Last night I watched a documentary on YouTube called "My Sex Robot". It was about the men who have developed a sexual fetish around the idea of a machine as a sexual companion, or even a romantic companion. I actually found it pretty fascinating to watch, partly because I can relate to it a little myself.
I have been alone for a large proportion of my of post-adolescant life and there have been times where a surrogate partner, if only for sexual release, has seemed like a very appealing idea. The thing is though that more recently I have real trouble seeing quite how a robot can ever meet what it is I truly desire, nor give me the kind of pleasure I get from meeting real women.
The show actually featured an academic who said that there are a lot of people who are lonely and frustrated and having robots for those people can only make the world better.
I cannot disagree more.
What it all seemed to come down to was a question of the self esteem these people have. It was the idea that an artificial partner would be completely incapable of judging or rejecting you. I found this expressed particularly well by one of the men interviewed when he talked about his obsession with shop mannequins. He said that because they were lifeless they wouldn't react, and "no reaction is better than a negative one".
What's missing here is an understanding that it doesn't have to be this way for any of these people. Self esteem isn't a finite resource like oil or gas, or indeed like money, it is one that can be grown and nurtured out of nothing. My own experience of working on my own sense of self esteem has been that as it has grown the world has become a progressively more friendly and accepting place.
People are, for the most part, warm and welcoming. It's extraordinary.
Once you start to get a taste of this different world, one where you can walk up to a group of strangers and they will smile at you, accept you, be interested about you and tell you about themselves, the thought of spending a night in with a robot starts to lose its appeal. There is so much emotion conveyed in conversation with another human being and there would be none of that with a robot that had anything short of human levels of intelligence. But if you could build a machine like that you get into all sorts of ethical questions. If this machine is as intelligent as you doesn't it also deserve the same freedoms as you? Such freedoms would no doubt include the freedom to leave you.
For some reason I am reminded here of that TV series The Outer Limits where every other week the plot was basically: man builds machine; man has sex with machine; machine becomes self aware; man rejects machine; machine tries to destroy the world. A natural story progression.
Anyway, coming back to the issue, as I see it what this hinges on is that there are a lot of men out there who are just unable to connect with women. This is sad, because the guys who want a robot because it won't reject them have no idea just how receptive women really are. Out of fear they are rejecting women before they've even given women a chance to connect with them.
Learning to be an easy socialiser, which is, I think, the linchpin to having attractive women in ones life is not an overnight transition but it is something that anybody who commits themselves to can realistically achieve. It does take effort, but it is worth it.
Likewise the only way to consistently attract the women you want, as a man, is to risk rejection. This is the only way. If you are unprepared to take that risk you cannot expect to reap the rewards of female attention, companionship and, yes, sex.
I really don't think that a futuristic sex toy is the solution all those lonely men out there really want. They are just unaware that they can take steps to become the men that the lonely women (let's not forget them!) want to meet. That or they are too scared to apply themselves to it. Either way this is not something that technology will solve; quite the opposite in fact. What it really needs is the old fashioned low-tech process of learning to love oneself and connect with other human beings.
