Games about killing people are not a problem, as long they are labeled properly (enforcing that, that's another story). Do we have a bigger problem with objectification, than with plain murdering, or with drug dealing? And how's the argument about having sex with prostitutes in GTA? Really all this only confuses me - people are cherry-picking topics to be upset about, while ignoring similar glaring ones right there. I'm not even saying about what one should be upset, just expecting some consistency in it.
Cherry-picking is fundamental to most people’s views, sadly, and they always use “we have to draw the line somewhere” as an excuse for why it is valid to ignore similar or even far worse situations. Worse still, they focus their time creating elaborate objections to what are mostly meaningless topics, mostly due to not being able to exercise their control over those much bigger and broad issues. For example, known effects from cigarettes versus theorized effects of e-cigarettes. Same goes for debates on alcohol vs pot, electric car accidents vs ICE vehicles, so on and so forth. It also happens when placing extraordinary value on an individual cherry-picked life or theoretical life, rather than any of the actual lives lost every day to solvable problems.
End of the day, it’s all about people trying to control other people’s thoughts and actions by forcing them to conform to the box the debater has created and lined with cherry-picked facts. You can see that in the arguments of this article and in this thread.
Just as a note, I’m not advocating one way or another on any topic, just addressing the issue of cherry-picking that happens regardless of which side anyone falls on an issue.
Anecdotally, I would like to mention that my partner has been sick for over a month with some kind of lung shit he got from an e-cigarette (vuse something disposable crap).
He has been literally unable to sleep through a night for over a month, multiple doctor visits, 3 courses of antibiotics, lung xray that apparently confirmed it was viral pneumonia, but yeah. I have been smoking for over 6 years and still alive, but he smoked that shit for less than a few weeks and he is barely functional.
I can't remember the last time I got a full night's sleep anymore, because I constantly have to apply muscle relaxants and ensure he has proper medication to be able to remain asleep.
So yeah, not really the point of your argument, but fuck e-cigarettes, for the rest of time I will have this stance. And yes, I am brutally aware of what cigarettes do as well, but don't knock the "theoretical" effects of e-cigarettes.
As said, another example of cherry-picking. They smoked a vape, therefore it must be vapes. They got the vaccine, therefore it must be vaccines. Rinse and repeat for whichever argument.
What is worse, pointing out these selective facts generally makes people become defensive, so they dive into searching for more cherry-picked arguments as ammunition to prove themselves right, rather than accepting that they might actually be wrong and objectively looking for information. It is the core of the problem of politics on both sides and we can easily see how extreme it can make people regardless of the thing being advocated.
Cherry-picking and self-reinforcement go hand-in-hand.
On the topic of cherry picking and vapes, one of the biggest absurdities is that it's now cheaper and more convenient to purchase meth or fent in San Francisco than it is a flavored vape. I can respect people having different levels of libertarian or public health concerns than me, but there's absolutely no consistent pairing of them that should result in vapes being more restricted than fentanyl.
In Germany more than half of all murder victims are women. I presume it's not much different in other countries, although gang on gang violence may distort the picture a bit.
If you look into research on femicide, you see there is a specific dynamic at work, objectification and feelings of possession in men are causal. These motives are universal, as femicides are otherwise frequently happening across all economic, cultural and social backgrounds.
> I presume it's not much different in other countries, although gang on gang violence may distort the picture a bit.
If you count all homicides i would expect women to usually be the minority in most countries due to gang crime as you say. In france its the reverse, 67% of all murder victims are men. The data looks similar in the US.
In the french statistics certain crimes affect mostly women and other mostly men. 97% gang related deaths are men while 66% of intra-family deaths are women.
Yeah, my "expectation" was meant in regard to non-gang violence, which varies by country a lot. Gang on gang, or inner crime violence is for the most part irrelevant to the argument, as it's not something the general population is involved in, usually.
My point is, femicides are a much bigger problem than people realize. Considering the majority of murderers and other criminals are men, I don't think it's wild to presume some form of gender specific motivations in those murders, without getting all academic here.
Don't know about you infographic, here is recent stats for Germany:
There is an interesting aspect when looking at gender in intra-relationship violence. The rate of violence is fairly independent on the gender of the couple, meaning that same-sex relationships has the same rate of violence as any other relationship. This statistical phenomenon mean that women in same-sex relationships are twice as violent as other women, and men in same-sex relationships are about half as violent as other men.
The big question then is what (if any) gender specific motivations is causing this to occur.
Can you link the source for that? It's not that I would completely dismiss it, I think I read it before, but I still would like to see the meaning of "same" here.
I think there are many possible explanations, but one certainly shouldn't be ignored over essentialist ones: Co-morbid mental illness and maladapted behavior in LGBT folks, caused by their upbringing and coping with discrimination or alienation. They usually don't have a blueprint for life and have to make up their own gender and community roles. Then there is all sorts of violence imaginable in relation to "gay panic" and self-acceptance.
It may be cishet gender roles and the male archetype finding their way into these relationships.
Maybe people are just violent opportunists. (I doubt there are as many murders in F4F relationships...)
Maybe there are biological causes. Personally, I think it's misguided to separate sexual orientation and identity as fundamentally different. The whole of "sex difference" is produced by effective androgenic and estrogenic signaling throughout life. Like, a cell has no sex. The Y chromosome does about nothing, except for a brief moment mid development, and everything else is genetically identical. All genes affecting androgen effectiveness are located elsewhere. Funnily enough, the androgen receptor is encoded on the X-chromosome, so typically women got the information twice, making it functionally more robust.
Androgens role in aggressiveness is well documented, and it's usually relative levels making the difference. Maybe there is some sort of selective order in the lesbian community too. Things like PCOS come to mind.
Or a mix of all... There won't be data to give a definitive answer.
Honestly, I think it would be more interesting, if murder rates in M4M relationships were lower or higher. Cause sexual objectification definitely is present in some parts of the gay community. Although often in concert with sexual liberation and reciprocity, and I don't think possessive thinking is frequent.
I would point to the government report that the Swedish government did, or the study from Turell (2000) or Messinger (2001), or Kelley et al. (2012). I also recall hearing it from a professor.
There are many theories but one of the more reasonable one (in my view) is the simple one. Humans are humans and culture is usually a better explanation than biology. It also fits the challenge hypothesis of the relation between androgens and aggressiveness, which is that androgens function actually has nothing to do with aggressiveness but everything to do with social status and the amount of behavior towards defending against perceived social status threats. Only in a culture where social status is defended through the use of aggression is there a relation between androgens and aggression (An experiment using a setup where social status was defended through non-aggression showed a link with increased androgens and a reduction in aggression, which would indicate this theory to be true).
There are also multiple studies looking at self-reported amount of violence in relationships, which tend to show that while the rate of violence by women and men is fairly similar, what is different is how that violence get applied. This would also support the theory that the difference sits in how men apply violence against women, women applies violence against men, men against men and women against women. Same rate of violence, but not the exact same behavior when violence is being applied.
> In Germany more than half of all murder victims are women. I presume it's not much different in other countries, although gang on gang violence may distort the picture a bit.
No? For 2022 in Sweden the numbers were 93 men, 23 women. Men has been overrepresentative by 200% or more for as long as we have statistic data. You can look at the graph at the government statistic department on crime here: https://bra.se/statistik/statistik-om-brottstyper/mord-och-d...
From that same page, 9% of cases involve violence within a couple relation.
It would surprise me if the data looks that much different in other Nordic countries.
I don't speak Swedish. What's the proportion of gang on gang violence? Because I think it's irrelevant for the argument, as the general population isn't much directly affected by it.
In Germany, 2022, there were 114 male and 150 female murder (§ 211 StGB) victims. Mind you, that's all murders, including gang violence.
The number of deaths has increased in the last 10 years by 20%, so say around 20% can be attributed to gang violence? There is no official definition of gang on gang violence in the statistics, so we can only really guess here.
One thing of note is that the use of a gun sits at around 50%, which has also had a similar 20% increase in the last 10 years. The gang on gang violence that get media attention usually involve shooting or explosives.
I think he has a better point if he focused on intra-relationship murders. In these cases its usually women who are the victims in most country statistics i have seen. From the swedish one:
> I alla 10 fall av dödligt våld i en parrelation 2022 var offret en kvinna, vilket var 5 fall färre jämfört med 2021
=> In all 10 cases of fatal violence in a couple relationship in 2022, the victim was a woman.
IMHO There's no good reason for 'feminists' to be upset about robot brothels. If anything, it would re-inforce the divide between fantasy and reality.
The only explanation is that it's competition. It might sate some men, expecially singles, reducing their craving for sex with real women, and therefore it's 'value', and the effort they're willing to expend to obtain it.
Incrementally better pornography is incrementally better at suppressing fertility rates by satisfying sexual hunger with lower odds of producing zygotes. Robot sex is a kind of better pornography. But there are feminist natalists and anti-natalists, and that's only a problem for the former.
Very different experience here. The feminists I've known are very concerned about the cumulative effect of our actions on the wider society and not unusually focused on their own narrow point of view.
And discussing sexual health neutrally in academic terms, "like they're cattle", is also a feature of medicine and epidemiology, where feminists are well represented.
Can you link me something? Like an instance where a feminist, for the feminist cause, wants to police male sexuality and bodily autonomy in regard to fertility preservation? Because, even writing that feels silly.
I think sometimes medical and epidemiology opinions are just that, even when they are voiced by a feminist. Lol.
Privacy, personal freedom, absence of victims, even absence of interaction with any other being (human or animal), will not keep society from interfering if they can portray the perpetrator as a modern-day witch.
Historically there always has been a furious reaction from women/feminist movements against anything related to this, even in past decades when even the act of thinking or imagine anything like this was all one could do.
This is a topic with more mines than an Ukrainian field, but I'll say this:
Last century, we moved places because there were many problems and deservedly so we wanted something better, we had to choose paths to take. What if the paths we choose weren't the best ones? Can we have the courage to admit that?
This doesn't invalidate any problems with the starting point, but the place we ended up might not be any better.
The same applies to this "sex robots" thing, the place of unimaginable silent pain and loneliness is already here, so we want to move to a better place, is this the best choice? or is this the only choice available to those in need? - Just as the first part, this one is to be answered by the ones following the path, not the ones on the sidewalk.
Women, and especially feminist women, in my experience are pretty open to the idea that the need for sex exists and that sex toys are a delight.
What they object to is the equating women to sex objects - treating women like sex tours rather than whole human beings with rich lives and emotional depth and complexity.
Some men have a hard time decoupling the concepts. A fancy toy like proposed in the article is great for the folks who want it so long as it's not seen as a "woman analogue". (Just like how a dildo isn't a man analogue.)
There should be no shame in sex toys, if they make someone happy, go for it. I'm not sure what the implication of "best choice" vs "only choice" is referring to, because I could interpret it quite negatively I think maybe you could expand that idea more?
I think the issue is when it's a bot or doll emulating a full human and hitting the uncanny valley.
Plenty of toys out there for men and women nobody has an issue with outside of some(not all), strongly religious people.
If there was more of market for male dolls I could definitely some elements of the "manosphere" decrying it as an attempt to denigrate and replace men.
The UK already had an incident with mentally ill guy wanting to kill the queen.
Partially because he felt an AI "girlfriend" encouraged him to do so.
So it isn't that impossible to believe some user somewhere , divorced from reality , will do something bad to a real person that they might not have done had they not tried it with these dolls/bots.
I don't think they should be banned(although ones emulating children probably should be), but it's worth debating it.
A sex toy is a sex toy, not a substitute for a human being.
If you'd frame the topic differently, maybe "women/feminist movements" wouldn't "always react furiously". Why even bring that up? Regardless of truth in that statement, considering crime statistics, a woman has every right to be scared, when a man views them categorically, as something that can be replaced by a doll companion, at all. Same with AI porn, the concept of consensual sexuality becomes even more distant. That's scary, as we're not living in a world where that's all fun and games. At least in Germany, most murder victims are still women. Objectification and feelings of possession is a major cause for femicides.
Super cool, if your fetish is sex robots. But even bringing up "loneliness" and "choice" ... idk, man.
"The J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship is an organization that donates a lot of money to George Washington University's law school. Two of the faculty chairs are named after them. Jonathan Turley, and also Robert Glicksman, who is the J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/979js7/w...
> An endowed professorship (or endowed chair) is a position permanently paid for with the revenue from an endowment fund specifically set up for that purpose. To set up an endowed chair generally costs between US$1 and $5 million at major research universities. Typically, the position is designated to be in a certain department. The donor might be allowed to name the position. Endowed professorships aid the university by providing a faculty member who does not have to be paid entirely out of the operating budget, allowing the university to either reduce its student-to-faculty ratio, a statistic used for college rankings and other institutional evaluations, or direct money that would otherwise have been spent on salaries toward other university needs. In addition, holding such a professorship is considered to be an honor in the academic world, and the university can use them to reward its best faculty or to recruit top professors from other institutions.
Seems lazy and includes an unexplained slur about "liberal voices" that Turley never connects to the rest of his article. The laziness involves merely listing objections to sex robots/sex dolls without examining any of the nuances or reasons for people to object, then posing "libertarian" as a simple, easy solution.
Turley is not incorrect in subtly noting that the "Lost in Space" character Dr Smith is a robosexual.
I'm guessing I'd be one of the liberal voices he hand-waves away. He lists off numerous things I feel are worth considering:
- That sex-bots offer a denuded, perfectly submissive woman to a man: a woman that exists entirely for his pleasure, and should he desire a new one, is 100% disposable, or even resellable
- That the fact that sex-bots designed to appear as children is not a coincidence to the former thing, and seems to be part of the draw, at least for a fair slice of the market
I also feel the numerous comparisons to dildos in this thread really alarming. This isn't just a sex toy. This is, at some point and seemingly what their market truly wants, a simulated human being with which one may have a relationship: except that relationship is entirely one-sided, and will never challenge, grow, or pose a problem to the person in question. I don't think having full and complete access to a perfectly simulated person that you can do literally anything to and any time with zero objection or consequences will be good for anyone's mental health. We can't even help but form relationships and strong emotions for people on fucking television, do you really mean to tell me that a fully three dimensional, simulated human being, in front of you, that you can touch, smell, hold, and fuck are going to somehow not affect us in the slightest?
Like all technologies, there will be risks and negative outcomes.
Just look at books. At some point a married woman read a romance book that depicted an unrealistic male character who wanted nothing but to satisfy any desire of the woman in the book. And after reading that book she became unhappy in her marriage because her husband would never be like that character.
I don't think such large questions are served properly with "good" and "bad," context is important. If, for example, the woman in question had no previous knowledge of what a proper relationship looked like, and realized that she was depressed because her husband worked all day, drank beer all night, berated her every effort at making him happy, and couldn't fuck worth a damn, and left him and found a new husband that made her happy? Then I'd say that's terrific. If on the other hand the woman in question was a satisfied, happy homemaker, with a husband who did all he could to make her happy, but then was given an artificial AI sex-bot boyfriend because her husband needed to travel overseas for several months, and she became so enamored with this machine that it undermined an otherwise healthy and productive relationship because no human being can ever truly match up with a simulated one who's sole reason for existence is making another person happy, and as a result, their marriage fractured apart and their children grew up in a split set of two poor households as a result? I call that pretty shitty.
I'm not saying ban sex-bots. I'm saying we should be asking why this is a thing people want and maybe try addressing the actual social ills here.
In general middle aged women read unrealistic romance novels because they enjoy the fantasy and in general are never going to be with anyone that is as good looking and romantic as the men in those books.
I don't shame them for doing that. It is their choice.
It's a bad thing if it offers some measure of comfort to icky people.
ToucanLoucan is concerned about child-like sex-bots - would he prefer their buyers instead focus their attention on human children? Or does he believe sexuality is malleable, that they can be sent to conversion therapy and become attracted to adult women instead? In which case we might witness some mental gymnastics to explain why conversion therapy only works on sexualities frowned upon by society, but is ineffective pseudoscientific abuse for any of the accepted or celebrated sexualities.
I think it doesn't matter that abusing a robot that looks and acts like an abused child is better than subjecting an actual child to it.
There are all kinds of things that are innate and natural and which we simply cannot tolerate no matter how natural they are. All kinds of violence are natural, and the only acceptable response to it is to fucking supress and control it. Clubing a woman over the head and dragging her off to your cave is natural, and should only ever be repressed, inhibited, controlled, not tolerated, mercilessly. All those words that in other contexts are bad, are bad in those other contexts. It's wrong to repress your desire to be an artist. We aren't talking about being an artist are we?
Merely for generic violence we just happen to have a few constructive uses for it, and so we have a few uses for those assholes. But what is the constructive use for people who have even a slight desire to mess with a kid that actually looks like a kid? (I'm setting aside the unfortunate class of people who are still kids and should not have to deal with adult life quite yet, but who through no fault of theirs or the people they attract, look sexually mature and attractive. That still needs to be dealt with and isn't tolerable either, but the crime is a different one.)
I see no benefit at all to providing quite this nature of pacifier outside of maybe some highly controlled clinical context where a doctor maybe uses it as part of some sort of therapy and not as mere supposedly victimless gratification of someone's otherwise harmful desires. The fact is the desires are harmful all by themselves.
I happen to think that animals are not sentient and that until one wins an argument with us about it, it's ok to own them as property and use them as property. I think, in a strict actionable legal sense, that there is no real basis for charging someone with any kind of crime if they say, boil kittens. I know we have animal cruelty laws on the books, what I'm saying is I don't think they actually are logically defensible if we are still willing to eat other animals that just aren't cute to look at. I don't think there is anything especially humane about being killed by any method, and pain and terror are utterly inconsequential next to the big problem of being killed at all. So, I don't think whatever we do to cows is significantly different or better even if it's painless. It may be better but not significantly so. Like if I burned your house down but I considerately waited until you finished watching a tv show.
And yet I could never bring myself to boil a kitten and if I knew someone who enjoyed boiling kittens, I would consider that person to be an incredible danger to everyone else. Anyone who would do that, means there is something incredibly and dangerously broken about them, and no one else is safe around them.
There is just no way to argue that the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device. Whoever would use such a device, something needs to be done about that, and very little consideration needs to be given to their feelings on the matter. Intolerance? YES, of course, intolerance is the correct response to the intolerable.
> The fact is the desires are harmful all by themselves.
You only asserted this, but provided no justification. The desires are dangerous, yes, for the simple fact that someone may decide to act on them (with real children, not dolls).
Regardless, we're not arguing about the desires, but about sex-bots. The desires exist independently of the sex-bots.
> I think it doesn't matter that abusing a robot that looks and acts like an abused child is better than subjecting an actual child to it.
> the fact that we have the technical means to create an abusable child faximile, means that it's at all tolerable to allow anyone to actually use such a device
I am curious, do you think the same about people who kill children in a video game?
>And yet I could never bring myself to boil a kitten and if I knew someone who enjoyed boiling kittens, I would consider that person to be an incredible danger to everyone else. Anyone who would do that, means there is something incredibly and dangerously broken about them, and no one else is safe around them.
So what you're doing there is creating thoughtcrime. Allow me to explain. Suppose we have Steve, George, and Mike. Steve does not want to boil kittens, and would never do it. George would like to boil kittens, but would never and will never do it[1]. Mike likes to boil kittens and has done it already. I think we both agree that Steve should not be punished for boiling kittens, while Mike should be. Do you think George should be punished, though? We both agree that George is at least potentially dangerous, but should he be punished for harboring a desired that he never acts on? From a purely practical standpoint, doesn't that encourage people like George to act on their desires at the earliest available opportunity? If having the desire to do something is basically the same as having done it already, George may as well do it.
[1] The reason why doesn't matter. Maybe he doesn't think he can get away from it. Maybe he has conflicting emotions about it. Maybe he feels he would enjoy boiling a kitten but morally couldn't bring himself to do it.
The entire thrust of this thought experiment presupposes that the response by society for crime, thoughtcrime or no, should be punishment. This is not an understood conclusion, at time of comment, 71% of the United States has some anti-prison sentiment, and many of them are completely prison abolitionist. I don't want anyone in prison for anything, not because crime shouldn't be resolved, but because prisons don't work. They don't work for pedophiles, they don't work for people who boil kittens, and they don't work for anyone else either.
And I mainly say this because a more prison-abolitionist position here makes even more sense for these kinds of issues: be something akin to organized, intensive therapy and/or psychological treatment to address the underlying issues, and, failing that, a position in society where the person in question would not be exposed to children; where they're allowed to live an existence they find fulfilling and contribute somehow to society, while not being put in a position where their desires will put them and others in danger. Not locking them away, and certainly not indulging their desires with placebos until such time as the fakes don't work anymore. And certainly certainly certainly not doing it in such a way where only the rich ones can take advantage of the fakes in the first place.
Like, you can slice this however you want, but at the end of the day, a sex bot company providing kids to pedophiles for luxury car money is not solving the societal issue of pedophiles existing, not even remotely.
I don't know why you're bringing up prison when my question didn't assume any specific form of punishment.
>And I mainly say this because a more prison-abolitionist position here makes even more sense for these kinds of issues: be something akin to organized, intensive therapy and/or psychological treatment to address the underlying issues, and, failing that, a position in society where the person in question would not be exposed to children
I disagree with your reasoning. If it was possible to immediately and perfectly detect pedophiles, confinement for life would be the best way to deal with them, because there we would be sure they could not possibly have access to children. I don't know why you think that abolishing prison would make more sense to deal with pedophiles.
>certainly not indulging their desires with placebos until such time as the fakes don't work anymore
I see, the gateway sexbot argument.
>not solving the societal issue of pedophiles existing
It's unclear to me that it's a problem that has a solution. Like the other guy said, if conversion therapy for homosexuality is believed to be ineffective, why are we assuming that conversion therapy for pedophiles would not be? I am able to be convinced that somehow only one of the two could be effective, but I would need to hear some justification.
One difference is you can explain what makes paedophilia wrong, who it harms, and exactly how, and how that harm compares to the "harm" of denying the paedophile, while there are no such facts to explain about homosexuality.
I don't mean that merely stating a few truths solves all the problem and that conversion therapy would work, I'm just saying that there is a difference.
I know if it were me, maybe nothing would change what I want, but the therapy aspect has to have valid arguments just as a baseline to even allow for the possibility that I even listen at all.
Maybe for some at least it's enough to cause them to artificially control themselves.
I don't think that's too crazy because I think artificially civil behavior is rather common. I mean good grief just the phenomenon of cheating in relationships. It happens rather a lot, but for every occurance of cheating in a relationship there must be 1000 artificially decided not to do something they really did want to.
It probably just comes down to how many paedophiles are actually full on sociopaths or psychopaths that don't really empathize with anyone, the kids being no different, vs how many just want what they want in that one context but otherwise are functional humans who do possess the ability to empathize and care about anyone else. Those are two different cases.
Naturally it will have an effect, some which will be negative.
Now that schools has started to utilize AI for teaching, how will children be effected? The school period and teacher-student relationship is a critical part of growing up and developing functional and healthy adults, and replacing it with a cold one-sided interaction done in isolation can only be destructive to peoples mental and physical health. Even if the teaching tools could be made into perfect simulated teachers, the lack of the human connection is a major danger.
We can also see the same thing with AI doctors, with worse medical outcomes as a result. People need human relationships and connections, especially during periods of needs. There are plenty of researcher (already published and will likely be published in the future) on the harm that AI/remote doctors has on mental health and outcomes.
All this come however at a crash against a reality that not all children get great teacher-student relationships. Not all patient get good doctors. Some don't even get any teacher or doctor. During covid, some doctors did more harm by being physical near their patients than if they did not do anything at all. A robot/ai/word-for-human-replacement will likely be worse than a human, but they can also benefit people when the lack of alternatives are worse. People having simulated relationship with generated AI models might be worse than most real human relationship, but it also might be much better than some of the less-healthy human relationships that people might get as an alternative.
Many things are discussed in that article, from toys that are really fancy fleshlights to chat ai that poses as a sexualized minor.
I find the sexualization of minors, even mock minors, to be reprehensible and we should consider shutting that down.
But the rest of it is basically proposing steadily increasingly accurate (or alien) versions of fleshlights. Increasingly fancy toys for people to use by themselves or with their partners.
We are not now, not likely will we be in decades, capable of producing something even remotely close to a "simulated human". The concerns there are valid, but as likely to pass as "I'm really worried about people getting access to black magic". Yes, it would be bad if it came to pass and yes, people absolutely want it, but it's not real.
If I read your post full of hyperbole and double-standards, I'd hand-wave it away too.
You simply choose to cherry pick certain realities that paint men in a worse light and women in a better light when it comes to preferences for sex toys.
Even if we give you the benefit of the doubt that you are arguing in good faith, you still haven't given a compelling reason as to why it's your goddamn business in the first place what sex toys people use?
It's my business insofar as I'm a member of a society which is, on the whole, becoming ever more atomized and anti-social with itself. People retreat into technology because relationships are hard, and relationships are always and will likely forever be hard. People are frightened of their neighbors, people are afraid of being bullied online, people are stressed as fuck because our society is so difficult to live in, and then aside of that, we have a whole cadre of tech companies selling market solutions to our various social ills: shit like AI girlfriends, sex bots, AI pornography, which while yes, do mitigate a level of the immediate symptoms of those ills for their users, also incentivize people to not improve the world, to not integrate into the communities they crave, to not improve themselves as to create intimacy with a chosen spouse(s), but instead to recede even further into their dens where nothing is challenging, nothing is hard, and nothing requires work, but at the same time it doesn't reward you, it doesn't help you grow. It's feeling good without the things that make feeling good a good thing. It's a pale imitation of the human experience.
I don't care if you have a sex toy, I have a whole fuckin tote bin of them. I'm not concerned about the toys. I'm concerned about the people who seem to be in a situation where they believe all they can have is toys. That depresses and worries me.
I've been married 3 times, I have offspring. I am at an age now where I can still be sexually active, but I choose not to because I'm frankly done with marriage and dating. I'm not attractive enough to pick anyone up on any dating sites, and meeting people in person just won't happen. For me, a sex robot would be an interesting diversion. I don't need to "want to have sex with" a woman to be friendly with that woman. I also don't need to go out on dates and do all kind of pointless shit just so I can get my dick wet. I'm at peace with being by myself. If I choose to have sex with a robot, who are you to judge?
