In Jacobite, Diana Fleischman discusses the appeal of sexbots to young (and not-so-young) men:
Sexbots are usually woman-shaped gynoid machines. At the present time, sex robots are simple: they’re silicone sex dolls that have some capacity for movement and response. Manufacturers are rolling out new models and new promises: sex robots that respond to touch and penetration, sex robots with interchangeable faces and bodies and sex robots with different personalities. Future robots will have all the allure of the cues of fertility in a flesh-and-blood woman combined with the artificial intelligence that creates compulsive reward directed behavior.
Sex robots are overwhelmingly gynoid because heterosexual men drive the market for sexual products like prostitution and pornography. Across cultures, men desire more sexual partners, need to know someone for less time before they want to have sex with them, and have lower standards for a sexual liaison than women. Looking at gay men is instructive here. Their sexual interactions are not limited by women’s sexual choosiness and they, on average, have many more sexual partners than straight men or lesbians.
It isn’t hard to see the reason for this. Men don’t get pregnant and don’t lactate, and they have smaller, easier-to-produce sex cells than women. For a man, the cost of producing offspring is cheap. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is the engine of evolution. The low opportunity costs make men motivated to take every opportunity, even if it comes in the form of a robot. Ever think a dog is dumb for growling at his reflection in the mirror? Human men can become aroused looking at flat images of nude women in black and white, our evolved psychology can respond in maladaptive ways towards novel stimuli.
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My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.
Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.
Perhaps we should encourage some men to use sex robots. Men who get environmental cues that they’re evolutionary dead-ends disproportionately menace society. In the 1980s, evolutionary psychologist couple Wilson and Daly found that perpetrators of violence and homicide had something in common: they were young, single and didn’t have access to the kinds of resources with which to win mates. Polygynous societies in which wealthier men have access to multiple women are more violent and less stable because they have a class of young men without the prospect of getting a mate. Monogamy, rather than being the state of nature, may have been an important cultural technology for reducing violence.
