Robotic "Companions" Are Testing the Scope of Privacy and Sexual Freedom
jonathanturley.org
jonathanturley.org
End of the day, it’s all about people trying to control other people’s thoughts and actions by forcing them to conform to the box the debater has created and lined with cherry-picked facts. You can see that in the arguments of this article and in this thread.
Just as a note, I’m not advocating one way or another on any topic, just addressing the issue of cherry-picking that happens regardless of which side anyone falls on an issue.
So yeah, not really the point of your argument, but fuck e-cigarettes, for the rest of time I will have this stance. And yes, I am brutally aware of what cigarettes do as well, but don't knock the "theoretical" effects of e-cigarettes.
What is worse, pointing out these selective facts generally makes people become defensive, so they dive into searching for more cherry-picked arguments as ammunition to prove themselves right, rather than accepting that they might actually be wrong and objectively looking for information. It is the core of the problem of politics on both sides and we can easily see how extreme it can make people regardless of the thing being advocated.
Cherry-picking and self-reinforcement go hand-in-hand.
If you look into research on femicide, you see there is a specific dynamic at work, objectification and feelings of possession in men are causal. These motives are universal, as femicides are otherwise frequently happening across all economic, cultural and social backgrounds.
If you count all homicides i would expect women to usually be the minority in most countries due to gang crime as you say. In france its the reverse, 67% of all murder victims are men. The data looks similar in the US.
In the french statistics certain crimes affect mostly women and other mostly men. 97% gang related deaths are men while 66% of intra-family deaths are women.
Germany: https://www.bka.de/DE/AktuelleInformationen/StatistikenLageb...
France: https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5763555?sommaire=576363...
US: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
My point is, femicides are a much bigger problem than people realize. Considering the majority of murderers and other criminals are men, I don't think it's wild to presume some form of gender specific motivations in those murders, without getting all academic here.
Don't know about you infographic, here is recent stats for Germany:
https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol...
The big question then is what (if any) gender specific motivations is causing this to occur.
I think there are many possible explanations, but one certainly shouldn't be ignored over essentialist ones: Co-morbid mental illness and maladapted behavior in LGBT folks, caused by their upbringing and coping with discrimination or alienation. They usually don't have a blueprint for life and have to make up their own gender and community roles. Then there is all sorts of violence imaginable in relation to "gay panic" and self-acceptance.
It may be cishet gender roles and the male archetype finding their way into these relationships.
Maybe people are just violent opportunists. (I doubt there are as many murders in F4F relationships...)
Maybe there are biological causes. Personally, I think it's misguided to separate sexual orientation and identity as fundamentally different. The whole of "sex difference" is produced by effective androgenic and estrogenic signaling throughout life. Like, a cell has no sex. The Y chromosome does about nothing, except for a brief moment mid development, and everything else is genetically identical. All genes affecting androgen effectiveness are located elsewhere. Funnily enough, the androgen receptor is encoded on the X-chromosome, so typically women got the information twice, making it functionally more robust.
Androgens role in aggressiveness is well documented, and it's usually relative levels making the difference. Maybe there is some sort of selective order in the lesbian community too. Things like PCOS come to mind.
Or a mix of all... There won't be data to give a definitive answer.
Honestly, I think it would be more interesting, if murder rates in M4M relationships were lower or higher. Cause sexual objectification definitely is present in some parts of the gay community. Although often in concert with sexual liberation and reciprocity, and I don't think possessive thinking is frequent.
There are many theories but one of the more reasonable one (in my view) is the simple one. Humans are humans and culture is usually a better explanation than biology. It also fits the challenge hypothesis of the relation between androgens and aggressiveness, which is that androgens function actually has nothing to do with aggressiveness but everything to do with social status and the amount of behavior towards defending against perceived social status threats. Only in a culture where social status is defended through the use of aggression is there a relation between androgens and aggression (An experiment using a setup where social status was defended through non-aggression showed a link with increased androgens and a reduction in aggression, which would indicate this theory to be true).
There are also multiple studies looking at self-reported amount of violence in relationships, which tend to show that while the rate of violence by women and men is fairly similar, what is different is how that violence get applied. This would also support the theory that the difference sits in how men apply violence against women, women applies violence against men, men against men and women against women. Same rate of violence, but not the exact same behavior when violence is being applied.
No? For 2022 in Sweden the numbers were 93 men, 23 women. Men has been overrepresentative by 200% or more for as long as we have statistic data. You can look at the graph at the government statistic department on crime here: https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-om-brottstyper/mord-och-d...
From that same page, 9% of cases involve violence within a couple relation.
It would surprise me if the data looks that much different in other Nordic countries.
> I alla 10 fall av dödligt våld i en parrelation 2022 var offret en kvinna, vilket var 5 fall färre jämfört med 2021
=> In all 10 cases of fatal violence in a couple relationship in 2022, the victim was a woman.
In Germany, 2022, there were 114 male and 150 female murder (§ 211 StGB) victims. Mind you, that's all murders, including gang violence.
https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Pol...
One thing of note is that the use of a gun sits at around 50%, which has also had a similar 20% increase in the last 10 years. The gang on gang violence that get media attention usually involve shooting or explosives.
The only explanation is that it's competition. It might sate some men, expecially singles, reducing their craving for sex with real women, and therefore it's 'value', and the effort they're willing to expend to obtain it.
I don't know about you, but I never met a single "feminist", or woman, who was involved with a stranger man's fertility at all.
And discussing sexual health neutrally in academic terms, "like they're cattle", is also a feature of medicine and epidemiology, where feminists are well represented.
I think sometimes medical and epidemiology opinions are just that, even when they are voiced by a feminist. Lol.
This is a topic with more mines than an Ukrainian field, but I'll say this:
Last century, we moved places because there were many problems and deservedly so we wanted something better, we had to choose paths to take. What if the paths we choose weren't the best ones? Can we have the courage to admit that?
This doesn't invalidate any problems with the starting point, but the place we ended up might not be any better.
The same applies to this "sex robots" thing, the place of unimaginable silent pain and loneliness is already here, so we want to move to a better place, is this the best choice? or is this the only choice available to those in need? - Just as the first part, this one is to be answered by the ones following the path, not the ones on the sidewalk.
What they object to is the equating women to sex objects - treating women like sex tours rather than whole human beings with rich lives and emotional depth and complexity.
Some men have a hard time decoupling the concepts. A fancy toy like proposed in the article is great for the folks who want it so long as it's not seen as a "woman analogue". (Just like how a dildo isn't a man analogue.)
There should be no shame in sex toys, if they make someone happy, go for it. I'm not sure what the implication of "best choice" vs "only choice" is referring to, because I could interpret it quite negatively I think maybe you could expand that idea more?
Plenty of toys out there for men and women nobody has an issue with outside of some(not all), strongly religious people.
If there was more of market for male dolls I could definitely some elements of the "manosphere" decrying it as an attempt to denigrate and replace men.
The UK already had an incident with mentally ill guy wanting to kill the queen. Partially because he felt an AI "girlfriend" encouraged him to do so.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-a...
So it isn't that impossible to believe some user somewhere , divorced from reality , will do something bad to a real person that they might not have done had they not tried it with these dolls/bots.
I don't think they should be banned(although ones emulating children probably should be), but it's worth debating it.
If you'd frame the topic differently, maybe "women/feminist movements" wouldn't "always react furiously". Why even bring that up? Regardless of truth in that statement, considering crime statistics, a woman has every right to be scared, when a man views them categorically, as something that can be replaced by a doll companion, at all. Same with AI porn, the concept of consensual sexuality becomes even more distant. That's scary, as we're not living in a world where that's all fun and games. At least in Germany, most murder victims are still women. Objectification and feelings of possession is a major cause for femicides.
Super cool, if your fetish is sex robots. But even bringing up "loneliness" and "choice" ... idk, man.
Statements like "Regardless of truth in that statement.." say much if not everything.
> At least in Germany, most murder victims are still women.
This is objectively not true, for ex. in 2019 of the the 623 murders, 347 were male, 276 were female.
> Super cool, if your fetish is sex robots. But even bringing up "loneliness" and "choice" ... idk, man.
This statement reveals either a profound ignorance, a extreme lack of empathy or both.
I understand if you come here with an axe to grind, but it's not productive in any way and this conversation will change nothing.
Just a side note about "the concept of consensual sexuality", go do some research about the most consumed ( by far ) adult literature by women.
Also, are we back to the 80s "conversation" about video games and their affect on children? quite the progress...
So, now what, gonna address the issue? Even your stats should give you pause, as there is quite the discrepancy on perpetrator sex isn't there?
What does it mean to be a Shapiro Professor?
> An endowed professorship (or endowed chair) is a position permanently paid for with the revenue from an endowment fund specifically set up for that purpose. To set up an endowed chair generally costs between US$1 and $5 million at major research universities. Typically, the position is designated to be in a certain department. The donor might be allowed to name the position. Endowed professorships aid the university by providing a faculty member who does not have to be paid entirely out of the operating budget, allowing the university to either reduce its student-to-faculty ratio, a statistic used for college rankings and other institutional evaluations, or direct money that would otherwise have been spent on salaries toward other university needs. In addition, holding such a professorship is considered to be an honor in the academic world, and the university can use them to reward its best faculty or to recruit top professors from other institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Endowed_pr...
Turley is not incorrect in subtly noting that the "Lost in Space" character Dr Smith is a robosexual.
- That sex-bots offer a denuded, perfectly submissive woman to a man: a woman that exists entirely for his pleasure, and should he desire a new one, is 100% disposable, or even resellable
- That the fact that sex-bots designed to appear as children is not a coincidence to the former thing, and seems to be part of the draw, at least for a fair slice of the market
I also feel the numerous comparisons to dildos in this thread really alarming. This isn't just a sex toy. This is, at some point and seemingly what their market truly wants, a simulated human being with which one may have a relationship: except that relationship is entirely one-sided, and will never challenge, grow, or pose a problem to the person in question. I don't think having full and complete access to a perfectly simulated person that you can do literally anything to and any time with zero objection or consequences will be good for anyone's mental health. We can't even help but form relationships and strong emotions for people on fucking television, do you really mean to tell me that a fully three dimensional, simulated human being, in front of you, that you can touch, smell, hold, and fuck are going to somehow not affect us in the slightest?
Just look at books. At some point a married woman read a romance book that depicted an unrealistic male character who wanted nothing but to satisfy any desire of the woman in the book. And after reading that book she became unhappy in her marriage because her husband would never be like that character.
Is that a bad thing?
ToucanLoucan is concerned about child-like sex-bots - would he prefer their buyers instead focus their attention on human children? Or does he believe sexuality is malleable, that they can be sent to conversion therapy and become attracted to adult women instead? In which case we might witness some mental gymnastics to explain why conversion therapy only works on sexualities frowned upon by society, but is ineffective pseudoscientific abuse for any of the accepted or celebrated sexualities.
There are all kinds of things that are innate and natural and which we simply cannot tolerate no matter how natural they are. All kinds of violence are natural, and the only acceptable response to it is to fucking supress and control it. Clubing a woman over the head and dragging her off to your cave is natural, and should only ever be repressed, inhibited, controlled, not tolerated, mercilessly. All those words that in other contexts are bad, are bad in those other contexts. It's wrong to repress your desire to be an artist. We aren't talking about being an artist are we?
Merely for generic violence we just happen to have a few constructive uses for it, and so we have a few uses for those assholes. But what is the constructive use for people who have even a slight desire to mess with a kid that actually looks like a kid? (I'm setting aside the unfortunate class of people who are still kids and should not have to deal with adult life quite yet, but who through no fault of theirs or the people they attract, look sexually mature and attractive. That still needs to be dealt with and isn't tolerable either, but the crime is a different one.)
I see no benefit at all to providing quite this nature of pacifier outside of maybe some highly controlled clinical context where a doctor maybe uses it as part of some sort of therapy and not as mere supposedly victimless gratification of someone's otherwise harmful desires. The fact is the desires are harmful all by themselves.
I happen to think that animals are not sentient and that until one wins an argument with us about it, it's ok to own them as property and use them as property. I think, in a strict actionable legal sense, that there is no real basis for charging someone with any kind of crime if they say, boil kittens. I know we have animal cruelty laws on the books, what I'm saying is I don't think they actually are logically defensible if we are still willing to eat other animals that just aren't cute to look at. I don't think there is anything especially humane about being killed by any method, and pain and terror are utterly inconsequential next to the big problem of being killed at all. So, I don't think whatever we do to cows is significantly different or better even if it's painless. It may be better but not significantly so. Like if I burned your house down but I considerately waited until you finished watching a tv show.
And yet I could never bring myself to boil a kitten and if I knew someone who enjoyed boiling kittens, I would consider that person to be an incredible danger to everyone else. Anyone who would do that, means there is something incredibly and dangerously broken about them, and no one else is safe around them.
There is just no way to argue that the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device. Whoever would use such a device, something needs to be done about that, and very little consideration needs to be given to their feelings on the matter. Intolerance? YES, of course, intolerance is the correct response to the intolerable.
You only asserted this, but provided no justification. The desires are dangerous, yes, for the simple fact that someone may decide to act on them (with real children, not dolls).
Regardless, we're not arguing about the desires, but about sex-bots. The desires exist independently of the sex-bots.
> the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device
I am curious, do you think the same about people who kill children in a video game?
So what you're doing there is creating thoughtcrime. Allow me to explain. Suppose we have Steve, George, and Mike. Steve does not want to boil kittens, and would never do it. George would like to boil kittens, but would never and will never do it[1]. Mike likes to boil kittens and has done it already. I think we both agree that Steve should not be punished for boiling kittens, while Mike should be. Do you think George should be punished, though? We both agree that George is at least potentially dangerous, but should he be punished for harboring a desired that he never acts on? From a purely practical standpoint, doesn't that encourage people like George to act on their desires at the earliest available opportunity? If having the desire to do something is basically the same as having done it already, George may as well do it.
[1] The reason why doesn't matter. Maybe he doesn't think he can get away from it. Maybe he has conflicting emotions about it. Maybe he feels he would enjoy boiling a kitten but morally couldn't bring himself to do it.
And I mainly say this because a more prison-abolitionist position here makes even more sense for these kinds of issues: be something akin to organized, intensive therapy and/or psychological treatment to address the underlying issues, and, failing that, a position in society where the person in question would not be exposed to children; where they're allowed to live an existence they find fulfilling and contribute somehow to society, while not being put in a position where their desires will put them and others in danger. Not locking them away, and certainly not indulging their desires with placebos until such time as the fakes don't work anymore. And certainly certainly certainly not doing it in such a way where only the rich ones can take advantage of the fakes in the first place.
Like, you can slice this however you want, but at the end of the day, a sex bot company providing kids to pedophiles for luxury car money is not solving the societal issue of pedophiles existing, not even remotely.
>And I mainly say this because a more prison-abolitionist position here makes even more sense for these kinds of issues: be something akin to organized, intensive therapy and/or psychological treatment to address the underlying issues, and, failing that, a position in society where the person in question would not be exposed to children
I disagree with your reasoning. If it was possible to immediately and perfectly detect pedophiles, confinement for life would be the best way to deal with them, because there we would be sure they could not possibly have access to children. I don't know why you think that abolishing prison would make more sense to deal with pedophiles.
>certainly not indulging their desires with placebos until such time as the fakes don't work anymore
I see, the gateway sexbot argument.
>not solving the societal issue of pedophiles existing
It's unclear to me that it's a problem that has a solution. Like the other guy said, if conversion therapy for homosexuality is believed to be ineffective, why are we assuming that conversion therapy for pedophiles would not be? I am able to be convinced that somehow only one of the two could be effective, but I would need to hear some justification.
I don't mean that merely stating a few truths solves all the problem and that conversion therapy would work, I'm just saying that there is a difference.
I know if it were me, maybe nothing would change what I want, but the therapy aspect has to have valid arguments just as a baseline to even allow for the possibility that I even listen at all.
Maybe for some at least it's enough to cause them to artificially control themselves.
I don't think that's too crazy because I think artificially civil behavior is rather common. I mean good grief just the phenomenon of cheating in relationships. It happens rather a lot, but for every occurance of cheating in a relationship there must be 1000 artificially decided not to do something they really did want to.
It probably just comes down to how many paedophiles are actually full on sociopaths or psychopaths that don't really empathize with anyone, the kids being no different, vs how many just want what they want in that one context but otherwise are functional humans who do possess the ability to empathize and care about anyone else. Those are two different cases.
I'm not saying ban sex-bots. I'm saying we should be asking why this is a thing people want and maybe try addressing the actual social ills here.
I don't shame them for doing that. It is their choice.
You simply choose to cherry pick certain realities that paint men in a worse light and women in a better light when it comes to preferences for sex toys.
Even if we give you the benefit of the doubt that you are arguing in good faith, you still haven't given a compelling reason as to why it's your goddamn business in the first place what sex toys people use?
I don't care if you have a sex toy, I have a whole fuckin tote bin of them. I'm not concerned about the toys. I'm concerned about the people who seem to be in a situation where they believe all they can have is toys. That depresses and worries me.
There just isn't a clear argument for where the line should be drawn.
Is your contention that none of them are correct in their belief?
I find the sexualization of minors, even mock minors, to be reprehensible and we should consider shutting that down.
But the rest of it is basically proposing steadily increasingly accurate (or alien) versions of fleshlights. Increasingly fancy toys for people to use by themselves or with their partners.
We are not now, not likely will we be in decades, capable of producing something even remotely close to a "simulated human". The concerns there are valid, but as likely to pass as "I'm really worried about people getting access to black magic". Yes, it would be bad if it came to pass and yes, people absolutely want it, but it's not real.
Now that schools has started to utilize AI for teaching, how will children be effected? The school period and teacher-student relationship is a critical part of growing up and developing functional and healthy adults, and replacing it with a cold one-sided interaction done in isolation can only be destructive to peoples mental and physical health. Even if the teaching tools could be made into perfect simulated teachers, the lack of the human connection is a major danger.
We can also see the same thing with AI doctors, with worse medical outcomes as a result. People need human relationships and connections, especially during periods of needs. There are plenty of researcher (already published and will likely be published in the future) on the harm that AI/remote doctors has on mental health and outcomes.
All this come however at a crash against a reality that not all children get great teacher-student relationships. Not all patient get good doctors. Some don't even get any teacher or doctor. During covid, some doctors did more harm by being physical near their patients than if they did not do anything at all. A robot/ai/word-for-human-replacement will likely be worse than a human, but they can also benefit people when the lack of alternatives are worse. People having simulated relationship with generated AI models might be worse than most real human relationship, but it also might be much better than some of the less-healthy human relationships that people might get as an alternative.