Love and Sex with Robots_The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships

by David Levy

  ONE OF THE ORIENT INDUSTRY DOLLS

  The growing success of the dolls manufactured by Orient Industries was reported in the Mainichi Daily News in late 2003.* “Early on, the showroom was more like a therapy area,” recounted Tsuchiya. “We’d get old guys who had permission from their wives to buy dolls, or mothers of disabled sons searching for a partner. Nearly all of our customers had some problem related to their sex life.”

  As the popularity of sex dolls in Japan increased, the attitude of customers toward their dolls transformed, from their being “considered mere instruments in which men could ejaculate to objects of deep affection.” By late 2003, Tsuchiya’s dolls were selling so well that he was able to boast how it took only ten minutes for fifty new dolls to disappear from the shelves. Standing just under five feet tall and weighing around fifty-seven pounds, the sale of the Orient Industries dolls was beginning to become a fairly big business, increasingly attracting attention from the media. In one report by Dacapo* journalist Mark Schreiber that appeared in a 2004 edition of Asian Sex Gazette,† Tsuchiya revealed how “Dutch wives,”‡ as they are called in Japan, have their own special place and treatment within the confines of Japanese culture, with discarded dolls having the opportunity of funeral rituals redolent of the virtual cemeteries devised for “dead” Tamagotchis.§

  “A Dutch wife is not merely a doll, or an object. She can be an irreplaceable lover, who provides a sense of emotional healing.” Speaking at his showroom near JR Okachimachi Station, where some two dozen of Orient Industries’ ersatz females are displayed, Tsuchiya tells Dacapo’s reporter that for years his clientele had typically been handicapped men, or single men over forty. But from around six years ago, when he commenced sales via the Internet (www.orient-doll.com), he was mildly surprised to receive a surge of orders from men in their twenties and thirties.

  “When I ran my hand along the doll’s thigh,” confesses Dacapo’s reporter, “I felt a shiver of excitement.” After observing the painstaking effort that goes into the making of each doll at Orient Industries’ factory, the reporter came away enlightened. “Many people might be inclined to disparage sex toys,” he writes, “but these dolls truly exemplify Japan’s status as a high-tech country!”

  Jewel and her sisters are shipped to purchasers in cardboard boxes stamped kenko kigu (health apparatus), and users are assured of lifelong after-service. As the vow “until death us do part” may be stretching things a bit, the company anticipates a time when Jewel might outlive her usefulness or her owner. “If a yome [bride] is no longer needed, we’ll discretely [sic] take her off a customer’s hands at no charge,” Tsuchiya adds. “Twice a year we also arrange for a kuyo (Buddhist memorial service) for discarded dolls at the special bodhisattva for dolls at the Shimizu Kannon-do in Ueno Park.” Founded in 1631, it’s where the “souls” of dolls are consecrated. (Kannon is the Goddess of Mercy.)

  A few months after this Asian Sex Gazette article appeared, a small group of Japanese entrepreneurs, who had previously been thinking of starting up a regular escort service, decided instead to hire out sex dolls rather than young women. In August 2004 their company, Doll no Mori (Forest of Dolls), opened its first shop in Tokyo’s Ota district, specializing in deliveries of dolls to hotels as well as to private homes. Initially Doll no Mori was renting out to around 20 customers per month, but by April 2005 their first shop had increased its customer base to 150 per month, and the business had been franchised to forty other shops nationwide, with monthly turnovers averaging anywhere between $2,500 and $25,000 per shop. The company’s manager, Hajime Kimura, explained to the newspaper Nikkan Gendai that although “we expected most of the clients to be eotaku (geeky) types, as it turned out, most of them are ordinary salarymen in their 30s and 40s.” For customers who wish to dress up their dolls, there are optional extras at around $80 each, including wigs, negligees, bathing suits, and other costumes such as school uniforms and French maids’ outfits. In a follow-up article in Nikkan Gendail,* sex therapist Kim Myung Gun explained, “People have been saying for a long time that men have lost their desire for real women. Rather than have sex with a woman who doesn’t fulfill their expectations, they would rather play with something that corresponds to their fantasy, even if she’s not real.”14

  It quickly became clear in Japan that the fembot’s far less technologically sophisticated ancestor, the sex doll, represents a real threat to the trade of human sex workers. Ryann Connell reported on this growing trend in a 2005 article in the Mainichi Daily News: “Rent-a-Doll Blows Hooker Market Wide Open.”15

  Several companies are involved in the bustling trade supplying customers looking to slip it into some silicon[e], with lifelike figurines that set back buyers something in the vicinity of 600,000 yen (about $5,000), as opposed to the simple blow-up types with the permanently open mouths that can be bought from vending machines for a few thousand yen. Prime among the sellers of silicon[e] sex workers is Doll no Mori, which runs a 24-hour service supplying love dolls, or “Dutch wives” as the Japanese call them, to customers in southern Tokyo and neighboring Kanagawa Prefecture.

  “We opened for business in July this year,” said Hajime Kimura, owner of Doll no Mori. “Originally, we were going to run a regular call girl service, but one day while we were surfing the Net we found this business offering love doll deliveries. We decided the labor costs would be cheaper and changed our line of business.”

  Outlays are low, with the doll’s initial cost the major investment and wages never a problem for employers. “We’ve got four dolls working for us at the moment. We get at least one job a day, even on weekdays, so we made back our initial investment in the first month,” Kimura says. “Unlike employing people, everything we make becomes a profit and we never have to worry about the girls not turning up for work.”

  Doll no Mori charges start at 13,000 yen (around $110) for a 70-minute session with the dolls, which is about the same price as a regular call girl service. The company boasts of many repeat customers and a membership clientele topping 200. “Nearly all our customers choose our two-hour option.”

  Within little more than a year after the doll-for-hire idea took root in Japan, sex entrepreneurs in South Korea also started to cash in. Upmarket sex dolls were introduced to the Korean public at the Sexpo exhibition, held in the Seoul Trade Exhibition Center in August 2005. They were seen as a possible antidote to Korea’s Special Law on Prostitution that had been placed on the statute books in 2004, and before long, Korean hotels were hiring out “doll experience rooms” for around 25,000 won per hour (around $25), a fee that included a bed, a computer to enable the customer to visit pornographic Web sites, and the use of a doll. This initiative quickly became so successful at plugging the gap created by the antiprostitution law that soon some establishments opened that were dedicated solely to the use of sex dolls, including at least four in the city of Suwon. The owners of these hotels assumed, quite reasonably, that there was no question of their running foul of the law, since their dolls were not human. But the Korean police were not so sure. The news Web site Chosun.com reported, in October 2006, that the police in Gyeonggi province had confirmed that they were “looking into whether these businesses violate the law…. Since the sex acts are occurring with a doll and not a humanbeing, it is unclear whether the Special Law on Prostitution applies.”

  Although the idea of hiring out these dolls appears to be attracting interest from entrepreneurs, the sex-doll industry is still in its infancy and still very much catering to the desires of men, as demonstrated by the fact that of the fifteen models offered on the RealDoll Web site, fourteen are made in the likeness of women and intended for sale to men, while only one is modeled on a man. A likely reason for this disparity—though not the only reason, I’m sure—is that RealDoll’s Charlie typically sells for $7,000, and there are far fewer women than men who have thousands of dollars of readily disposable income. But an alternative explanation that has been put forward for the disparity is one with w
hich I strongly disagree—the suggestion that far fewer women than men are interested in using artificial means for getting some or all of their sexual stimulation and for achieving orgasm. Many women claim that the use of sex dolls is very much a “guy thing,” but surely such a claim is easily refuted by the widespread use of vibrators among modern women.

  Sex Machines

  The end of the Victorian era witnessed the creation of the first female “self-gratifiers,” sex machines that simulated the thrusting movement of a penis inside the vagina. These devices were operated by the woman’s turning a handle or pressing on a foot pedal, thereby causing some sort of gear mechanism to move the machine’s artificial penis back and forth. The earliest known example of such a device is shown in a sketch dating from around 1900 and incorporated a method of squirting milk into the participant, simulating the ejaculation of semen.

  The first commercially available sex machine properly capable of simulating intercourse, and still the most prominent of such machines on the market, was the Sybian,* the brainchild of David Lampert, a former dance instructor in Illinois. In an interview with Jessica West for an article entitled “Plug Into the Ultimate Joy Ride” in Penthouse Forum magazine,† Lampert explained what inspired him, in the early 1970s, to devise his robotic penis:

  Over the years, I kept hearing the same complaints from women I met in my dance instruction classes. They were sexually frustrated. Their partners could not, or would not, satisfy them. Some said their husbands had erectile problems due to ill health, age, or indifference. Some of these women confided that they had never experienced an orgasm. That struck me as tragic. I personally could never enjoy sex if the woman is not satisfied.

  Lampert’s idea became a passion and an obsession. In 1985 he sold his dance studio to devote himself full-time to the development and marketing of what at that time was a revolutionary product.

  The Sybian consists of a saddlelike seat containing an electric motor to generate the motion of the machine’s phallic “insert.” (The inserts come in different sizes and thicknesses and are removable for cleaning.) The Sybian is designed to create two separate movements. The insert rotates within the vagina, and at the same time the area of the Sybian that makes contact with the vulva vibrates, as does the phallic insert itself.

  SYBIAN “LOVEMASTER” SEX MACHINE WITH ONE OF ITS INSERTS ON THE TOP

  The Sybian is straddled by the woman, who lowers herself onto it when the insert is in place. Separate controls allow for the independent adjustment of the speed of vibration and the speed of rotation. As the Sybian’s insert rotates within the vagina, the internal area, including the Grafenberg spot (more commonly known as the G-spot), is stimulated. At the same time, the entire vulva and clitoral area vibrate. The combination of these movements is designed to create a crescendo of orgasms.

  THE ROTATION AND VIBRATION MOVEMENTS OF THE SYBIAN’S INSERT

  After some fifteen years in its development, the Sybian was launched at Couples 87, a weekend convention for sexually uninhibited couples held in St. Louis, Missouri, in the spring of that year. Jessica West describes her reaction on first sight of the machine:

  All eyes were focused on a realistic rubber penis mounted on a vinyl seat. The penis was simultaneously rotating and vibrating at incredible speed. Those were movements no human male could possibly duplicate, at least for any length of time. Just watching that “thing” gyrate made me instantly wet and horny.

  Lampert realized that to convince potential buyers of the joys of using his machine, the best method of promotion would be to give women the opportunity to try it out in private, which he did in his hotel suite during the Couples 87 weekend. But before the private sessions began, he gave a demonstration to the trial group as a whole, with their husbands/partners present, in which one of the potential customers had volunteered to be the guinea pig. Jessica West describes what happened after Sally had lowered herself slowly onto the Sybian’s insert:

  When she was fully seated, Lampert began the demonstration, turning the controls on low speed at first, and then gradually increasing the intensity of both the vibration and the rotation. Sally’s face began to contort—first with mild pleasure, then with growing disbelief, and eventually with complete abandon. Her litany of moans and screams, her nails digging into poor Dave Lampert’s back, gave ample evidence that she was in the throes of extreme orgasmic excitation. At one point I thought she was going to faint. “Oh, God, oh no, oh yes, don’t stop, harder, faster, oh wonderful,” she intoned again and again. A communal sigh went up—almost like a communal orgasm. After about 20 minutes of this, it became obvious that Sally could go on coming forever. When Lampert finally turned the machine off, I thought it was probably because his back couldn’t take any more. Sally continued to shudder from head to toe for several moments. As she raised herself back on her legs, I could see that her knees were weak. A cheer went up from the crowd, and Sally’s husband gently helped her over to a couch. She smiled at her audience like a victorious long distance runner who had reached the finish line, and thanked Lampert for the experience. “All I want to know is, when can I do this again?”

  Encouraged by his initial commercial success with the Sybian, Lampert branched out by developing a sex toy for men, an electrically powered “hands-free masturbation aid with controllable stroking action, that gives powerfully satisfying orgasms” and allows the user to “achieve an orgasm in minutes or enjoy sensual stroking for hours.” This device was first marketed in October 1993 under the name Venus II, and it was later renamed the Venus 2000. The advertising description of the device suggests that it is easy to use: “Simply insert yourself into a lubricated, flexible, natural gum rubber liner,” switch on the machine, adjust the stroke speed to between eight strokes and three hundred strokes per minute, and adjust the stroke length. The company’s advertisements point out the obvious benefits of the machine, including that it is “always ready, no partner needed and no risk of disease.” Custom-fit attachments can also be provided. These include a “pump”—a recreational vacuum device that pulls blood into the penis, thereby creating a fully engorged penis from a flaccid state or enhancing an existing erection. Another optional extra is a “head massager,” described as an erotic foreplay device that creates a squeeze-release action wherever it is placed.

  While the Sybian is perhaps the best known of its kind, there are now many other machines on the market for simulating intercourse. This is hardly surprising in view of Kim Airs’s estimate that in 2005 there were seventy-five thousand sex aids on the market, accounting for almost one quarter of the $12 billion taken by the adult-entertainment industry per year.* A different type of machine, with a more thrusting movement of the phallic component, has been the choice of a number of manufacturers, creating products that go under names such as “Stallion,” “Invader,” “Probe Plus,” and “Thrillhammer.” The next illustration shows a “Stallion” that, apart from being electrically powered, bears a remarkable similarity in appearance to the Onanierapparat für Frauen (masturbation machine for women†) in the illustration that follows it, which was built in Germany between the two world wars. This particular example of the German machine had been confiscated by the police, and at one time was exhibited in the Dresden Criminal Museum.‡ Criminal? Yes, that’s right. Certain sexual practices were illegal in Germany during the early part of the twentieth century.§

  THE “STALLION XL” SEX MACHINE

  PEDAL-DRIVEN FEMALE MASTURBATION MACHINE IN THE MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD MUSEUM, BERLIN

  The Onanierapparat für Frauen was operated by a foot pedal, which in turn drove a pulley system to push an artificial penis device in and out of the vagina. The machine was built in 1926 by Russian-Jewish engineers in Leipzig, and passed to Magnus Hirschfeld, a Berlin sexologist and sexual reformer, whose liberalizing activities included his attempts to secure the decriminalization of abortion and homosexuality in Germany. During the period of the Weimar Republic, the era of Christopher Isherwood’s Cabar
et, when almost anything of a sexual nature was socially acceptable in Berlin (even if illegal), Hirschfeld also founded and directed the eponymous Institute of Sexual Science in the Tiergarten area of the city; it operated from 1919 until 1933,* many years before the work of Kinsey and other better-known names in the field of human sexuality research.

  Unfortunately for Hirschfeld, he was despised by the Nazis—not only because he was Jewish and gay but also because the Nazis had their own ideas about sex, ideas that made Hirschfeld’s sex machine appear to them like some sort of threat. It was “a revolutionary idea, and it was the thing that most upset the Nationalists and the Nazis. The idea of this liberated woman, the Weimar Girl, a woman who could choose her own sexuality.”17 Shortly after the Reichstag fire in Berlin in 1933, and as part of their crusade against Jews, Communists, sex, and anything else to which they took a dislike, the Hitler Youth burned almost all the books from Hirschfeld’s institute, as well as his many research files and sex inventions, including the original female self-gratifier.

  Many of the sex machines on the market today have been the subject of patent applications. Patent documents make useful reading material for researchers who are interested in how things work, available free of charge on the Internet, for example, from the U.S. Patent Office.* Hoag Levins’s 1996 book describes many of the U.S. patents for sex machines granted up to then, but from 1996 up to the end of 2005 almost six thousand additional patents were granted in the United States alone that contain the word “sexual” in their specification. Clearly, sex is on the minds of many inventors.