Even more Stepfordian paranoia!

Today I want to follow up on the Realdoll and electronic sex toy post from yesterday by elaborating on this high-tech fantasy, which is more often than not a male fantasy, of creating a submissive automaton for sexual gratification. I think it is a flawed persuit, personally. Perhaps I am too mired in my own Freudian cliches and so forth, but I am uncomfortable with the onset of synthetic romance, a coital union that is virtually free of emotional bond (except, perhaps, for the affection one can develop for an object) that complex human interaction between lovers can yield.

In Fritz Lang's 1927 film, Metropolis, a mad scientist creates a robotic doppelganger for Maria, the spiritual and political saviour of the proletariat in a futuristic society of mechanized slavery. It really was ahead of its time. Among the themes it introduces is the "machine" as Moloch, an ancient Jewish god to whom the people sacrificed children. Allen Ginsberg refers to it in his epic 1955 poem "Howl". If you have not seen Metropolis, you should, but I introduce the film here because of a web site called "Maria 2.0", which is a well-researched site with links to many places that collectively illustrate the state of the art in contemporary techno-industrial knowledge and products that would help fashion a human-like robot. If this whole endeavor makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable, or nervous, you should check out Masahiro Mori's 1970 theory of the uncanny valley," which is one of the links on the Maria 2.0 site. The uncanny valley is a theory of discomfort felt by people when technology becomes too humanlike.

The Maria 2.0 site includes a lot of expert information, from medical micro-data on human sexuality, to sites detailing state of the art technologies for synthetic speech and hearing, for artificial intelligence, and other scientific developments necessary for a humanoid robot.

A word to the feminists out there, or others who may be irked at the implicit sexism in this discussion. I am not promoting the development of artificial humanoid in the form of female sex slaves. While that should seem obvious, in these days of scandal and misunderstandings, I want to provide a clear position statement. Ever since Donna Haraway published her Cyborg Manifesto in 1982, cyborg studies has maintained a close affinity and heritage of radical socialist feminsim. As a marginalized group, feminists of all stripes see opportunity in the new cyborgian landscape to even the playing field some, to create new relations and distributions of power. Among the many feminist scholars joining Haraway in the theoretical investigation of cyborg and related topics are N. Katherine Hayles and Susan Squier. To be sure, the rich herritage of feminism in cyborg studies does not preclude visions of Maria 2.0 from being developed, but it does put many insightful perspectives into the mix.

I'll close this post by tying back to the context of post-evolution. The pursuit of a sex robot is not necessarily post-evolutionary--except to the degree that it destabilizes our embodied subjectivity and draws our attention to the connection and interface with the apparatus of pseudo humanity. In the case of sexual substitution, it seems the in-depth focus on the "connection points" does in fact deprivilege the human as a unified subject and instead focuses on sexuality as an isolated function that can be reproduced in a mechanical fashion, no matter how fancy or elaborate that mechanical substitute is. The attention nonetheless is drawn towards the interface. - MF