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?
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.
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.