Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Nancy Jecker is right when she says that older persons ought not to be ashamed if they wish to remain sexually active in advanced old age. She offers a useful account of the role that sexuality plays in supporting key human capabilities. However, Jecker assumes an exaggerated account of what sex robots are likely to be able to offer for the foreseeable future when she suggests that we are obligated to make them available to older persons with disabilities. Moreover, whether older persons should be ashamed to desire sex robots—or, more importantly, whether we should be ashamed at the thought that we should respond to the sexual needs of older persons by providing them with sex robots—turns on a range of arguments that Jecker fails to adequately consider.
Jecker’s illusions about sex robots originate from a failure to recognise that what ‘sex’ robots facilitate is masturbation, not intercourse. Sex robots are sex toys, not partners. If there is only one person in the room, any sexual activity going on is masturbation, not sex. Jecker seems to think that the fact that ‘robots, like sex toys, can be used by couples’ means that they offer something other than ‘a form of masturbation’.1 However, that a sex toy—or a robot—can be used by couples does not make its use sex rather than masturbation—unless they are using it to have sex with each other.
Qua masturbation aids, sex robots are likely to be overpriced and underwhelming. The starting price for RealDoll’s HarmonyX sex doll, which has a robotic head that can mimic facial expressions and ‘speak’ in the same way that Alexia or Siri can speak—the only robotic feature yet available—is US$12 000.2 ,1 For this, one gets a sex toy that might enable one to enjoy the fantasy of having sex with the (one) person the robot represents. Although—if one pays still more—it is possible to swap out the faces and the genitals of these dolls, it remains the case that the physical nature of the artefact actually works to place severe limits on the range of fantasies sex ‘robots’ can serve to facilitate. Given that the real work is being performed by the imagination, unless one is turned on by the thought of having sex with a robot, one would do better to masturbate the old-fashioned way.
Nor do sex robots allow people to sustain relationships in any meaningful sense. As Jecker herself observes ‘robots are instruments by definition and all of their functions, sexual or otherwise, are designed to serve users’ ends’.1 There is no ‘other’ there, with which one can have a relationship.3 If ‘part of what is sought through engaging in sexual relationships is relationships’1 then sex robots can only disappoint.
Jecker suggests that ‘sex robots simulate being with another human being and involve forming a human-robot relationship’ (my emphasis).1 Given that robots are neither subjects nor agents, I’m not really sure what human–robot relationships are. However, I am confident that: (1) they would not differ fundamentally from the relationships one might have with other objects, such as a house plant or a dildo; (2) as such, they are unlikely to contribute much, if anything, towards realising the human capacities that Jecker highlights; and, (3) they are highly unlikely to be satisfying to anyone but members of the small community of robot fetishists.
A simulation of a relationship with another human being is another matter. However, a simulated relationship is not a real relationship and will not contribute to well-being in the same way as a real relationship may.4 Moreover, a relationship with a robot will only simulate a relationship with a human being to the extent that the robot succeeds in effacing its nature as an artefact. It is for this reason that I have argued that the project of facilitating ersatz relationships by means of robots is fundamentally deceptive.4 For the moment, the relatively primitive state of the art of humanoid robots means that there is little danger that anyone would mistake them for a human being—or get much benefit out of a ‘relationship’ with them.
That sex robots have little to offer older persons with disabilities does not make them unethical. However, there are powerful lines of ethical criticism of sex robots, which Jecker fails to adequately acknowledge, in large part because she neglects the ethics of the production and distribution of sex robots in favour of a narrow focus on the ethics of their use: this elision is especially unfortunate in a paper that is advocating for a policy of providing older people with disabilities with sex robots.
While individual older persons may be willing to be deceived about the nature of a robot in order to maintain the (false) belief that they have a relationship with it, the ethics of designing robots to deceive users is highly problematic.5 A policy of making people happier by bringing them to have false beliefs is disrespectful.
In response to the concerns I have previously expressed, that sex with robots may represent (in the sense of simulate) rape and thereby encourage vicious dispositions in users,6 Jecker responds by suggesting that ‘if these objects are used behind closed doors whose business is it?’.1 One can not help but wonder if she would be equally sanguine about the use of child-sized sex robots by those who enjoy the fantasy of sex with children? Moreover, neither the manufacture of sex robots, nor a policy of providing them in aged care contexts, can occur ‘behind closed doors’. The social understandings—about sexuality, about gender relations and about consent—that are expressed and reinforced by the manufacture of, and discourses about, sex robots are ethically salient and deserve (much) more attention than Jecker pays to them.
Jecker is to be commended for expanding our conception of who might benefit from sex robots. However, her naiveté about the nature of sex robots and all-too-swift dismissal of key ethical concerns mean that her paper ultimately offers fantasies about sex robots and their utility rather than a serious response to the ethical demands made on us by the sexual needs of older persons with disabilities.
Footnotes
Contributors Sparrow is the sole author of this manuscript.
Funding Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, Australian Research Council (CE140100012).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
↵The title of this page suggests the starting price is $7999 but that is the price for the robotic head of the sex doll alone – adding a (moulded latex) body raises the price to the figure quoted here.
Linked Articles
Other content recommended for you
- Nothing to be ashamed of: sex robots for older adults with disabilities
- Are sex robots enough?
- I, Sex Robot: the health implications of the sex robot industry
- Comment on ‘I, Sex Robot: the health implications of the sex robot industry’
- Sex robots for older adults with disabilities: reply to critics
- A human right to pleasure? Sexuality, autonomy and egalitarian strategies
- Robots and sexual ethics
- Commentary on Jecker
- Considering sex robots for older adults with cognitive impairments
- Society must consider risks of sex robots, report warns