Modern-Radical Feminism Hates the Concept of Sex Robots (Not Shocking)

Campaign Against Sex Robots

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Over the last decades, an increasing effort from both academia and industry has gone into the development of sex robots – that is, machines in the form of women or children for use as sex objects, substitutes for human partners or prostitutes. The Campaign Against Sex Robots highlights that these kinds of robots are harmful and contribute to inequalities in society.

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these are their main points

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*We believe the development of sex robots further objectifies women and children.
*The vision for sex robots is underscored by reference to prostitute-john exchange which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of the buyers of sex, the sellers of sex are not attributed subjectivity and reduced to a thing (just like the robot).
*The development of sex robots and the ideas to support their production show the immense horrors still present in the world of prostitution which is built on the “perceived” inferiority of women and children and therefore justifies their uses as sex objects.
*We propose that the development of sex robots will further reduce human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship.
*We challenge the view that the development of adults and child sex robots will have a positive benefit to society, but instead further reinforce power relations of inequality and violence.
*We take issue with those arguments that propose that sex robots could help reduce sexual exploitation and violence towards prostituted persons, pointing to all the evidence that shows how technology and the sex trade coexist and reinforce each other creating more demand for human bodies.

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The Position Paper really gets into the details of why they are against sex robots. I doubt anyone will be shocked to hear that it's based in radical/third wave feminism

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I want to argue that Levy’s proposal shows a number of problems, firstly his understanding of what prostitution is and secondly, by drawing on prostitution as the model for human-robot sexual relations, Levy shows that the sellers of sex are seen by the buyers of sex as things and not recognised as human subjects. This legitimates a dangerous mode of existence where humans can move about in relations with other humans but not recognise them as human subjects in their own right.

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While males are the chief buyer of human sex, females are more likely to purchase artificial nonhuman substitutes such as vibrators [1] that stimulate a discrete part of the body rather than purchase an adult or child for sex. Take a look again at the above– ‘renting a girlfriend’ or ‘feeling sorry for the girls’ these and many more indicate that the buyer of sex is putting his needs over and above the other person. In the prostitution/client exchange both enter the encounter in specific ways. A study by Coy [3 p. 18] found the asymmetrical form of encounter between buyers and sellers of sex. As modern subjects, male and females have equal rights under the law, and these rights recognise them as human agents. In prostitution, only the buyer of sex is attributed subjectivity, the seller of sex is reduced to a thing.

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Baron-Cohen suggests that the higher prevalence in crime, sexual abuse, the use of prostitutes and murder are disproportionately committed by men and show that men lack empathy in comparison to females [8]. By proposing that empathy is an ability to recognise, take into account and respond to another person’s genuine thoughts and feelings is something that is absent in the buying of sex. The buyer of sex is at liberty to ignore the state of the other person as a human subject who is turned into a thing.

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In a forthcoming paper I propose that technological-animism is at work in the sphere of robotics, but rather than come from spirit or religion as in classical studies, technological-animism comes from a lack of awareness and attention given to how cultural models of race, class and gender are inflected in the design of robots [18]. The issue then becomes not a why question (that is still open for debate), but a how question. In what ways are robots made and what uses are they put to and what can these practices tell us about gender, power, inequalities, race and class? Campaigns to extend rights to robots without due attention paid to human are problematic. Robertson [19] notes that campaigns to extend rights to robots are done in contexts where the campaigners do not simultaneously campaign for the extension of rights to all human beings. When this happens it is important to explore the ethics of the human that is reproduced in robotics. In some cases, such as sex-robots it will rest on a disturbing vision of a seller of sex as a thing.

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It's not shocking that the subject-object theme is pushed hard. Once that TED talk was spread around the internet, it became THE go-to argument for weak thinkers who want to remove agency of individuals and replace it with perceived institutional inequalities (and almost always universally to show men, specifically white men, in a bad light). The arguments almost always remove the reciprocity of the subject-object discussion because they eliminate the agency/ability of the "object" from being able to make such a distinction. Sex workers see their customers as "objects" the same as how the customers see the sex workers as "objects".

I figured the author would ignore sex toys (due to the gender discrimination seen in the usage of sex toys), however they were mentioned...in passing...when discussing sexual substitutes and how they lead to more sexual activity. Of course an industry of complete gender inequality that leads to sexual experience and openness of marginalized women has no issues, but the development of similar technology for males is somehow the proliferation of misogyny and marginalization of women.

*ETA: CAD made a media-linked thread about the same author. OP changed and here is a link to his thread