'd think, just they won't use the E word. The widespread disapproval of teenage pregnancies is exactly due to eugenics: people know that the child will probably not amount to as much as a child of a mother who is 25+. Moreover, fewer and fewer babies with Down Syndrome are being born as women are choosing to abort.
Since my last post, I did some more reading on birth control. It turns out that doctors (in the UK) *are* now promoting long-acting contraceptive methods, with excellent results. Over 30% of women in Russia are on a long-acting contraceptive. These contraceptive methods should be promoted further: think of all the "accidents" they'd prevent due to people too thick to put on condoms properly and too lazy/irresponsible to get the morning-after-pill.
- Gethin
LBD --
That was my point, I guess I didn't make it clearly.
Gethin --
You're right. All those women who carefully scan their potential sperm donor's physical and mental attributes are practicing eugenics, even if they don't use that word. And sexual attractiveness is, in large part, about choosing a healthy mate whom you would want to combine your genes with. And yes, all those people who abort Downs babies are also effectively practicing eugenics.
the neo mini little ice age will be here in ten years anyway
crops will fail, massive flooding everywhere, societies will fall, civil war, race war, no electricity
the sex bots will be mostly unplugged for a while until all that is over
(the narrator makes constant reading errors such as "Zharkov" for "Zharkova" PISSES ME OFF but you can still get a good sense of the subculture view WHAT FOLKS ARE SAYING from this video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVM_w5T3dCQ&t=219s
====GUINEA HENWEED
(the above sounds perhaps ironic but I do vote TEAM NEO MINI LITTLE ICE AGE in the coming decade)
GUINEA HENWEED --
Sounds like one way or the other, we're screwed.
Another of John's classics, really got me thinking.
Thank God I am past the age of mate hunting. It could be a real social problem for
women. Imagine your competition is a damn doll.
There is a movie 'Lars and The Real Girl" where the protagonist gets a sex-doll because
he is unable to have a real relationship.
Sherie
Sherie --
Thank you. Yes, but think of your alternative: the perfect man. He'd never hit you, never mock you, he'd never even talk back (unless you wanted that). And he'd always be "in the mood" if you were. So there'd be competition for all of us, not just women.
John, what the kind of movies, video games, books, shows, stuff, anything you get into?
-Ga
Ga --
I don't play video games. My taste in movies is pretty eclectic. I'm embarrassed to say I don't read many books these days, do most of my reading on the internet, though I have been indulging myself in some Jack Reacher novels recently. I spend more time working out than most people do. And I trade stocks, which takes a fair amount of time.
Hi John,
I've been meaning to comment on your sexbot posts. Based on my experience with females I think it'll take decades before they are accepted by males. The reason why I believe this to be the case is due to female shaming. If the push to buy sexbots become mainstream, I think the female population with aggressively engage in their shaming tactics and this may not even be conscious on their part. But I've noticed that women resort to shaming tactics when the competition becomes fierce, which is what a sexbot will do increase the competition.
I can imagine all the female talk shows bringing up this topic and engaging in shaming of men who decide to get one.
This is also why I tend to be cynical about male birth control being available anytime soon. Most men would start taking it and women lose control of having children as freely as they would like. Press the PANIC button haha.
Martin Black
Martin --
Females DO resort to shaming as a tactic. One example that's always struck me is the widespread disapproval of older men with younger women, middle-aged women will always comment on how "disgusting" that is, whereas an older woman with a young man will only elicit cries of "You go girl!"
But I don't see that as greatly limiting the number of men who buy them that much; if the shaming becomes widespread, then men will just enjoy their sexbots more privately.
"And I trade stocks, which takes a fair amount of time."
so...tell us your stock picks, boss...
(I mean, you ask me about psychopath stuff, I don't hold out on you, or at least I make a polite ordinary social proffer of information...LIKEWISE you could never give us all of your vast knowledge, especially not for free, BUT, you could slip us maybe one tidbit a month such as "MISTER CRAIG JUST BOUGHT SOME GWGH because its insurtech subsidiary, Life Epigenetics, holds the exclusive license for lifespan-predictive technology developed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for the life insurance industry." for example).
I been meaning to ask you about cryptocurrencies also...what do you think about XRP/ripple, for example, every time I get paid I been buying some, since it's still under a dollar, but, I bet it will stay cheap for years, too, sigh...
(thinking about the above further I worry that I may have overstepped myself, LIKE A TYPICAL PSYCHOPATH, who cannot forbear to work the room, always seeking to extract some nuisance advantage...after all this is your house, and we are grateful that you provide us with this nice project, and you should talk about whatever you like...I am merely pointing out that an occasional stock pick might be well received by a subset of your readership...like cat pics, one is usually not too many)
====GUINEA HENWEED
GUINEA HENWEED --
It's a reasonable question but no, sorry, I'm not going to start giving stock advice. I've done it with friends in the past, and I've found that I feel much worse when I've given bad advice (of which I've given plenty) than I feel good when I give good advice. So, I'm out of that business.
Plus, I have nothing even close to insider information, I'm pretty isolated, so I have no informational advantage. And a lot of what I do is merely reactive, i.e., when I think a name has swung too much in an overreaction to, say, earnings, I'll go the other way, but I may take a profit -- or loss -- just a few minutes later. And there's no way that even if I were so inclined, I'd be able to communicate that on this blog in any sort of remotely timely fashion.
You said yourself just the other day that you think day traders are crazy; and you're probably right.
You're probably thinking that because what I say in my posts is true that what I might say about stocks would likewise be "true," but it just doesn't work that way. The older I get the more I realize that success at stock trading is a matter of luck as much as it is of skill. (Unless you're an insider trader, but for that you'd have to consult with the people at places like Renaissance Technologies or SAC, not with me.)
I HAVE been planning to write a post about which Wall Street sayings are right and which are wrong, and which conflict with each other. And also, some generalized truths about stock trading. I'll try to get around to that at some point in the not too distant future.
I just googled eclectic.
I haven't seen you make posts about movies, shows, or books and the like.
I guess you are more into the real world happenings, it can be more fascinating and absurd than the wildest fictional work sometimes.
-Ga
Ga --
I read books voraciously as a kid and young man. But now we have the internet, and Netflix, etc. And I've done movie "reviews" in the past, though I guess I haven't done as many recently.
As long as I kept her in the garage, I think the wife would buy off on the idea...haha
Arthur
Arthur --
Ha, I guess the existence of sexbots will give new meaning to the old phrase, "coming out of the closet."
Re:Mr. Thurman
Grammar check-- did you mean keeping your wife in the garage or keeping the robot in the garage?
LBD --
Ha!
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