The utter loneliness of life with a sex robot
According to NHS doctors who have reported on the phenomenon of “sex robots” – the growing army of animatronic dolls with gigantic glossy lips and weird glassy eyes – the devices are unlikely to provide a cure for loneliness or curb violence against women. Despite their manufacturer’s claims, this might not come as a great revelation to most of us: in fact, I can’t think of anything lonelier than waking up next to a sex robot – although perhaps the ingenious people who make these things could design one that incorporated a clock radio, a Kindle and a Teasmade.
The customisable elements, however, are usually more to do with aesthetics. The life-size dolls, which can sell for £10,000, invite the purchaser to design every aspect of their perfect robot-woman, going beyond eye-colour and chest measurements to include the desirable level of preprogrammed interactive chat.
In 1972, a US science-fiction writer called Ira Levin published The Stepford Wives, a novel about a sparky New York photographer called Joanna Eberhart who goes to live with her husband and children in a pretty suburban town, only to become bemused by the shiny conformity of many of the women around her: they are strangely docile, preoccupied with husband and housework and possessing uniformly large breasts. The women of the town are being bumped off one by one and replaced by lifelike robots – a fate that eventually befalls Joanna herself.
Levin’s book immediately gave rise to the phrase “Stepford Wife” to describe an attractive trophy wife who was encouraged to be seen and not heard. Then came the popularisation of plastic surgery, whereby – with breast implants, nose jobs and other “tweaks” – women could make themselves over (sometimes at their husband’s expense) into a greater approximation of a certain kind of man’s ideal. Now we have the march of the sexbots themselves, increasing in technological sophistication with every year.
They’re not quite at the point of becoming a respectable substitute for a real woman yet, but Levin has already turned out to be more of a social prophet than even he might have imagined.