Would You Want Your Very Own “Westworld” Sex Robot?

October 4, 2016
HOLLY-KINGSTOWN

Does a sexy robot turn you on?

Jezebel did an excellent piece on the robots of the new HBO series "Westworld" and raises a whole lot of great questions about how we would interact with that kind of artificial intelligence-enhanced fuck machines if we were given the chance.

We really have been sexually into replicating the genitals and bodies of porn stars and generic women for a long time. Think of all of those porn star sex dolls, fake pussies, fake assholes, fake mouths, fake boobs, fake cocks, the RealDolls, and the Fleshlights out there. There are even "Fleshlight Girls" - porn stars who have committed to the artificial representation of themselves in this way. VR porn is loved by some and not all. Hell, porn has been pushing the virtual reality possibilities for a long time, really. So, it makes sense that in this fake "Westworld"place this technology would be brought to its highest, most advanced level.

Can a sexy robot give consent?

The question of consent gets raised in the Jezebel piece, and really, I do not know that an object like a Westworld host, the hot lady robots in "Ex Machina" or even the body-less Scarlett Johansson computer program in "Her" can give consent to anything. The point of them is to be an object that we created to bends to our whims. The Westworld hosts are even programmed to ignore a human when and if the human in front of them refers to them as not being "real." Is a robot a person when it has the Westworld-level of technology going on behind it? Right now, I am not sold on it either way.

We already have actual humans doing a lot of sex work out there, and frankly, they are not treated very great, so the way that the humans in "Westworld" like to occasionally sexually abuse a robot host who is pretending to be a non-consenting fake human and/or murder them just rings extremely true to me. Sex workers get murdered and hurt in our country all of the time and they have little legal protections because of what their jobs are. The robots of "Westworld" seem to provide an outlet for all of those guys who would normally beat up a hooker after the hooker was done blowing them, so to me, that robotic future is a positive.

I lived in Seattle while the Green River Killer - a serial killer who targeted prostitutes and economically disadvantaged women as his prey - was not yet apprehended. Every single woman I knew who lived in that city then had some form of personal protection on them when they took any public transportation. I was working as a peep show performer during part of the time period where he was actively killing women. Green River Killer Gary Ridgway got away with killing women as long as he did partially because the women he was killing were seen as less valuable members of society by the Seattle Police Department. That's really wrong, but it's also really true.

Society needs to be a lot kinder to strippers, porn stars, and prostitutes. Hopefully, viewers will be able to connect the dots on "Westworld" on the importance of being decent to a sex worker - whether they were made in a robotic lab or not. The Jezebel piece expresses that we will need to show respect to our robotic sex workers, but the treatment that our current human sex workers get does not leave me terribly optimistic, you know? However, if a guy would be sated with beating up a 'bot instead of raping and killing a human who is hooking to pay her bills, I have to say that I want those robots here right now to keep my friends safe.

When machinery turns human

Tomcat, the creator of Kink's Fucking Machines website, talks about the development of the sex machines on the site and how the site's viewers loved watching the evolution of the machines. I completely get that. I am a huge fan of BattleBots, so I get wanting to watch that design process. For me, though, that design process and the resulting functionality does tend to bind me emotionally to certain BattleBots while other ones I just can't get behind at all. (Chomp is dead to me.) I guess what I feel for the BattleBots is an arousal in a sense, and I do love the orgasms that the Fucking Machines give many a porn star, so I guess in some sense, the Westworld hosts would probably do more for me sexually than maybe I want to own up to right now.

It is that consent issue that kills me every time right now on the whole concept of wanting an AI-enhanced sex toy. I need consent out of my partners and I don't know that I could not make a sex robot into a person in my mind even if it looked, acted, and smelled a certain way around me. It all boils to down to the artificial intelligence in it for me, I guess. I love my Womanizer because, to me, it approximates what great cunnilingus feels like but right now, I don't think that I would want to go down on it and grab some Starbucks with it afterwards. Someday, though, a machine might be able to tell me what a great sex partner I am and I would feel great about that statement coming out of that thing. I guess it could happen.

Would you want one of these sex robots to want you like you want what that 'bot actually represents to you? Would you want that to be a two-way relationship or is part of the sex robot fantasy that you can use the object to your exact liking and then maybe trash it for another model?