Dystopian Panic, Transphobic Hatred, and Annihilation Anxiety: Critiquing Radical Feminist Opposition to Sex Robots
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I critically analyze radical feminist opposition to the development, sale, and use of sex robots, focusing on the Campaign Against Sex Robots and its affiliated scholars and activists.Drawing from theoretical frameworks including sexpositive feminism, queer theory, and posthumanism, I use a feminist critical discourse analysis to examine the ideological assumptions that underpin feminist anti-sex robot arguments.This thesis traces two interrelated themes: how 'real' womanhood is discursively defined and defended by anti-sex robot feminists through the violent exclusion of certain bodies, and how these feminists mobilize discourses of love, intimacy, and relationships to bolster normative heterosexual relationality.Ultimately, I argue that while anti-sex robot feminists claim to oppose systemic violence, their arguments reveal a deep investment in violence, particularly against trans women, in the name of protecting a narrowly defined ideal of womanhood and intimacy.doll, with a special robotic head that can make facial expressions, blink, look around, and speak (RealDoll, 2021). 1 While her body is flexible and poseable, "it is not equipped with animatronic parts yet [emphasis added]" (RealDoll, 2021).She comes with a choice of five different faces, and nearly every other aspect of her appearance, including her hairstyle, makeup, eye color, and nipple shape, can be customized.2 The RealDoll X runs AI software that lets the user customize her personality and voice and interact with her, and she can be linked to an digital avatar through a subscription-based mobile app.She also has a Bluetooth-enabled insert that detects touch, allowing the user to bring her "from mild arousal to orgasm" (RealDoll, 2021).Realbotix TM CEO Matt McMullen has recently revealed that the company is working on a male sex robot that can be programmed to be gay or straight, and a lesbian version of the existing female robot (Wakefield, 2021).A fully animated robot body is also in development (Wakefield, 2021).For the time being, those interested in an artificial companion can purchase what is effectively a female sex doll with an animatronic head, running AI software similar to Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa.Sentient, fully mobile, truly human-like sex robots are beyond the limits of existing technology -for now, at least.Perhaps unsurprisingly given that sex robots sit at the intersection of two notoriously contentious topics, sex and technology, their development, sale, and use has 1 Whatever one's opinion is of sex robots, the artistry and attention to detail put into their design is impressive.They look strikingly human.Krizia Puig (2017), who visited the Abyss Creations/RealDoll factory for their own MA thesis research, describes being transfixed by their tiny, realistic details: "the modeling of their faces, the freckles on their shoulders and the wrinkles on their heels...I spent minutes looking at their pupils and detailing the pores of their silicone skin" (p.65). 2 To a point, at least.There is a narrow range of skin tones, facial features, hair textures, and body types to choose from.As they currently exist, these robots very much conform to normative ideals of feminine beauty, thinness, and whiteness (see Puig, 2017).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".