Ooh baby, give it to me
Sari
Näre is one of the best-known Finnish academic feminists. Even though
she is not even close to her American or Swedish sisters in nuttiness,
she has been a vocal opponent of porn, just like all good little
Dworkinites. I remember once reading her interview in some magazine,
and in this interview she said that for her Ph.D. thesis, she had read
a lot of porn magazines and eventually their purpose dawned on her:
these magazines are used for masturbation. No shit, Sherlock. More
recently, I recall reading somewhere that Jenna Jameson was paid
something like 30 million dollars for her Internet website and porn
empire. Talk about a "irrational exuberance"! I don't think that Jenna
is that much hotter than her competition, but who am I to disagree with the free market?
I read Pamela Paul's book "Pornified" earlier today. This book discusses the way that pornography has recently become mainstream so that it is barely edgy any more, and the way that porn and porn culture have affected both the general culture and individual men, women and children in the modern world. Especially now that the Internet has made porn trivial to acquire and consume in total privacy, porn has become virtually ubiquitous.
This book kind of reminded me of Naomi Wolf's famous lament "The Porn Myth" that complained that young men who are accustomed to seeing attractive women in porn are less satisfied with "real" women and thus less enthusiastic to have sex with them. Since women are sexual gatekeepers due to the fact that on aggregate, they desire men significantly less than men desire them, this has the unfortunate effect of decreasing the demand (<= economic sense, once again for the illiterate leftists who are outraged of men "demanding" sex) and thus the "price" of sex for men, which makes women worse off. Unlike Wolf, to her credit Paul doesn't propose going back to the old ways so that women should again start wearing modest clothing and head scarves, like the orthodox Jews that Wolf admires. (I wonder what opinion Wolf holds about burqas.)
It's pretty clear to me that the most important reason why women and especially feminists oppose porn is that it reduces the beautiful thing of sex to a commodity, and this way reveals too clearly what men really like and want. Unlike in the real world, in the digital media copying is free and there is no scarcity, and anonymity takes away all social pressure. It follows any man gets to view precisely the porn that he likes best, and porn companies have to accept this reality in their product. (Even the models at Suicide Girls, the supposed "alternative" porn site that features "diverse" women and body types, are just mainstream porn women who wear piercings and have wilder hairdos.) When we look at the offerings of the financially most successful porn companies, the commonsense predictions of sociobiology turn out to be eeriely accurate, with young and slender women totally dominating the marker while "fat porn" and "middle-aged women porn" are practically meaningless niche markets.
Heck, I would bet that if you took a peek into a typical "sensitive" profeminist male's closet or hard drive, his porn tastes would turn out to be totally mainstream. For all the supposed diversity of male tastes and preferences, porn producers sure are slow to throw away money not catering to those tastes. How silly of them! For example, Hugh Hefner could multiply his profits by publishing different editions of Playboy so that the articles would be the same, but the editions would have different women in them. One edition would have the current Playmates, another would feature obese middle-aged women, a third one would feature MILF's etc. For all his business acumen, Ol' Hugh must be quite retarded not to do this already.
In every contest between natural and artificial, the artificial will eventually win whenever technology reaches the level required for creating the artificial alternative. Unlike natural things whose designing forces paid no attention to my needs or happiness, artificial things can be engineered to not have any of the defects (from the user's point of view) of its natural competitors. Even in its very primitive current form that offers only a crude and flat simulation of an attractive woman who behaves sexually as if you were a rock star or some other doubleplusalpha male, porn is already better than sex with the women they can hope to attract for many gamma men who have to settle for the most inferior women. If The Danimal's occasional predictions about realistic sex robots are ever realized (I am personally very skeptical about this, but after reading Ray Kurzweil's new tome "The Singularity is Near", I might give it 50 years, since all this futuristic stuff always seems to be 50 years in the future) so that some form of technology can give men artificial sensations equivalent to having sex with an extremely attractive woman who is herself extremely hungry for sex with the user, all bets are off. I am pretty sure that if any man could score with a hottie as easily as he can get water from a faucet, few men would bother to walk ten miles uphill in a snowstorm just to hear the girl say no. More pessimistically, since the Finnish aphorism advises us that "good pussy is the real reason why big houses and cars are bought", invention of realistic sex robots might turn out to be the last invention that the mankind ever makes.
I remember wondering years ago with my chums what Sari Näre and other academic feminists would do if sex robots ever turned sex into a commodity the same way that CD's and MP3's have turned music a commodity. Whereas in the old days ordinary people could at best hope to listen to the accordion player of the village maybe once a month, today anybody can listen to any music as much as they want whenever they want, by the best performers in the world. Sex robots would essentially do the same for sex, removing all scarcity of rare super-attractive women. I am sure that feminists would immediately come up with complex explanations why men fornicating with sex robots instead of trying to woo similar women who are way above their league is wrong and immoral. I am also sure that the feminist complaints against sex robots would again be humorously analogous to their complaints against Wal-Mart that puts mom and pop stores out of business the same way that sex robots would put the average woman and the whole relationship industry (that starts from bars and continues all the way to divorce lawyers) out of business.
Curiously enough, feminists already hold a very different attitude towards men who give up women for porn or RealDolls, compared to their attitude towards women who give up men for vibrators and other sex toys. Can you guess what this difference is? It's always funny when the opponents of sociobiology can't help but live exactly the way that sociobiology 101 predicts, and for all their denial about sexual differences, they accidentally reveal that they understand perfectly well why "wanker" is an insult only for men, and "slut" is an insult only for women. Everybody knows perfectly well how things work, except feminists and leftists, apparently.
Oh heck, The Danimal has already said pretty much all that needs to be said about this topic, so instead of trying to repeat it here in an inferior fashion, let's just have the master say it:
I read Pamela Paul's book "Pornified" earlier today. This book discusses the way that pornography has recently become mainstream so that it is barely edgy any more, and the way that porn and porn culture have affected both the general culture and individual men, women and children in the modern world. Especially now that the Internet has made porn trivial to acquire and consume in total privacy, porn has become virtually ubiquitous.
This book kind of reminded me of Naomi Wolf's famous lament "The Porn Myth" that complained that young men who are accustomed to seeing attractive women in porn are less satisfied with "real" women and thus less enthusiastic to have sex with them. Since women are sexual gatekeepers due to the fact that on aggregate, they desire men significantly less than men desire them, this has the unfortunate effect of decreasing the demand (<= economic sense, once again for the illiterate leftists who are outraged of men "demanding" sex) and thus the "price" of sex for men, which makes women worse off. Unlike Wolf, to her credit Paul doesn't propose going back to the old ways so that women should again start wearing modest clothing and head scarves, like the orthodox Jews that Wolf admires. (I wonder what opinion Wolf holds about burqas.)
It's pretty clear to me that the most important reason why women and especially feminists oppose porn is that it reduces the beautiful thing of sex to a commodity, and this way reveals too clearly what men really like and want. Unlike in the real world, in the digital media copying is free and there is no scarcity, and anonymity takes away all social pressure. It follows any man gets to view precisely the porn that he likes best, and porn companies have to accept this reality in their product. (Even the models at Suicide Girls, the supposed "alternative" porn site that features "diverse" women and body types, are just mainstream porn women who wear piercings and have wilder hairdos.) When we look at the offerings of the financially most successful porn companies, the commonsense predictions of sociobiology turn out to be eeriely accurate, with young and slender women totally dominating the marker while "fat porn" and "middle-aged women porn" are practically meaningless niche markets.
Heck, I would bet that if you took a peek into a typical "sensitive" profeminist male's closet or hard drive, his porn tastes would turn out to be totally mainstream. For all the supposed diversity of male tastes and preferences, porn producers sure are slow to throw away money not catering to those tastes. How silly of them! For example, Hugh Hefner could multiply his profits by publishing different editions of Playboy so that the articles would be the same, but the editions would have different women in them. One edition would have the current Playmates, another would feature obese middle-aged women, a third one would feature MILF's etc. For all his business acumen, Ol' Hugh must be quite retarded not to do this already.
In every contest between natural and artificial, the artificial will eventually win whenever technology reaches the level required for creating the artificial alternative. Unlike natural things whose designing forces paid no attention to my needs or happiness, artificial things can be engineered to not have any of the defects (from the user's point of view) of its natural competitors. Even in its very primitive current form that offers only a crude and flat simulation of an attractive woman who behaves sexually as if you were a rock star or some other doubleplusalpha male, porn is already better than sex with the women they can hope to attract for many gamma men who have to settle for the most inferior women. If The Danimal's occasional predictions about realistic sex robots are ever realized (I am personally very skeptical about this, but after reading Ray Kurzweil's new tome "The Singularity is Near", I might give it 50 years, since all this futuristic stuff always seems to be 50 years in the future) so that some form of technology can give men artificial sensations equivalent to having sex with an extremely attractive woman who is herself extremely hungry for sex with the user, all bets are off. I am pretty sure that if any man could score with a hottie as easily as he can get water from a faucet, few men would bother to walk ten miles uphill in a snowstorm just to hear the girl say no. More pessimistically, since the Finnish aphorism advises us that "good pussy is the real reason why big houses and cars are bought", invention of realistic sex robots might turn out to be the last invention that the mankind ever makes.
I remember wondering years ago with my chums what Sari Näre and other academic feminists would do if sex robots ever turned sex into a commodity the same way that CD's and MP3's have turned music a commodity. Whereas in the old days ordinary people could at best hope to listen to the accordion player of the village maybe once a month, today anybody can listen to any music as much as they want whenever they want, by the best performers in the world. Sex robots would essentially do the same for sex, removing all scarcity of rare super-attractive women. I am sure that feminists would immediately come up with complex explanations why men fornicating with sex robots instead of trying to woo similar women who are way above their league is wrong and immoral. I am also sure that the feminist complaints against sex robots would again be humorously analogous to their complaints against Wal-Mart that puts mom and pop stores out of business the same way that sex robots would put the average woman and the whole relationship industry (that starts from bars and continues all the way to divorce lawyers) out of business.
Curiously enough, feminists already hold a very different attitude towards men who give up women for porn or RealDolls, compared to their attitude towards women who give up men for vibrators and other sex toys. Can you guess what this difference is? It's always funny when the opponents of sociobiology can't help but live exactly the way that sociobiology 101 predicts, and for all their denial about sexual differences, they accidentally reveal that they understand perfectly well why "wanker" is an insult only for men, and "slut" is an insult only for women. Everybody knows perfectly well how things work, except feminists and leftists, apparently.
Oh heck, The Danimal has already said pretty much all that needs to be said about this topic, so instead of trying to repeat it here in an inferior fashion, let's just have the master say it:
Evolution sucks, because sperm is cheap and eggs are costly. That's why I suggest we build sex robots. Let everyone act out whatever silly sociobiological urges they feel, in a safe way which affects no other human.
The concept of sex robots is a rational response to all the disasters associated with trying to get recreational sex the natural way. Nature has no concept of "recreational" sex. Many features of our future sex robots will reflect the painful lessons learned by men during their groveling ordeal of trying to obtain quality sex from women.
Sex robots might someday be that cheap. A realdoll costs about $5000. If it lasts for 10 years and you bang it 500 times per year that's $1/bang. Adding intelligence to the realdoll won't increase the price very much because you're going to get intelligence for free anyway as computers continue to get better. Adding mobility would increase the price, but it's hard to say by how much. On the other hand, a mobile robot would good for lots of things other than sex. For example: cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, guarding your property, etc.
The AIDS epidemic continues to worsen steadily. From a public health perspective, a sexbot is like a more effective condom: an artificial device a man sticks his penis into to stop the spread of disease, but unlike a conventional condom, a sexbot would actually feel good. I expect the AIDS industry to promote sexbots once they become good enough to start replacing real sex. AIDS advocates agitate to distribute clean needles to drug addicts. How would sexbots seem worse?
Imagine a tribe of humans living in, say, Ohio without any source of artificial heat. They could do it, but it would be tough. Imagine if some proto-religion had taken a hard stand against artificial heat. The hominid craving for warmth would have wounded that religion soon after the discovery of fire. The invention of thermostats would have done it in. The above scenario may seem hard to imagine, but many religions have drawn analogous lines in the sand against sex, and this will almost certainly pit them against sexbots. When sexbots become as good as I think they can be, those religions will lose. Drawing lines in the sand against sex has worked so far because for most people at any given time, really good sex is pretty much out of reach. Holiness is a good option when sin presents logistical problems.
When sexbots get good enough, nobody will care what the human partner thinks, because human partners will no longer be necessary. Some women get jealous when their men watch football games on TV. A lot of women eventually come to terms with it somehow, I guess. It's like in the old days, when horses were a necessity. There was probably a market for any horse a person could ride. Today horses are luxuries, so the nags probably get turned into dog food.
About the sex robots... I agree that some men (and women) would likely settle for artificial gratification, but wouldn't such progress eventually give much more weight to the gratification one gets from the mere challenge of scoring with a real hottie and succeeding in it? Therefore such development would only give more power to the hotties in question.
Although, the development could just as well go to the point where men pursue the real hawt chicks just for the challenge, and as soon as the scoring is obvious, they drop the task and plug in to the instant artificial gratification system. After all, it wouldn't necessarily require any physical effort like the real thing does.
Posted by Pasi | 3:55 AM
There is also the evolutionary factor. Barring artificial wombs or some similarly disruptive technology, the first generation created after the invention of viable sexbots is going to be descended from the subset of the population that decided to have children anyway.
Posted by Dog of Justice | 4:48 AM
We're already descended from people who decided to have children anyway, so nothing is going to change there...
BTW, I think The Porn Myth is a great article, it really just suck if someone and their wife having sex would just be really bad pornography ;-)
Posted by Anonymous | 5:04 AM
Pasi, I think the opposite. If there are less competitors, how would one get more gratification from the challenge? The difference is like being a Czech and choosing between becoming a football or a ice-hockey star (Czech has been successful in both of them). You have a chance for glory in a sports played by just about every nation on Earth or in a sports played by just a handful of nations.
In addition to that, even the men with higher sexual market value might choose a sexual robot because it saves time for other interesting activities, whether they be of intellectual or physical nature. I bet some of them already do this by watching porn regularly and just occasionally spending time and effort for getting real stuff. If there were more and better substitutes for the real stuff, there would be less candidates for even the real hawt chicks to choose from.
Posted by Rebyk | 5:13 AM
This is not exactly on topic, but Ilkka must absolutely see this:
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/3-26-2004-52214.asp
Search for the words "Ireland's most famous" in the text. Instant hilarity guaranteed when you see the next words. :D
Posted by Panu | 5:47 AM
Rebyk is right. When artificial sex of the highest quality becomes cheap and abundant, there will be much less demand for sex with real hotties. Consequently, scoring with them will become less of an achievement.
High-quality sexbots will require a high level of AI to produce the necessary graceful movement and appropriately nuanced body language.
When that level of AI is reached, technological evolution will have switched into such a high gear that biological evolution and all facts of life associated with it will shortly become totally meaningless from a human point of view.
Posted by Markku | 6:53 AM
Why are you a conservative if you don't think conservative thoughts?
Posted by Anonymous | 6:58 AM
Nice post, this reminds me of a friend, whose first question in carshop is always: "Do I get pussy with this?"
Posted by Anonymous | 8:02 AM
Dawn of sex robots could be difficult for womens, since they need more 'mental connection' to enjoy sex, thus have more difficulties to change to artificial partners, while mens only throws the juice in.
Posted by Peter | 8:07 AM
"more 'mental connection' to enjoy sex"
Well, that is only because - against the common sentiment - women handle their emotions so poorly.
Posted by Anonymous | 10:19 AM
Scoring with real women will always be an achievement, what men really want. In our society, men who, by "choice" or necessity, forgo real women in favor of porn, real Dolls, etc. are considered losers who do so because no woman will have them. This stigma will also be associated with sexbots.
Furthermore - what about hookers? For a reasonable fee (and certainly for less than the cost of a sexbot), men can now just hire a woman who will be a sure thing & who in the interest of repeat business, provide their services with a smile. Many men obviously do just that and yet... getting a real woman still remains the optimal scenario.
And of course there's the powerful internal drive for things like the social validation involved in showing off that woman on your arm to your social circle (no one's taking the sexbot out for a walk), the desire for romantic love/to be cared for/to be desired by another human being, creating a family (yes, lots of men eventually want children/a wife). Sexbots will never satisfy these needs.
Posted by Alex | 12:43 PM
Ilkka wrote: "More recently, I recall reading somewhere that Jenna Jameson was paid something like 30 million dollars for her Internet website and porn empire. Talk about a "irrational exuberance"! I don't think that Jenna is that much hotter than her competition, but who am I to disagree with the free market?"
Of course she is not that much hotter. The reason for her success and "demand" is that she is famous porn star, which leads to great number of people going to her site (you get lots of money from advertisement) or buying her movies. The same is true for example the famous sports stars or the famous actors.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:13 PM
Naomi Wolf says:
By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale.
Well, she sure knows what it is about, eh ...
Posted by realist | 3:54 PM
If you want to see what happens when sex with young slender women is available for nearly nothing, go to Thailand.
Check out the gender composition of the travellers.
Posted by Anonymous | 6:40 PM
the desire for romantic love/to be cared for/to be desired by another human being, creating a family (yes, lots of men eventually want children/a wife). Sexbots will never satisfy these needs.
Bots will certainly satisfy these needs waaaay better than your average Sari Näre and her disciples. An advanced artificial intelligence will simulate romantic love far better than any feminist, and those bots will come with an assortment of ova from donors (donatrices?).
Feminists are so disparagingly inhuman that it will sure be no big deal to create bots more human than that lot, I'll go bail.
Posted by Panu | 8:37 PM
Alex: "getting a real woman still remains the optimal scenario"
Naturally there is some kind of optimal scenario, but notice that we are talking about what happens if you don't need another human being to fully satisfy your sexual needs. I believe that there are a lot of people (likely men) who put up with bad behaviour just because they have a chance getting laid.
It could be interesting to see if choosing a bad relationship over having no relationship or one night stands at all correlates with the access to prostitutes. Prostitutes are different from sex robots in one important aspect, though. They are human beings and you never know if you are hurting them, no matter what they say.
Posted by Rebyk | 4:09 AM
"Prostitutes are different from sex robots in one important aspect, though. They are human beings and you never know if you are hurting them, no matter what they say."
Prostitutes are service workers whose time is valuable. The going rate for 1/2 hour session with a prostitute is in the order of about 100 euros or about 10-20 times the average person earns in that amount of time.
Also note that when sexbots capable of delivering high-quality sex, they won't remain expensive for long. The same level of AI needed to operate a sexbot capable of providing human-level sex, will be used to render all (unenhanced)human labor obsolete.
Posted by Markku | 7:25 AM
RealDollSex.com seems to address how some people use the dolls.
Posted by Abbie | 2:14 PM