February 12/2019
In his Metamorphosis the Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a female statue he had carved out of ivory. Wishing that his statue might come to life he made offerings to the goddess Aphrodite and she granted his wish. The story has its modern corollaries in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, later adapted into the film 'My Fair Lady'.
In an obvious sense humans 'love' to create and love what they create, re-create or make over. The ability to make or create something original, beautiful (or useful) can be empowering and even intoxicating. Perhaps, however, we should pause for a moment when what is being created are sex robots shaped like women, with female voices and feminine traits—minus all the emotional fuss, after-sex chatter and pressure to commit to something more than just an exchange of bodily fluids.
In short, subtract everything that would distinguish the ‘made object’ or ‘thing’ from a living, breathing, experiencing human being, and then add to this the reality of a gender imbalance that resulted from China’s one-child policy and longstanding historical practice of female infanticide, and you might begin to see why the WM Doll manufacturing company is awash in profits—producing 1,500 to 2000 sex dolls a month. These sex dolls also do housework and come in 260 faces, 11 body shapes and cost between $900-$1,779. The newest option is a doll with a normal human body temperature of 37 degrees C.
Consistent with the axiom that you can pay a sociologist to say anything, ‘famous feminist’ and sociologist Li Yinhe relates that “single men can never find wives” and that sex robots “can solve this problem”. I’m wondering, however, whether the problem is not really that there are not enough women around in China, but rather that there are not enough subservient women around—you know, the type that refuse to allow men to get away with treating them like they might treat a sex doll—as mere objects for male sexual gratification or domestic slavery.
However, the manufacture of sex dolls is not confined to China. It is a 30-billion-dollar industry. A California-based company sells a life-size silicone sex doll for $15,000. In addition to being a sex slave their doll talks, blinks, smiles, praises you and tells you facts about your life—it can even be made to look like Scarlett Johannsen
If you don’t think the proliferation of AI sex dolls are an extension of pornography that will tend to contract our capacity to love or be caring, compassionate and empathetic towards flesh and blood humans; if you don’t think they perpetuate a culture that objectifies women by treating them as merchandise or sexual property reduced to the status orifices and receptacles; if you don’t think these dolls are made by men to conform to existing stereotypes of the subservient women; if you don’t believe that most men who pay for such dolls really DO want them ‘come alive’ as sex-slave humans they can program and control; if you don’t get that these are not harmless sex toys but will intensify misogyny and have a harmful impact on women and girls, then you are already buying into the normalization of objectification and violence towards women and girls via the proliferation of AI sex dolls.