In the absence of research, we need not presuppose that sextech/digisexuality (human–sex robot relationships) will increase hegemonic or toxic forms of masculinity, compared to carbonsexuality

Plastic fantastic: Sex robots and/as sexual fantasy. Lara Karaian. Sexualities, June 12, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607221106667

Abstract: This article provides an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of sex robots and/as sexual fantasy. I demonstrate that sexual fantasy is a highly complex and salient vector of analysis for any discussion of love and sex with robots. First, I introduce contemporary North American sex robots and offer a brief sketch of their ontology as relates to sex toys and pornography. Next, I provide a short but instructive mapping of sexual fantasy scholarship from across the fields of experimental psychology, media and cultural studies, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer and critical race theory. My goal here is to demonstrate sexual fantasy’s polymorphous and productive nature and its complex relationship to reality. Drawing on the theories of sexual fantasy canvassed herein, I examine the role of fantasy to sex robots’ inception, marketing, and consumption. From here I offer an appraisal of radical feminist, new materialist, and disabled queer and trans feminists’ critiques of sex robots and their users. I argue that theorizing sex robots through the lens(es) of sexual fantasy is necessary given efforts to stigmatize, regulate, and criminalize sexual fantasy and sextech users in the post/digital age. Future scholarship is encouraged to further examine the sex robot/sexual fantasy nexus and to consider whether and how their intersections impede or facilitate the development of alternative “networks of affection” including those that lie between the platonic and romantic or between “carbonsexuality” and technosexuality/digisexuality.

Keywords: sex robot, sexual fantasy, sextech, intersectional, digisexuality

Silicone users and abusers?

To a degree, the assumption that sex doll and robot users are a relatively privileged group, not the sexual subjects who have historically been socially and psychically abjected, dominated, and “punished most viciously for seeking out the pleasures of perverse sexual license” (Rodriguez, 2011: 336), is correct. Despite the growing number of people who fantasize about and express a willingness to have sex with robots (Lehmiller, 2018; Rajnerowicz, 2021), approximately 80% of sex doll owners are a majority cis-gender, white, men (Su et al., 2019), with a degree of financial privilege (given the high cost of realistic sex dolls and doll-bots), while 20% are couples and females (Döring et al., 2020: 13). Emerging research on sex doll users suggests that while a minority of consumers are “Men Going Their Own Way” men’s rights activists, the majority of users reject misogynistic views of women as well as heterosexual and monogamous constraints placed upon their sexual and intimate needs (Hanson, 2021).

Extrapolating further from existing sex doll literature, these men are privileged in that they are no more lonely, desperate, or socially inept than those in the general US population (Szczuka and Krämer, 2017), nor do they exhibit significantly higher rates of mental-illness (Valverde, 2012). Any attempts to condemn them based on the assumption that male use of sexual objects deviates from “statistical sexual norms” (Szczuka and Krämer, 2017: 4) or that users are “fetishists” (De Fren, 2009; Valverde, 2012) ignores the fact that both object fetishism (“sexual arousal from the erotic use of inanimate, nonliving objects”) (Rees and Garcia, 2017) and men’s use of flesh lights (Lampen, 2017) and vibrators (Reece et al., 2009) is relatively common and positively experienced within the North American context. Although sex doll users have been found to experience “above-average problems with sexual functioning” (Valverde, 2012: 30), this is arguable a normative evaluation that reifies the primacy of the ejaculatory penis above other organs, acts, pleasures, and intimacies, and ignores the growing destigmatization and usage of “erectile dysfunction” drug for medical and recreational purposes (Marsh and readers, 2017).

Notwithstanding their privileges, these men are also deviantized and marginalized in mainstream narratives (Borenstein and Arkin, 2019; Di Nucci, 2017), where they are regularly depicted as deprived victim-loners (CBC News, 2019), sicko “creeps” (Tiehen, 2018); pervy “johns” (Amin, 2019; Comella, 2018), and pre-criminals (Douthat, 2018). Although the source of their abjection is multifaceted, evidence suggests that this abjection flows, in large part, from the explicit parallels drawn between them and rapists, porn consumers, and sex work clients. That is, to the extent that sex robots are understood as commercialized manifest fantasy and as a means of playing out (common) S/M and rape fantasies, the men who consume them have been framed as users and abusers; as perpetrators of rape culture, as yet another source or symptom of a pornographic “public health crisis” (Blunt and Stardust, 2021); and/or as “unworthy” clients of commercial sex (Pheterson, 1993) who must be shamed, stigmatized, and criminalized (Weitzer, 2018).

In this context it is worth considering whether sex robot consumers can be understood as deviantized or even as queer sexual subjects in the same way some have suggested that “deviantized” sex work clients should be theorized (Khan, 2019). Indeed, additional support for the queerness and homosociality of sex robot users is evidenced by emerging analyses of male sex doll users and communities (Burr-Miller and Aoki, 2013; Middleweek, 2021; Su et al., 2019), as well as within the personal narratives of female sex robot consumers such as that of queer artist Amber Hawk Swanson. For instance, grappling with her difficulty finding a female partner, Hawk Swanson found herself admiring, sympathizing, and identifying with the online community of “doll husbands”—men who owned and loved their own RealDolls—and in 2006 commissioned a life-size RealDoll (not a robot) in her own image. Of her art, Getsy writes that Hawk Swanson disrupts “clichéd (heterosexual) fantasies of lesbian desire and of twin sexuality, both of which repeatedly surface as erotic ideals in popular culture as well as mainstream pornography” (2013: 469) while also complicating the boundary between “victimizing owner and victimized image” thus exposing “the anxious interdependence of self-objectification and self-realization” (2013: 474 and 475). Hawk Swanson’s subsequent conversations with doll users in her collection entitled Doll Closet (2017), draws on the closet metaphor to signify the stigmatization that keeps doll owners hidden, while also acknowledging the closet as a necessary space for sex doll/bots that must be hung to avoid being damaged. Of the iDollators she speaks with at least one is racialized—the internationally known Davecat—whereas others gender-bend and express their own heterosexual desires alongside a disidentification with heteronormativity. To this resource we can add the growing body of media coverage that exposes sex doll users as running the gamut from heterosexual married couples, to interracial poly couples and single queer men (Beck, 2013; Pemberton, 2020). Taken together with qualitative analysis of male users of a major sex doll forums, it thus begs considering how, “in the absence of empirical research otherwise, we need not presuppose that human–sex robot relationships will increase hegemonic or toxic forms of masculinity” and whether “these new relationship configurations may usher in new identities, communities or “liberated forms of sexuality” that enhance our lives with novel forms of mechanized pleasure” (Middleweek, 2021: 383). To the extent that emerging studies of sex dollbot and their users help to reveal the “myth of a natural, monolithic heterosexuality… [and the] capriciousness of its logic” (Burr-Miller and Aoki, 2013: 386), it becomes possible to view the idea of the “hegemonic sex robot user” as itself a fantasy⁶ and to question the construction of sex robot consumers as singularly privileged male users and abusers with oppressive sexual fantasies.