What Are Women For? Sex, Robots & ‘Frigid Farrah’

A deft coil of metal winds its way between the unsteady legs of a deep-sea oil rig. It will perform routine inspections, even carry out basic maintenance. A regular craft could never do it — so designers took their lessons from the way eels and sea snakes navigate so effortlessly depths that would crush a human to a breathless pulp. Tasked with the enviable duty of designing the future, engineers may sometimes look for inspiration in the inscrutable horizons of science fiction. But when it comes to putting that utopianism into practise they look not ahead, but around them — to the myriad functions of nature whose intricate operations evolution has spend millions of years developing. Robotics steals all its best tricks from the animal kingdom. Hooking up cockroaches to motion-capture cameras, examining exactly how the muscles of a kangaroo’s legs store and release such incredible power.
The same is true for human animals. The trajectory of automation takes its cue from human life: attempting to mimic, perfect, streamline . So we develop robot surgeons to stitch people back together, robot line-workers to build cars, cyborg hearts to pump blood round the body. We are seeing the rise and rise of therapy-bots and artificial intelligences that work as part-butler, part-personal assistant, part-librarian. This is no accident: the push for automation is precisely the push to replace human workers and their capacities — phasing out workers that come with troublesome things like free wills and demands for wages. So human functions are slowly part-replaced by newer, shinier, and more pliable cyborg proxies.
That this push for automation is designed to replicate human functions is rather telling; it gives us a litmus test for what the designers think people are for. This is no more cartoonishly clear than in the case of female robots; coded as feminine, or woman-shaped, they expose our assumptions of what roles women are expected to fulfil. Assistant AIs and therapy-bots are given feminine voices and ‘personalities’ — cleaving neatly to the idea that women are meant to soothe and serve. The prospect of artificial wombs have lead some — feminists and MRA cave-dwellers alike — to predict the ‘end of women’. And among the first imaginative steps into the field of lady-bots gave rise — inevitability — to sex robots; fleshing out the fantasy of the perfect sexual partner; pneumatic, uncomplaining, endlessly available, and whose sole function is to please.
That we could use robots as essentially person-shaped sex toys should not be necessarily concerning. But they do have a unacnny ability to unveil our most unsetling attitudes about sex the human mind can harbour. And true to form, this drive to develop the perfect partner has taken a sinister turn, as the sex robot brand True Companion has revealed their new model ‘Roxxxy’. Roxxxy comes full-equipped with multiple ‘personalities’, which determine how she responds to your advances; there’s ‘Wild Wendy’, and there’s ’S&M Susan’ — and then, there’s ‘Frigid Farrah’. According to their website, if you touch Farrah “in a private area, more than likely, she will not be too appreciative of your advance.” This, in short, is a robot who can be raped. This makes the following pretty clear: they consider that being raped is one of the functions that women perform. That being-raped is simply another of the things that women are for, another feminine faculty to be automated, perfected and made eternally available to real people (read: men).
In response to criticisms, the company has rather audaciously claimed that this rape-setting will actually help women, by allowing rapists to exorcise their worst vicissitudes, shifting the burden of being-raped from human women onto their plastic proxies. For people tasked with the mimicking of the most intimate aspects of human sociality, they seem to flounder when it comes to understanding how humans actually work; that we use technology as a learning tool, even when we don’t mean to. When we get positive feedback from using technology — be that the endorphin rush of a new notification or the endorphin-rush of an orgasm — it reinforces and concretises certain patterns of behaviour. A rapeable robot rewards and normalises rape. As a mostly-human woman, that’s not exactly a reassuring prospect.
Moreover, this technology allows us to continuously rehearse and re-enact in dangerous myths about sexual violence: that refusing sex is simply one of a myriad ways in which women titillate their partners, that no doesn’t always mean no. That rape is primarily a way of having sex rather than a way of doing violence. That the urge to rape is a primal urge of men that demands sexual catharsis rather than social solution. But rapists aren’t like heroin addicts needing an outlet for a simple unreconstructed urge. They are people who make the decision to hurt other people. If Farrah came readily equipped with a wallet you could steal, or a knife you could use to hack off her limbs — with lifelike screaming and squirting blood! — we would rightly be concerned about what behaviours these technologies encourage. But we’re comfortable enough with the idea of rape as an unextraordinary part of sexual life for Farrah to be marketed along with fleshlights and skimpy lingerie.
This technology does nothing to challenge some men’s assumption that they are unalienably entitled to women’s bodies. It just gives them the capacity finally rape a woman, finally re-assured in that sneaking conviction they’ve had all along; that this woman is not really a person. One can only hope that Farrah has a sleeper-agent setting built in which True Companion have tactfully neglected to include in their press releases. “She will not be too appreciative of your advance” — and any man that tries her will get a stilettoed robo-boot right to the solar plexus. That, friends, is a teaching technology I can get behind.
