{"id":52813,"date":"2019-11-18T05:00:55","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T10:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=52813"},"modified":"2023-02-02T15:54:47","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T20:54:47","slug":"i-cant-help-but-wonder-if-a-large-majority-of-men-wont-opt-for-the-conflict-free-humanoid-over-the-real-thing-with-all-of-our-baggage-and-hormones-and-mothers-in-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/11\/18\/i-cant-help-but-wonder-if-a-large-majority-of-men-wont-opt-for-the-conflict-free-humanoid-over-the-real-thing-with-all-of-our-baggage-and-hormones-and-mothers-in-law\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I can&#8217;t help but wonder if a large majority of men won&#8217;t opt for the conflict-free humanoid over the real thing, with all of our baggage and hormones and mothers-in-law&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the (US) <em>Spectator<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/spectator.us\/inside-world-couch-buddy-sex-robot\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Bridget Phetasy<\/a> reports on her visit to the factory where Realdolls are made:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_52814\" style=\"width: 490px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-52814\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO-480x252.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"252\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-52814\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO-480x252.jpg 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO-853x448.jpg 853w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO-150x79.jpg 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO-768x403.jpg 768w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Auradolls-Mississauga-BlogTO.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-52814\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of the sex dolls on offer at Aura Dolls in Mississauga, the first &#8220;sex doll brothel&#8221; in the Toronto area.<br \/>Photo originally published by <em>BlogTO<\/em> &#8211; https:\/\/www.blogto.com\/city\/2019\/11\/sex-doll-brothel-mississauga\/.<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p>The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn&#8217;t be surprised, I&#8217;m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the &#8220;Ferraris of love dolls&#8221;, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I&#8217;m sure she&#8217;s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The employees look at the &#8220;love dolls&#8221; as more than just sexbots. They know their customers want a couch buddy. They want someone to cuddle at night. Perhaps they&#8217;ve lost a spouse and don&#8217;t feel like dating.<\/p>\n<p>Whitney Cummings logged on to a forum for men who own the sex robots and monitored their conversations for months. &#8220;I thought they were going to be creeps, psychopaths,&#8221; she says. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what to tell you. They&#8217;re very lovely men. They&#8217;re lovely. They adore their dolls. They marry their dolls. That is happening.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What strikes me amid the body parts, the rows of eyes, the wall of nipples and the robot &#8220;brains&#8221;: these aren&#8217;t your weird uncle&#8217;s sex dolls. With the introduction of AI, these dolls are offering something their predecessors couldn&#8217;t: intimacy and affection.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I always looked at them as art and I always found it funny that because it&#8217;s a sexually usable thing, it&#8217;s disqualified as art in the higher sense in a lot of people&#8217;s minds. They go, &#8216;Oh that&#8217;s not art, that&#8217;s just nasty'&#8221;, says McMullen. &#8220;And what&#8217;s funny about that is now we&#8217;re doing this serious engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics and now people aren&#8217;t so quick to dismiss it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Realbotix is the natural evolution of Abyss Creations, the company McMullen started in 1997 (in fact, Abyss Creations made the doll for <em>Lars and the Real Girl<\/em>). What began as just &#8220;real dolls&#8221; now has a robotic component, an AI team and an app.<\/p>\n<p>McMullen talks about how he&#8217;s always wanted to break free of the sex toy stigma. &#8220;Yes people use them sexually, but they also get this huge sense of companionship from having a doll and a robot.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the (US) Spectator, Bridget Phetasy reports on her visit to the factory where Realdolls are made: The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn&#8217;t be surprised, I&#8217;m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the &#8220;Ferraris of love dolls&#8221;, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,66,13],"tags":[1506,139,1320,255],"class_list":["post-52813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-health-science","category-usa","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-psychology","tag-sexdolls","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dJP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52817,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52813\/revisions\/52817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}