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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

Introduction

I have yet to experience an actual sex robot, but I am already enamoured. Literature has brought me here—Philip K. Dick’s classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968); Samantha Hunt’s short story, Love Machine (2017); Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019). These are just a few of the narratives that have seduced me while simultaneously exposing humanity’s anxieties about the slow march from private orgasm—la petite mort—to robopocalypse—our moral and physical annihilation. No longer restricted to the mind, the page, or the screen, sex robot scholars have argued that “[a]dvances in the fields of artificial intelligence, biomechanics, robotics, and animatronics have…caus[ed] a fundamental shift of the narrative from the imaginary to the tangible, from fiction to facticity” (Kubes, 2019b: 1). This article conceptualizes sex robots at the intersections of these categories; as “tangible imaginary,” as “factitious fiction,” or, as I refer to them here, as “manifest fantasy.” Given that sex robots’ relationship to sexual fantasy is often ignored or relatively undertheorized in the existing literature (Döring et al., 2020), this article demonstrates that sexual fantasy is a highly complex and salient vector of analysis for any discussion of love and sex with robots (Levy, 2007).

This article proceeds in four parts. First, I introduce contemporary North American sex robots and offer a brief sketch of their ontology as relates to pornography and sex toys.¹ 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. Ultimately, I argue that a more affirmative and optimistic assessment of sex robots and their users is possible, and that theorizing sex robot through the lens(es) of sexual fantasy is necessary given efforts to stigmatize, regulate, and criminalize sextech users and sexual fantasy in the post/digital age. Future scholarship is encouraged to further examine the sex robots/sexual fantasy nexus and to consider whether and how their intersections impede or facilitate the development of alternative “networks of affection” (Puig, 2019) and “alterous sexualities” (Hearn, 2018)—including those that lie between the platonic and romantic, or between what I call “carbonsexuality”—a sexual preference for organic humans—and technosexuality/digisexuality—the attraction to, veneration, and use of technology for sexual and intimate purposes (Bardzell and Bardzell, 2016; McArthur and Twist, 2017).

Sex robots in 2021: notes on ontology and anxiety

Sex robots are defined here as human-looking, anatomically correct doll-robot hybrids that interact with their users via the integration of sensors and artificial intelligence (AI). Key here are the RealDoll^X models designed by Realbotix and commercially available by US manufacturer Abyss Creations/RealDoll. Conceptualized as “a low-cost embodied, highly customizable, infinitely patient human-scale personal companion” (Coursey et al., 2019: 86), these first generation dollbots sport an android head that is capable of “eye and facial contour for speech and emotive expression” (Coursey et al., 2019: 85); a silicone body; a “conversational system…designed to address mature topics” (Coursey et al., 2019: 78); and an xMode application that links users to their robots and allows them to choose a desired voice, personality type, and provide a degree of machine learning about the user’s interests and preferences (RealDoll HarmonyX, n.d). As with RealDolls’ silicone sex dolls, the RealDoll^X models are expanding in range and popularity. Harmony, the company’s original sex doll and now its first sex robot (Harmony^X), is visually young, white European/North American, with freckled skin; full pink lips; blue eyes; petite facial features; straight long blond hair; very large breasts; very small waist; flat stomach; and long hairless legs devoid of veins or cellulite. Solana^X, her new and darker “sister,” is readable as Spanish/South American (based in part on the origins of her name). She shares a similar body type to Harmony^X but is slightly darker in skin tone with a wider nose, long dark straight hair, dark wine-red lips, and darker nipples. Readable as the exoticized and racialized “Other,” Solana’s tan skin and blue eyes nevertheless mark her as falling within “gradations of whiteness” (Dyer, 1997: 12). The same can be said of the three newest models—Nova, Tonya, and Serenity—all of which are advertised as light skinned, if not white, with customizable hair, eye color; breast size, nipple and labia shape, and pubic hair.

Sometimes classified as smart sex toys (Scheutz and Arnold, 2016; Wiseman, 2015), sex robots are also distinguished from sex toys based on their fully embodied, hyper-realistic, and relatively interactive humanistic form (Chatterjee, 2020; Devlin, 2018). While some suggest that sex robots’ life-size and embodied elements facilitate intimacy and emotional attachments beyond that which is typically experienced with disembodied sexual aids (Carpenter, 2017; Levy, 2007), others suggest that the process of anthropomorphizing is not limited to sexbots (Darling 2016). As roboticist Kate Darling argues, “[T]he human form is overrated and overused. We can put emotions into everything from blobs to chairs” (Corbyn, 2021). To the extent that sex robots are conceptualized as sex toys, there is reason to believe that they may democratize the sex toy market by further destigmatizing sex toys for men much as sex toys have been for women (Comella, 2017).

For many, however, sex robots’ gendered and racialized humanistic form, as well as their pornified esthetics, invoke concerns directly out of the feminist sex wars playbook (Bracewell, 2016; Duggan and Hunter, 2006)—namely fears that sex robots stand in for and objectify all women, eroticize social domination, and normalize and promote sexual violence—thus, mirroring radical feminists’ concerns about pornography, prostitution, and S/M fantasy play. For instance, UK ethicist and self-proclaimed radical feminist Kathleen Richardson established the Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) based, in part, on the supposition that sexbots reinforce “‘prostitute-john’ [relations]…justify the use of women and children as sex objects, [and] corrode human empathy” (Klein and Lin, 2018: 111). More recently CARS has changed its name to the Campaign against Porn Robots (CAPR) because, according to Richardson, “They’re pornbots, they’re actually pornography. What the dolls are actually mimicking are the women in pornography. They’re a version, from this masculinist, male patriarchal point of view, a very degraded view of women, reduced…to a form with penetrable holes that can be sold off and commercialized and circulated among men” (Campaign Against Sex Robots, n.d). And yet, what little we know about sex doll and robot consumers at this point indicates that for them the fantasy of intimacy with a “brought to life-partner”—via doll personalization, modifications, online textual narratives and shared photographic poses—creates an “embodied intimate fiction” (Su et al., 2019: 28) that may distinguish their experiences from those between porn consumers and the porn stars they idolize (Coursey et al., 2019; Jackson et al., 2019).

While sex toys’ and pornography’s relationships to sexual fantasy has met with sustained scholarly inquiry, apart from the few sources discussed below the same cannot be said of sex robots and their users. What research does exist favors psychological and psychoanalytic analyses of sexual fantasy’s perils. The following section thus presents a circumscribed interdisciplinary and intersectional mapping of sexual fantasy’s complex ontology, affects, and effects, before offering an appraisal of sexual fantasy’s significance to the design, marketing, consumption of sex robots, and to scholarly analyses of both dollbots and their users.

Sexual fantasy across disciplines

In the service of theorizing sex robots as sexual fantasy this section reviews sexual fantasy’s vicissitudes. Referencing theories from across the fields of experimental psychology, cultural and porn studies, post-colonial, critical race feminist, and queer-of-color theory, it provides a snapshot of sexual fantasy as simultaneously conscious and uninhibited; unconscious and repressed; as private and as public; as a/political; as individual and as collectively experienced and enacted; as produced by, and productive of, social relations; and as a mode of oppression and resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates sexual fantasy’s myriad manifestations and its complex relationship to reality.

Sexual fantasy as individual and conscious

Sexual fantasy is commonly understood as an individualistic and conscious practice that is distinct from reality (Ing, 2020; Neuman, 2014). From within the positivist field of experimental psychology, sexual fantasy is described as “deliberate patterns of thought” which “can be generated by, and generative of, sexual arousal; a product of our vast imaginary capabilities and/or triggered by something we read or see”; as well as an “integral part of everyday human existence, with clinical and social significance” (Leitenberg and Henning, 1995: 492). Psychologist regularly ask: how many people have fantasies?; who has them?; when do they have them?; as well as, what their fantasies are comprised of and whether a relationship exists between fantasies, sexual behavior, and sexual offending (Leitenberg and Henning, 1995). Findings are often distinguished along cis-gendered male/female lines often with little explicit intersectional analysis or reflection on the heteronormative, cis-normative, and racial dynamics at play in individual studies or in the discipline of psychology more broadly (Barker, 2007; Riggs, 2007; Roberts et al., 2020). What emerges are limited yet instructive studies about rates, types and the gendered dimensions of individuals’ sexual fantasies. Work from within this discipline suggests that (cis-gender, mostly white, and heterosexual) men and women have sexual fantasies at an approximately equal rates yet men appear to fantasize about sex more often throughout the day (Leitenberg and Henning, 1995: 473); men report a higher diversity of sexual fantasies than women (Joyal et al., 2015); women imagine having something sexual done to them whereas men imagine doing something sexual to their partner; and men have more explicit and visual imagery in their fantasies as opposed to women who conjure more emotional and romantic imagery (Joyal et al., 2015: 337).

Central to psychological analyses of sexual fantasy are concerns with paraphilia and the distinction between normal/abnormal and typical/unusual fantasies. Here, however, studies suggest that very few fantasies are statistically rare or unusual and that the field should be careful before labeling a sexual fantasy as unusual, let alone deviant. Rather than focus on the content of fantasies, Joyal and colleagues suggest that the emphasis should be “more on pathological aspects such as rigidity and necessity of certain sexual fantasies” (Joyal et al., 2015: 335–336). While evidence exists to support the finding that sexual offender have sexually arousing fantasies about sexual offences and masturbate to these fantasies, this association does not necessarily mean that the fantasy caused the behavior any more than the behavior caused the fantasy, and that “the evidence is mixed as to which occurs first, fantasy or behavior” (Leitenberg and Henning, 1995: 487). One’s fantasies do not necessarily indicate a desire to experience the fantasy “in reality,” a conclusion that is evidenced by individuals’ enjoyment of rape fantasies and their unwillingness to actually rape/be raped (Bivona and Critelli, 2009).

Sexual fantasy and the collective un/conscious

In addition to psychology’s analysis of sexual fantasy as relatively individualized, conscious, common, and healthy to the extent that it is distinct from wish-fulfillment, sexual fantasy has also been theorized by psychoanalyst, cultural studies, and feminist scholars as culturally produced and as productive, thus complicating the boundary between fantasy and reality. Given that the scope of scholarship across this realm is too broad to do justice to, this section limits its focus to a few theories of the “problem” of sexual fantasy. Key here is critical race and post-colonial psychoanalytic scholar Franz Fanon’s argument that the origins of colonialism and the racialized Other can be traced to the colonizer’s repudiated and repressed sexual fantasies about the Negro’s genital potency—what Tamari Kitossa calls “the Black Phallic Fantastic” (Kitossa, 2021). For Fanon, this myth is not merely an image in mind of the colonizer, but rather one that is faithfully reproduced in and imposed by public rhetoric and discursive and semiotic representational texts—from children’s books to theater, film, and beyond (Fanon, 1952: 169). Together these fantasies and cultural impositions structure and constrain the collective un/conscious—how the colonizer and colonized come to know themselves, their belonging and value, in history and society (Fanon, 1952: 191).

Sexual fantasy’s impositions and constraints have also long underpinned Post/Freudian, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories of sexual fantasy. Having canvassed this body of literature and findings from his joint study of peoples’ engagement with online pornography (with Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood), cultural studies scholar Martin Barker offers two key insights. First, that sexual fantasy is primarily viewed amongst the psychoanalytic and feminist literature as singular and wild; as at best of limited value and at worst as “adolescent, deficient, and dangerous” and in need of “careful management” (Barker, 2014: 148). Second, that while fantasy plays a central role in pornography’s consumption, fantasy is “varied and multiform [in] purpose” (144) and serves people in a number of different ways (2014: 155). In keeping with Fanon, Barker dismisses the claim that one can lose the distinction between fantasy and reality, suggesting that this distinction is itself nonsensical because fantasy exists at the intersections of one’s sense of self, between bodies, and amidst social and cultural norms with myriad private and social affects and effects. However, unlike Fanon, Barker suggests that fantasy’s plurality and productivity means it is equally capable of being used “exploitatively and hurtfully” or “constructively, to explore and build sexual relations of great power and pleasure” (Barker, 2014: 155).

Sexual fantasy at the intersections

Amidst this anxiety and optimism about sexual fantasy arise questions about whether and how we ought to, or can, decolonize our sexual psyches, thus, unchaining our fantasies, desires, and selves from what Juana María Rodríguez calls “the oppressive pornographic narratives of racist patriarchy” (Rodriguez, 2011: 337). Drawing on Judith Butler’s idea of the “critical promise of fantasy”—fantasy’s ability to “challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality,” thus enabling us “to imagine ourselves and others otherwise” (Butler, 2004: 29)—Rodríguez outlines a “sexual fantasy remix” wherein “racialized women and the disabled, along with indigenous populations, slave societies, immigrant groups, welfare recipients, prisoners, gender-queer subjects, and other bodies marked as deviant…stare into the face of racialized erotics and pain in a gesture of critique and imagination that attempts to unravel both individual subjectivity and the existing social relations that surround us” (Rodríguez, 2011: 343). Fantasy’s critical promise is thus offered as a means of conjuring a queer anti-supremacist sociality. In contrast to Fanon’s rejection of a politics of recognition as a way out of abjection and hurt (given that this recognition rests on the “elevation” of the Black subject to the already racialized as white idea of the human), Rodríguez advocates on behalf of recognition, and the social bonds it may create. “Through our real and imagined sexual encounters,” Rodriguez writes, “queers enact the possibility of disentangling bodies and acts from preassigned meanings, of creating meaning and pleasure anew from the recycled scraps of dominant cultures…[and] of remarking and remaking the pain and refusal of social intelligibility that constitute our daily lives” (2011: 338).

A similar “sexual fantasy remix” is advanced in Ariane Cruz’s analysis of Black women’s sadomasochistic race play—wherein black women and white men (among other interracial configurations) sometimes serve as slaves to white men’s plantation fantasies. Drawing on interviews with Black female practitioners of race play, Cruz concludes that the journey into racialized sexual fantasies is as much about “working out and through a Black female (un)consciousness haunted by a history of sexual violence” as it is about “innovating fresh modes of accessing pleasure” (Cruz, 2015: 434–435). The elaborate “play of race” she argues, demonstrates the “fragile yet formidable boundaries between the constructs of fantasy/reality, inside/outside, mind/body, and Black/white” (Cruz, 2015: 435). Thus, both Rodríguez and Cruz demonstrate, “just how permeable, nonetheless vital, the line between fantasy and reality is” (Cruz, 2015: 428. Emphasis added), as well as the opportunities sexual fantasies provide for imagining, negotiating and creating alternative sets of social and sexual relations.

Sex robots and/as manifest sexual fantasy

Taken together, the above theories of sexual fantasy establish that sexual fantasy must be understood as “a complex realm of subterfuges and satisfactions as well as terrors” (Cowie, 1992: 150). And yet, sexual fantasy remains an undertheorized aspect of sex robot debates. Where sexual fantasy is acknowledged, terror reins. This section analyses how sexual fantasy informs the design, marketing, and consumption of sex robots, and argues that a more affirmative and optimistic assessment of seemingly normative sex robots, users, and their fantasies, is possible. Moreover, I suggest that such an analysis is necessitated by emerging efforts to stigmatize, regulate, and criminalize both sex robot users and sexual fantasy in the post/digital age.

Plastic fantastic: origin stories and sales pitches

According to Matt McMullen (artist, sculptor, founder, and CEO of RealDoll and Realbotix) and Dr. Kino Coursey (computer scientist and AI/VR designer at Realbotix), sexual fantasy played no conscious role in McMullen’s creation of the human figures that would become Harmony and later the Model^x line of dollbots. Rather, McMullen had set out to create a “fashion mannequin that could pass a ‘fast visual Turing test,’ in that at a glance an unobservant observer might not notice that the mannequin was not human” (Coursey et al., 2019: 79). Department stores, however, expressed little interest in McMullen’s tall, skinny, poseable creations. Only after he received, and dismissed, inquiries about his dolls’ anatomical correctness did he begin seriously considering requests for shorter and curvier “sex capable” options. As an artist, McMullen felt compelled to create products that satisfied both his clients’ requirements and his own aesthetic tastes (as any artist would) (McMullen, personal communication, 2022). While he may have tapped into his own fantasies when hand producing each doll, given that each figure took 3–6 months to complete and was costly to produce, ultimately consumer demand, the fragility and weight of his materials,² and the need for a sustainable business model dictated the dolls’ final form (McMullen, personal communication, 2022), not, as some might assume, an explicit effort to materialize and objectify hegemonic sexual fantasies.

Despite this origin story, RealDoll’s name and its tag lines explicitly reference sexual fantasy, at times distinguishing fantasy from reality and at other times collapsing the two into one another. For example, at the time of writing, RealDolls’ website invited its browsers to “Dream your wildest fantasy into reality,” but also to “Get Real. Nothing beats the real thing” (RealDoll, n.d). While the first tag line (Dream your wildest fantasy into reality) reinforces a clear distinction between fantasy and reality, the second (Get Real. Nothing beats the real thing) blurs these boundaries. For instance, getting “the real thing” can be interpreted as both “the best dollbot on the market” (as opposed to a knock-off), and a “real” (read cis-female) woman,³ or at least the feeling of sex with one. Indeed, by replacing “purchase” or “buy” with “get,” RealDoll facilitates the fantasy of “scoring” a hot date—based on one’s inherent talents or charm—rather than on purchasing sex—which is often linked to one’s buying power and presumed lack of sexual appeal. At the same time, the tagline calls for consumers to “get real.” While this can be interpreted as a literal demand to “acquire a RealDoll,” used colloquially, “get real” is an idiom that implies the need to “confront reality, to realize something seriously, stop daydreaming and face the truth,” and “give up artifices” (Get Real, n.d). As such, “get real” tacitly reinforces the fantastical nature of the transaction, reminding the potential consumer that a RealDoll might be their best option given how unrealistic it is that they can “get” a human woman that is as hot as one of their robots and who will “do” what a RealDoll can do for them. A similar double move is facilitated by the company’s combination of “real” and “doll” in its name. Originally old slang for “sweetheart, mistress, paramour,” the term “doll” shifted in the 1770s to describe “a child’s toy baby” before transferring back, in 1778, “to living beings…in the sense of ‘pretty, silly woman’” and then, by the mid-20th century, to “an endearing or patronizing name for a young woman” (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d). The “doll” in RealDoll thus refers to both an objectified subject and a subjectified object. Combining Real and Doll thus serves as a sort of perlocutionary act, one meant to help convince the consumer they are fulfilling their fantasy of realizing both an inanimate plaything and an animated lover.

Sex and sexual fantasy simultaneously drive and take a back seat to the development of the Model^X line. According to McMullen, Realbotix’s design team⁴ started by animating Harmony^X’s face to add personality and expression “rather than focusing on sexual gyrations” because she “is more about companionship than sex” (Bartneck and McMullen, 2018). At the same time, each unit is equipped with an interactive interface module, animation, and magnetics that allow users to attach different faces to the same underlying mechanism thus facilitating personalization “for various genders and fictional species” (Coursey et al., 2019: 84), a design detail that aligns with effort to facilitate sexual fantasies involving mythical creatures and fictional characters.⁵

Perilous plastic fantasies?

Sexual fantasy also appears, to varying degrees, in both mainstream and scholarly analyses of sex robots. Media sources from across the political spectrum refer to sex robots as embodying and facilitating primarily normative and “deviant” fantasies, including fantasies about “up for anything” sexual partners (Gibson, 2016), threesomes (CBC Radio, 2017), and, more frequently fantasies of sexual domination, submission, and rape (Cheung, 2022; Ghosh, 2020; Knapton, 2017). Interestingly, the fantasy of “sex with a robot” is rarely explicitly acknowledged. Here, sex robots are sometimes referred to as a “technology driven by male masturbatory fantasies” (Moore, 2017), with some suggesting that “Cyborg sex…more than likely foretells the sad future of erotic phantasy and the further disciplining of sexual pleasure” (Rosen, 2017). Within academic scholarship, Allison de Fren’s analysis of ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robots)—an internet fetish community centered on fantasies of robotic women—emerges as one of the first works to engage more closely with fantasy for RealDoll owners. As de Fren writes, amongst the community there is an acknowledgment of the tension between the fantasy of eternal life and beauty and concerns about the “programmatic control [and use]…of a human object” (De Fren, 2009: 409). As such, ASFRians are sensitive to the interpretation of A.S.F.R. “as a technological elaboration of standard BDSM (bondage-domination-sado-masochism) fantasies, in which one person dominates another for sexual pleasure” as well as “the perception that it represents the reification of normative gender ideals” (De Fren, 2009: 409). According to the ASFRians de Fren spoke with, these assumptions “keeps its members highly closeted in comparison to fetishists like the Furries and the Plushies (those who eroticize anthropomorphic and stuffed animals and animal costumes, respectively) [and] who hold dozens of public conventions each year throughout the world” (2009: 409). Indeed, ASFRians were “so concerned about the accusation of sadism or misogyny that they have coined a mantra or tagline, oft repeated on their websites: ‘ASFR is not about the objectification of women, it’s about the feminization of objects’” (2009: 409), an assertion that has largely been ignored or dismissed by anti-sex robot activists and scholars.

In the decade since de Fren conducted her research, techno/digisexuality and the use of sex robots has come to be known by the mainstream (Hart, 2020; McGowan, 2019), prompting the Campaign Against Porn Robots’ founder, Kathleen Richardson, to ask—“[W]here do the fantasy images and products come from? Is fantasy just a neutral domain that is a sphere separated off from the ‘real’ and therefore unproblematic?” Answering her own question she claims that “fantasy, and the ways that robots are seen show human relations at work”; they “tell us about gender, power, inequalities, race and class” (Richardson, 2016: 292). From here Richardson concludes that sex robots are the product of rape culture, that they facilitate rape fantasies, and embody fantasies about the perfect, passive, plaything thus resulting in the abuse and rape of real women (Gutiu, 2016; Richardson, 6/2016a), a conclusion that much of the sexual fantasy research cited above complicates and even contradicts.

For Richardson, the vital if porous line between fantasy and reality, and the possibility that sex robots may be generative of new sexual intimacies and realities is rejected wholesale. Richardson’s radical feminist critiques have since been nuanced by new materialist feminist and disabled queer/trans scholars. Concerned that sex robots look and behave “like a pornographer’s phantasy come true” (Moran, 2019: 60), and are aimed at fulfilling “individualistic forms of satisfaction catered to meet the needs/fantasies of cis-straight people (white men mostly)” (Puig, 2019: n.p.), these scholars decenter gender oppression and robot abolitionism and instead offer intersectional responses aimed at problematizing the anthropocentric and “biocentric” nature of humanistic sex robots; their (purported) manifestation of white supremacist and colonialist fantasies about racial, gendered, and sexual superiority; and, their endorsement of “hierarchical and exclusionary understandings of familial, romantic, platonic, erotic, and sexual relationships,” (Kubes, 2019a, 2019b; Moran, 2019; Puig, 2019). For instance, Jenny Moran draws on Fanon and Achille Mbembe to argue that the racialized AI personalities of the now non-existent TrueCompanion sex robot—namely the Arabic named “Frigid Farah” (who presumably does not consent) and Japanese named “Young Yoko” (who presumably cannot consent)—“necropolitically racialise their AI’s performance of consent by assigning rapeability to subjects upon whom non-Westernness is (incorrectly) ascribed” (2019: 42). Moran thus interpolates users who simulate rape using Young Yoko or Frigid Farah personalities as having internalized colonial and racist messages and as perpetuating “necropolitical rape culture” thus “strengthen[ing] discriminatory practices which oppress marginalized Peoples” (Moran, 2019: 43). Drawing instead on Crip and trans theory, Krizia Puig makes similar connections between contemporary sex robots and genocidal social death. Referencing the erasure of nonnormative “bodymindspirits” from the “imagining, theorizing/experimenting, and producing [of] sex tech” (2019: 502) as well as sex robots’ hypernormative and cishetero “humanistic affective logics of time, space, and relationality” (2019: 510), Puig concludes that contemporary sex robots constitute a form of emotional genocide; “Not our bodies, nor our fantasies or hopes—not the ways we love and grieve, nor our joy or our pain are considered within most projects of future-making” (2019: 510).

Both Moran and Puig’s engagement with critical race, post-colonial, Crip, queer and trans theory offer analyses of sex robots that go beyond single-axis critiques that emphasize gender oppression or, as Jennifer Nash argues with respect to anti-porn feminists, that merely mobilize race as a peripheral “intensifier” to help bolster arguments that pornography is not “just fantasy” thus helping to “secure [feminists’] claims to pornography’s harms” (2014: 10). Considered in relation to Fanon’s political theory of fantasy referenced above, as well as to technology and cultural studies’ analyses of the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, representation, and tech (See Chun, 2009; Hall, 1997; Wajcman, 2007), these authors raise legitimate concerns about sex robots as semiotic texts with complex relationships to social relations. Nevertheless, missing from these works is an attentiveness to sexual fantasy’s vicissitudes and affordances. As such, these works offer “paranoid readings”—that is, readings which “represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge” (Sedgwick, 2003: 126). Given the complex nature, affects, and effects of sexual fantasy, it begs considering whether and how sex robots’ manifestation of seemingly hypernormative fantasies and their facilitation of ostensibly “deviant” sexual fantasies may in fact invite and extend “new bodily and erotic relations” (Karaian, 2019: 820), particularly given, as Sedgwick notes, the “many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003: 150–151).

In this context calls to develop sex robots from “a gender-queer perspective” (Kubes, 2019b: 14) arise, thus mimicking sex radical, sex positive, critical race, and queer calls for the transformation of the pornography industry; including calls for the proliferation of non-standard bodies, sexualities, scenarios, improved working conditions, and a broader set of (satisfied) consumers (DeGenevieve, 2014). While such reforms have changed the pornography industry for the better (Taormino, 2013), they have also resulted in questions about the desirability of sanitizing and rendering sexual fantasy “politically correct” in all contexts (Nguyen, 2014). For instance, referencing Hoang Tan Nguyen, Rodríguez posits that for the historically sexually deviantized, racialized sexual fantasies may present “an occasion to stare into the face of racialized erotics and pain in a gesture of critique and imagination that attempts to unravel both individual subjectivity and the existing social relations that surround us” (2011: 343). She goes on to suggest that “To deny our fantasies because they are too complicated, too painful, or too perverse, to erase their presence or censor their articulation in public life, constitutes a particular kind of insidious violence that threatens to undermine our ability to explore the contours of our psychic lives, and the imaginary possibilities of the social worlds in which we exist” (Rodríguez, 2011: 343). Of course, critical race scholars such as Rodríguez, Cruz, Nguyen, and Nash develop theories of the revolutionary potential of sexual fantasy within the realm of racialized pornography and sadomasochistic play from the perspectives of the most deviantized sexual subjects—namely racialized, queer, trans, and disable women. The question then becomes whether the utopian potential of sexual fantasy is restricted to certain abjected subjectivities and scenarios, and whether normative seeming sex robot users and their fantasies can be understood in more benign or even more positive terms than are currently available. To begin to answer this requires more insights about sex robot consumers.

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.

Conclusion

Scholarly analyses of sex robots’ relationship to sexual fantasy are rare (Döring et al., 2020). In those instances, where sexual fantasy is considered it is overwhelmingly condemned as “too normative” or “too deviant”; as mimetic of, and a means of reifying structural oppression; and, as in need of aesthetic reformation, sanitization, and regulation. Yet, as the above interdisciplinary mapping and analysis of sex robots and/as sexual fantasy reveals, the fantasy/reality binary is concurrently fact and fiction. Sexual fantasy is polymorphous in form and multifarious in effects; it is simultaneously intangible narrative, manifest object, productive practice. Both reverie and reality, sexual fantasy is generative of private ecstasies, public injuries, and vice versa. Nevertheless, acknowledging the co-constitution and interdependence of fantasy and reality does not preclude their ability to be cleaved apart. It is possible, indeed necessary, “to maintain fantasy as fantasy, not allowing it to become the basis for social norms” (Cowie, 1992: 23) or the foundation for legal regulation. As is demonstrated here, the lack of a sustained and nuanced analysis of sexual fantasy’s relevance to the design, marketing, and use of sex robots has contributed to the disintegrative shaming, surveillance, and governance of both sex robots and their users. In addition to public and scholarly opprobrium discussed above, Canada and the US have sought to criminalize some sex doll-robot users via the creation of new legal frameworks (Tiehen, 2018), the application of child pornography offences (Payette, 2017), and the creative interpretation of municipal bylaws that prevent the operation of sex doll “brothels” (Amin, 2019; Comella, 2018). In this context, asserting, as some have, that sex robots and their users exclusively manifest oppressive and violent hetero-patriarchal and racist sexual fantasies that “spill over into the real world” (Danaher, 2019: 564) overemphasizes the “presumptions…[of] representational realism that conflates the signified of fantasy with its (impossible) referent and construes ‘depiction’ as an injurious act and, in legal terms, a discriminatory action or ‘real’-effect” (Butler 1990: 106). Such a conflation, although rooted in important analyses of the complex interdependence of fantasy and reality, denies the very real possibility of maintaining the two as distinct realms. Failing to acknowledge this is troubling, particularly in a contemporary context wherein exploring one’s sexual fantasies via the use of the Internet and new sexual technologies is increasingly being conflated with, and criminalized as, abuse or as inchoate crime (Gilden, 2016). Given that, as Gilden demonstrates, “tension between protected sexual identity and marginalized sexual fantasy has become particularly acute” in the legal realm, and that “judges and juries in several areas of the law repeatedly conflate sexual fantasy with sexual abuse, have largely been dismissive of both the merits and value of fantasy based defenses, and have relaxed evidentiary standards in ways that particularly prejudice individuals whose desires likely provoke disapproval or disgust” (2016: 423), there exists reason for sextech producers and consumers of all ilk to be concerned. In this context, sexuality, sextech, and socio-legal scholars are encouraged to further examine the perils and promises of sex robots and/as sexual fantasy, including whether and how their intersections invite new modes of affection, intimacy, and sexuality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful engagement with this manuscript and their insightful and valuable feedback. Thanks also to Shaira Vadasaria, Dina Georgis, and Sara Matthews for critical conversations about sexual fantasy, and to Kate Devlin and the participants of We Robot (2020) and the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots (2021) for their close engagement with earlier versions of this text. Finally, thanks go to Delphine DiTecco for her excellent research assistance.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 435-2020-0246).

ORCID iD

Lara Karaian

Notes

Lara Karaian, PhD, is a critical criminologist, socio-legal, porn, and sexuality studies scholar at Carleton University. Her research examines the body, sexuality, identity, technology, law and popular culture. Her current federally funded research (SSHRC, 2020–2025) examines sextech’s sexual, criminal, and constitutional affects and effects. Professor Karaian is an editorial board member of the journal Porn Studies. She has served as an Expert Consultant for national and international studies on young people’s digital sexual expression and has served as an expert consultant on numerous criminal cases involving youths’ intimate image creation and distribution.

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