Why are sex robots which allow men to simulate rape a bad thing?

Inflatable dolls are more low-tech, but share the same concept. (Picture: Getty)

The internet was one of the world’s most important and exciting inventions, and we filled it with porn. 
So it should come as no surprise that as artificial intelligence progresses further and further, we’re using that technological advance in a similar way, namely, to create sex robots.

The True Companion website (which is strangely outdated given their high-tec product) offers a wide variety of products, both male and female. The robots are programmable, which means the owner can select a personality for their robot based on their own tastes.
Personality options include Young Yoko, who is ‘…oh so young (barely 18) and waiting for you to teach her’ and S&M Susan, who is ‘…ready to provide your pain/pleasure fantasies.’
But the personality which has provoked the most horror is ‘Frigid Farrah’ who is ‘reserved and shy’.

These are dolls, rather than robots. They come in a wide variety of looks. (Picture: Shutterstock)

The inference of Farrah’s character description is that she doesn’t want to have sex, and will provide resistance while the owner forces her into sex. The website explained that if you touch Farrah ‘in a private area, more than likely, she will not be to appreciative of your advance.’
Whether you feel comfortable or not with the idea of a person buying a sex robot is a personal judgement. But the option of a sex doll with a ‘frigid’ setting, which allows men to simulate non consensual sex with a sex doll has provoked a reaction of horror.
A reaction which I’m not sure is entirely reasonable.
It’s an inconvenient truth that many adults enjoy consensual non-consent. Which is a gentle way of saying that lots of people role play rape. Rape, as you’ll read in any article about sexual fantasies, is the most common female sexual fantasy.
Women who fantasize about rape do not want to be raped. Rape play and rape are entirely different entities.

Sex doll bodies, ready to be finished. (Picture: Getty Images)

For some women, role playing rape is about feeling you are so desirable that another person cannot resist you. For others, pretending not to consent is a way to absolve yourself of any guilt you may feel surrounding sex.
It might be a controversial sexual fantasy, but women aren’t lambasted for having it.
So if we believe that women are capable of enjoying a fantasy about non-consent, and that they should be allowed to play out those fantasies behind closed doors, why don’t we extend men that same courtesy?
Isn’t it possible that men are capable of having darker sexual fantasies which they would only ever want to carry out in role play? If women who like non consenting role play don’t want to be raped, isn’t it possible that men who like it also do not wish to rape?
Ethical questions and implications for robots, and whether or not we should be concerned about how people chose to treat their sex robots, is a complicated question. All of these questions are so very new, that we have to precedent to look to, no previous experience to cite.

Completed and uncompleted sex dolls (Picture: Getty)

Professor Noel Sharkey launched the Foundation for Responsible Robots 18 months ago, in order to address exactly the kinds of questions – brand new ones which humans have never encountered before.
Discussing whether or not it should be legal to create robots who simulate non-consensual sex, Professor Sharkey said:
‘Some people say it’s better they rape robots than rape real people. There are other people saying this would just encourage rapists more.’
This idea that a sex doll could ‘encourage’ a rapist shows a woeful misunderstanding of what a ‘rapist’ is.
Given that the vast majority of people who are sexually assaulted know their assailant, it’s important that we move away from the misconception of a rapist as a specific ‘type’ of man.
Rapists are, in the vast majority, not men who dress entirely in black and lurk around dark allies looking for vulnerable young women to attack.

The dolls also wear various outfits. (Picture: Getty Images)

Men who drive Volvos can be rapists. Men who take their wives to nice restaurants for their birthdays. Men with friends, and children, and sisters and jobs.
Rape is often the result of a lack of education about consent. It is commonly a type of control or domestic abuse.
It is very rarely the result of a man who has a rape fantasy becoming pathological about his desires and going into the world and selecting a woman to attack.
There are many aspects of the sex robot that worry me.

The idea that your ex partner could make a robot in your exact likeness, for instance. The prospect that, in a recent survey, a quarter of people said that they would happily date a robot, giving up actual human interaction.

But the option for men who have a dark sexual fantasy, a fantasy which is just as common in women as it is in men, to act out something that they know is taboo? That’s probably the least worrying, to me.
If a man is able to recognise that a fantasy is different from reality, and a sex robot is different from a woman, then what he chooses to do in his bedroom is entirely his business.
And if he isn’t able to tell the difference between those two things? Then he’s a danger to the world around him, whether he owns as sex doll or not.