Love and Sex with Robots_The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships

by David Levy

  The medieval church in England was so obsessed with sex that it absolutely banned all forms of sexual activity other than intercourse between married persons, and then only when carried out with the object of procreating. “In some penitentials fornication was declared a worse sin than murder. In the penitentials of Theodore and Bede the penance imposed for simple fornication was one year, but the penalty was increased according to the frequency of the act and the age and discretion of the parties.”6 And under the influence of the Puritans in England, whose general attitude toward sex is best described as anti, an Adultery Act became law in May 1650 in which the death penalty was stipulated for fornication (and adultery, of course), though it seems that this punishment was never applied.7 After the Puritans moved from England to the colonies and set up their base in Plymouth, John Demos reports that throughout the seventeenth century they had “a steady succession of trials and convictions for sexual offenses involving single persons. ‘Fornication’ in particular, was a familiar problem” for which the punishment was “a fine of ten pounds or a public whipping—and applied equally to both parties.”

  Fast-forward a few hundred years, to 1950s England, when, lo and behold, fornication could still technically be an offense. Gordon Taylor reports on a case in which two unmarried women had spent the night at a hotel with two American soldiers, both couples registering at the hotel as married. The women were prosecuted under the Aliens Order* and were duly committed to prison. But by the twentieth century, such eccentricities of the law had become very much the exception rather than the rule, and sex outside marriage had ceased in most civilized jurisdictions to be a criminal offense.†

  Masturbation

  For centuries masturbation or self-stimulation of the genitals has been associated with evil and madness, as well as a sin against God, deserving death and damnation. Masturbation has been blamed for causing tuberculosis, gonorrhea, epilepsy, and insanity. As recently as 1901 the following were included in a list of alleged consequences of masturbation: depravity, bedwetting, acne, mental retardation, dull mind, memory loss, hallucination, hysteria, psychoses, malaise, weight loss, loss of strength, deafness, blindness, eye diseases, fever, debility, and sudden death.

  —Anne Juhasz8

  Masturbation is another popular sexual practice that was punished by the church, one most often performed without the collaboration of a (human) partner, just as robot sex will not require the presence of a human partner. In the early Christian church, priests would dole out penances* of twenty days’ fasting for masturbation, and even seven days for having a wet dream or “involuntary nocturnal emission.” So seriously was masturbation viewed by the clergy that “in the five comparatively short medieval penitential codes, there are twenty-two paragraphs dealing with various degrees of sodomy and bestiality, and not fewer than twenty-five dealing with masturbation on the part of laymen, to say nothing of others dealing separately with masturbation on the part of the clergy.”9

  Jon Knowles’s comprehensive history of masturbation, on which much of the following summary of the subject is based, indicates that since ancient times and up to the middle of the twentieth century the practice has almost universally had bad press. For various reasons it was disapproved of by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The early church was opposed to it, as to every other sexual act that could not bring forth children, for which reason Bishop Augustine of Hippo* went so far as to argue that masturbation was an “unnatural” sin and therefore more serious than fornication, rape, incest, and adultery, all of which could lead to pregnancy. Masturbation was a crime in the courts of many European countries during the Middle Ages, and although the offense was rarely discovered and brought to the attention of a court, masturbators could suffer extreme civil penalties, including exile. Emperor Charles V’s “Penal Rules” of 1532 even went so far as to establish the death penalty for masturbators (as well as for homosexual behavior and for using contraceptives).

  In 1676 the first major work on the evils of masturbation was published: Letters of Advice from Two Reverend Divines to a Young Gentleman, about a Weighty Case of Conscience, and by Him Recommended to the Serious Perusal of All those that may Fall into the Same Condition. This publication was the “confession” of a young man who ruined himself through masturbation and saved himself through penance.

  During the eighteenth century, the church’s perennial opposition to masturbation was taken up by many misguided medical practitioners, and for some 250 years thereafter the medical profession was generally of the view that masturbation was the cause of a plethora of horrible diseases. In 1760, for example, Samuel Tissot promoted the myth that masturbation is evil and leads to “postmasturbation disease.”* Physicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to diagnose and treat conditions thought to derive from masturbation, employing “cures” that ranged from food products and diets designed to decrease sexual drive to techniques and devices (such as special chastity belts) that would physically prevent sexual arousal and masturbation. These antimasturbation contraptions included “a genital cage that used springs to hold a boy’s penis and scrotum in place and a device that sounded an alarm if a boy had an erection”;10 rings of metal spikes that would stab the penis if it became erect; and metal vulva guards. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, several other techniques came into common practice to keep children’s hands away from their genitals, including confinement in straitjackets; wrappings of cold, wet sheets during sleep; applying leeches to the genitals in order to remove blood and congestion that might be created by desire; burning the genital tissue with an electric current or a hot iron; castration; and removal of the clitoris.

  At the close of the nineteenth century, the pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis became the first authority on sexology to speak out against all this ranting. Fearful of censorship in England, Ellis published his refutation in Philadelphia in 1899, attacking the views put forward by Tissot and his followers. Ellis asserted that they were responsible for the mistaken notions of many medical authorities, notions sustained by nothing more than tradition, and he pointed out that masturbation relieves stress and has a sedative effect.

  In contrast to Ellis’s liberating teachings, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Lord Baden-Powell, helped to ensure by his writings in Boy Scout manuals that the fear of masturbation survived well into the twentieth century:†

  Smoking and drinking are things that tempt some fellows and not others, but there is one temptation that is pretty sure to come to you at one time or another, and I want just to warn you against it. It is called in our schools “beastliness,” and that is about the best name for it…. The temptation to self-abuse…is a most dangerous thing…for should it become a habit, it quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind, and often ends in a lunatic asylum.

  Sometimes the desire is brought on by indigestion, or from eating too rich food, or from constipation. It can therefore be cured by correcting these, and by bathing at once in cold water, or by exercising the upper part of the body by arm exercises, boxing, etc.

  It may seem difficult to overcome the temptation the first time, but when you have done so once it will be easier afterwards. If you still have trouble about it, do not keep a secret of it, but go to your scoutmaster and talk it over with him, and all will come right.11

  Even Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged that masturbation relieves stress and cannot cause a sexually transmitted infection, warned that it could cause certain neurotic disorders and have adverse effects on sexual potency. But despite Freud’s warning, sexologists and psychologists increasingly came to agree with Havelock Ellis, and as medical, physiological, psychological, and sexual knowledge advanced in the twentieth century, most authorities dismissed claims that masturbating caused physical ailments, although there were still some who chose to emphasize the possibilities of mental impairment as a result. In fact, the effect of the stigma against masturbation was still strong in the
United States in 1937, when studies showed that 90 percent of children caught masturbating were severely threatened, punished, and often terrorized by being told that they would go insane or blind or have their penises cut off or their vaginas sewn closed. At that time 82 percent of college freshmen in America believed that masturbation was dangerous.

  Increasingly, however, physicians abandoned the notion that masturbation caused physical or mental dysfunction. In 1950, more than thirty years after its publication in German, Wilhelm Stekel’s book Autoeroticism, which had suggested that masturbation was universal and normal and that interference with it was the actual cause of problems and disorders, was translated into English. And in 1951, after nearly a half century of warning about the evils of masturbation and the horrors of postmasturbatory disease, the U.S. federal government published Infant Care, advising “wise” mothers that it could confuse children who masturbate to tell them that they should desist.

  One of the most important results of the work of Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues was the normalization of masturbation and the weakening of the stigma against it. Kinsey’s research revealed that of the 20,000 people interviewed during his research, between 92 and 97 percent of the men in his study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and 62 percent of the women in his study Sexual Behavior in the Human Female had masturbated. In fact, Kinsey found that it was the behavior in which women most frequently achieved orgasm.

  Throughout the United States, the church protested at Kinsey’s findings. Even without reading Kinsey’s work, Billy Graham wrote, “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” while Senator Joe McCarthy, as was his wont, denounced Kinsey’s work as part of the Communist conspiracy. Ultimately, as a result of all this furor, the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its financial support for Kinsey’s research.

  Studies after Kinsey’s death continued to corroborate his findings. In the late 1960s, his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote the books Girls and Sex and Boys and Sex, advising children about masturbation, reassuring them that “no physical harm can come of it, contrary to the old beliefs, no matter how frequently it is done.” In fact, Pomeroy said that masturbation was “a pleasurable and exciting experience…. It releases tensions, and is therefore valuable in many ways…. It provides a full outlet for fancy, for daydreaming, which is characteristic of adolescence…. In itself, it offers a variety that enriches the individual’s sex life…. It is not only harmless but is positively good and healthy and should be encouraged because it helps young people to grow up sexually in a natural way.”12 Finally, the American medical community pronounced masturbation as normal in the 1972 American Medical Association publication Human Sexuality.

  Nowadays masturbation is treated as a perfectly normal activity, practiced by the mentally healthy and regarded by the medical profession as being free from any danger of causing mental illness, physical damage, or death. The Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality quotes data indicating that about 72 percent of young American husbands masturbate, with an average frequency of about twice a month, and that about 68 percent of young wives do so, slightly less than once a month on average. Possibly as a result of such incontrovertible evidence of the prevalence of masturbation, the Vatican revised its position on the practice in 1992, but only very slightly, with its revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, suggesting that although masturbation is an “intrinsically and seriously disordered act,” the church would in future “take into account emotional immaturity, force of habit, a state of anguish, or other mental or social factors which lessen, indeed even extenuate, the individual’s moral guilt.”

  Thus we can see that over time there have been huge changes in attitude toward all of these sexual practices: homosexuality, oral sex, fornication, and masturbation. Practices that were for centuries treated as very serious, even capital offenses in some of the most “civilized” countries in the world are now widely regarded as thoroughly normal and as leading to fulfilling relationships and satisfactory sex lives. The rates at which such attitude changes have come about have varied, but some of the most dramatic changes have taken only decades rather than centuries.

  As with progress in so many other fields, particularly science and technology, progress in social ideas and social change is happening much faster in the first decade of the twenty-first century than it did even fifty years ago, and as with science and technology the rates of progress and development in social and sexual ideas are themselves increasing. This will inevitably lead to even more rapid changes in the acceptability of new sexual practices, to the point where blow-up dolls and robots will become widely acceptable within society as our sex partners. And once the sexbot bandwagon starts rolling, nothing will stop it.

  The Cybersex Era

  In two important respects, much of the groundwork has already been laid for the sexual-robot craze to start. First, sexual awareness and experiences are now happening to our children at ever-younger ages, a side effect of the revolution in sexual behavior in the second half of the twentieth century, of the ever-increasing media coverage of sex, and of the availability of pornography and other explicit sexual material on the Internet. The average age of first intercourse in the United Kingdom has fallen from twenty-one for women born in the 1930s to seventeen for those born in 1972. And Ward Elliott, quoting a long-unpublished 1970 Kinsey Institute survey, indicates that 92 percent of married American women who were born before 1900 were virgins at the time of their marriage, a figure that declined, on average, by about 8 percent per decade, to 30 percent for 1950s-born “disco era” women. This change is seen as even more dramatic when measured by the percentages of women who had had premarital sex, for whom the increase was almost ninefold, from 8 percent of women born in the nineteenth century to 70 percent of those born at the peak of the Baby Boom. Mirroring these changes, public tolerance of premarital intercourse has grown markedly since the 1960s. In 1969, 68 percent of the American public thought premarital coitus was wrong; this declined to 48 percent of the general population and only 19 percent of college students by 1975, a gap of only six years.

  Just as the youth of today are becoming sexually active earlier than in any previous postwar generation, the age at which children first learn about sex has lowered. Nowadays if a six-year-old tells his classmate that he has just found a condom on the patio, he is just as likely to be asked in reply, “What is a patio?” as “What is a condom?” Given this trend, it is reasonable to assume that society’s attitudes on matters sexual will to a significant extent be more and more molded by the attitudes of the younger, sexually active generation.

  Another development that lays the foundation for positive changes in attitude to sexual robots is the marriage of sex and technology, a union that started in the closing years of the twentieth century. One hundred years earlier, the invention of the automobile created a splendid venue for lovers lacking privacy, facilitating private assignation and fornication. And much more recently, sex has led some of the most important technological developments within the consumer-electronics industry, being, for instance, the driving force behind the boom in sales of the videocassette recorder (porn videos), then the DVD (more porn), and, of course, the Internet (yet more porn, and the first signs of interactive adult entertainment). These are examples of how social responses to technology sometimes encompass and encourage new sexual behaviors.

  These two trends have fused together to create cybersex.* The usage of personal computers has become more and more the province of our youth, a phenomenon that will surely be repeated as handheld PDAs† with wireless connections to the Internet and third-generation mobile phones both become mass-market consumer items for recreational use, including sex-related use. As our youth wholeheartedly embrace such technologies, so sex will increasingly permeate through to their computer screens and the liquid crystal displays (LCD) on their handheld devices.

  From Haptic Interface to Sex Robot
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  When the Web site www.BetterHumans.com conducted a survey in February 2003 to investigate what sex technology most people desire, the clear favorite was “android‡ love slaves” with 41 percent of the votes polled, followed at a discreet distance by mind-to-mind interfaces with 24 percent and virtual-reality sex with 17 percent. Clearly, robots are forming a significant part of the sexual thinking of the technologically aware.

  Cybersex is the latest sexual revolution, reflecting both the advances in the technologies that make it possible and the norms and play areas of contemporary sexual culture. Sex has become an activity that instead of simply requiring the physical presence of a second person now appeals to many people in newer and different forms, whether it be the opportunity to meet potential sex partners in an Internet chat room or one of the intimate activities that have been made possible through the development of dildonic and teledildonic devices. In the words of Cheyenne, an online sex-show host,* “Technology has allowed people who may have felt repressed, guilty, unimaginative or just basically sheltered, a way to express their sexuality without boundaries and to explore different sexual worlds.”

  The sexual possibilities that have been created by the teledildonic age are mind-boggling, so for many people sex today is already rather different, and the differences stem from the technologies. Among the most remarkable of these differences is the lack of a necessity to worry about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, even without a condom, because, through the use of haptic interfaces, sex can now take place between lovers who are in entirely different locations—different homes in different cities, different countries and different continents.