On Sex Robots: Dehumanizing Sin

Some disassembly required.

David Warren: Some seek satisfaction in robot “love,” but automating sex is wrong. We are facing a new “crisis”: an attempt to dehumanize sin. Fortunately, it can’t be done. 

I don’t know who was surprised, but I wasn’t, to read in some electronic tabloid that sex robots can be programmed for rape. Appalled, perhaps – I am often appalled – but hardly surprised. And not being surprised, the quality of one’s outrage is spoilt. One must pretend to be shocked – as people have been doing for as long as they have been having bad sex.

Or so one might say, roguishly. There is a gap – a wide and deep canyon – between what we like to think is common, and what is. The notion of radical evil having been suppressed, in modern “education,” it is now a rift valley.

“How dare you suggest a woman would lie about something like that!”

This is an actual quote I recall (with confidence, word for word) from the critic of a column I once wrote on family court proceedings. I had suggested that it was unwise of the authorities to assume the truth of all female accusations. And vice versa, too, I had noted: men often lie. The human race is generally capable of bearing false witness, and the ability crosses all sexual, racial, and other demographic lines.

True, I had called my critic “Honey,” but that was in a moment of exasperation she had inspired. More circumspectly I tried to explain how law is supposed to work. How it is supposed to entertain the possibility that the accused may be innocent, of the crime specifically alleged. How the law should at least pretend to be blind to just those factors that she, in her feminist enthusiasm, imagined to be crucial.

Give up on principles like that, and the world will become rather as we find it, today: high-tech and crazy.

She said, too, that men treat women like robots. Well, I can remember saying, they must be robots, if they never lie.

Click here to read the rest of David Warren’s column . . .

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist with the Ottawa Citizen. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is from the film Ex Machina.

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