Morality, Artifice and Sex Robots, Oh My!

Bulletin, 2010

Every weekend, some women on the Gonzaga campus choose to dress like sex robots. By cramming themselves into skin-tight polyester and miniskirts, these women package their own bodies as a product.

Recently, TrueCompanion, Inc. shocked some by introducing Roxxxy, the first sex robot capable of speaking, retaining information, engaging in conversation and being used for sex. For about $7,000 any person over the age of 18 can purchase and customize their very own sex robot, complete with specialized personality settings, haircut and color, make-up, and nail polish, as well as other certain anatomical specifications.

Similarly, it seems some young women in relationships do not balk at the idea of getting a Brazilian wax to match the women their boyfriends see in porn and the myriad of underwear-less celeb pictures gracing the tabloids, without asking for anything in return. Many of the actions young women have come to see as pedestrian and necessary are products of sex as a commodity.

Critics and fans alike have been vocal in their response to the product since its introduction at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in early January. Roxxxy has been a topic in a number of on-campus classes including Sex, Gender and Society and Gender, Family and Society, spurring dialogue. In almost every conversation on campus, the response seems to be vehement condemnation, but the conversation is a bit more complex than simple refutation. Upon examination, many of the arguments prove to be more complicated than they appear.

First, many opponents claim that using a sex robot is “just wrong.” Presumably, they are making the claim that it is immoral to use a robot for sexual contact. This argument raises other important questions about artifice in the world of sex; namely, is it immoral to use anything that is not human for sex? Where do we draw the line on products like the Fleshlight? Do those who oppose the sex robot also oppose products like sex toys, synthetic lubrication or Viagra? In a world where technological advance often outpaces societal readiness, it is naïve to not acknowledge a growing gray area when it comes to our relationship with technology.

There is another argument that we can’t ignore; sex robots bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. In a relationship with an actual person, the world of fantasy and the realm of reality have a barrier. However, with a device like Roxxxy, fantasy becomes an immediate reality in which any whim or predilection can be realized. In a world of increasingly accessible and prevalent porn, this becomes problematic.

Some opponents of sex robots (and of porn) make the claim that it hurts women. However, I see the unfortunate effects on both the men who are using sex robots and women at large. When there is no distillation of fantasy, no hesitancy to live out a whim, those who use products like Roxxxy alienate themselves from the organic, natural intimacy that can come from sex between humans. In this way, products like Roxxxy are the embodiment of ultimate human alienation. Roxxxy’s highly customized nature promotes an idea that women should be equally customizable, with each facet of their personality and body attuned to their partner’s wishes.

Another problem I see in the discussion is the level of delusion in the binary, us-versus-them world of people who would use a sex robot and people who would not. People are quick to put themselves in a category of those who would never use a product like Roxxxy (or Rocky, the soon-to-be-released male counterpart). However, every day we partake in activities I see as merely sex robotics re-packaged.

Women aren’t alone in this, though, as some men make it a part of their coming-of-age tradition to skulk into a darkened strip club to watch women gyrate in g-strings to “Pour Some Sugar On Me.” Some of these men would recoil in horror at the thought of using a sex robot. However, watching strippers and using Roxxxy are much the same. With Roxxxy, men pay for programmed, controllable sex. With strippers, men use dollar bills to dictate what women wear, how they dance, how they talk and what they do. To many, Roxxxy represents a completely new and decidedly bad advance in machinery. If we acknowledge the cultural meaning of our own actions, we see Roxxxy as merely the next baby step in a world of entangled sex and technology.

Products like Roxxxy will continue to push the boundaries of sexual technology. More importantly, however, they will force us to examine the activities we see as pedestrian that may be equally as hurtful to others and ourselves. Are we merely Roxxxys or Rockys ourselves? Do we treat others like sex robots that breathe? While a simple acceptance or refutation of these products is perhaps the most common response, I argue that an honest examination of our actions proves that we are perhaps already following a cultural, social and moral trajectory merely accelerated by products like sex robots.

Super Bowl Vs. Puppy Bowl

Bulletin, 2010

Last Sunday I made the epic hajj to the couch to watch the perennial return of the Super Bowl. The day had all the fixings to be great: a three-hour homage to a game predicated on a system of arbitrary and cryptic rules, enough junk food to make me question the power of my digestive system and the sensory overload that is the world of American professional sports. Soon, however, I was torn between hulk-like 300-pound men and adorable puppies. Which would I choose, the Super Bowl or the Puppy Bowl? In true sports fashion, I checked the stats:

The Super Bowl

What It Is: The Super Bowl is the finest display of homoeroticism since the carving of Michelangelo’s David, or, to some, the distillation of seventeen weeks of professional football. The pre-game show, halftime show and after-show cued every washed up celebrity has-been and confetti machine in the greater Miami area. For those who couldn’t care less about football, the ads typically guarantee laughs and, in this year’s case, controversy in the form of Tim Tebow and his mother railing against abortion.

Key Players: This year, fan favorite Peyton Manning and his Indianapolis Colts faced off against the New Orleans Saints and Reggie Bush, who is most famous for his other full-time job as the chief curator of Kim Kardashian’s pronounced gluteus. Additionally, Reggie Bush has remained a popular face of the NFL ever since he emerged from a highly successful college career at USC. Peyton Manning, progeny of football phenom Archie Manning and brother of NFL QB Eli, retains popularity through his dynamic appearances in commercials and his courageous battle against a lifetime of hardship brought on by having a freakishly large forehead.

The Good: The Super Bowl features flair and lots of it. Between the fireworks, the myriad of American flags, the confetti bombs, the celebrity box seats, the upturned Kool-aid coolers and the overwhelming screen graphics, the Super Bowl keeps viewers somewhere between constant entertainment and epileptic seizure. The Super Bowl is an explosion of visual and auditory clutter, just the way we like it.

The Bad: Ever since 2004’s Janet Jackson Nipplegate, the Super Bowl halftime shows have been sterile, boring mash-ups of mid-level country stars, crusty 1970s rockers and unobtrusive Disney music childbots. The halftime show is the dullest part of the multi-hour affair.

Wildcard: The Super Bowl commercials this year featured a motif that never fails to elicit laughs--talking babies. E*Trade, an online stock trading company uses computerized babies to show the ease and profitability of their do-it-yourself brokerage system. While many have heralded the Doritos commercials as the funniest this year, I always find myself laughing awkwardly loudly at a talking baby.

The Puppy Bowl

What It Is: The event follows this equation for success: puppies + puppies + puppies. Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl consists of different kinds of puppies playing with chew toys, gnawing on each other and doing all of the adorable things puppies do. Viewers typically spend the first half of the game squealing at how cute the puppies are, the second half debating which puppy is cutest and the post-game wishing they could play with a puppy.

Key Players: This is not a Jeffersonian world of puppies. Not all puppies are created equal. While I chose my preferred pet (Garbanzo, an adorable cattle dog mix), my roommates quickly chose their favorites including the hideous Sir Winston, the Cavalier King Charles with lopsided eyes. We found ourselves bitterly divided over which puppies had redeeming qualities of cuteness, playfulness and overall charisma, begging the question in our minds; Manning who? According to the advertisement that ran almost constantly, there was online voting to choose the MVP (Most Valuable Puppy). Jake, the Chihuahua/Pug mix nabbed the title this year.

The Good: The draw to a continual loop of playful puppies seems obvious. However, the game also featured a Kitty Halftime Show where kittens played with an elaborate stage full of swishing cat toys, fake furry mice and swirling feathers. It’s the Puppy Bowl… with kittens.

The Bad: Once the hipster appeal of watching puppies play a fake football game wears off, the Puppy Bowl becomes a bit monotonous. One can only watch the Puppy Bowl in stints of a few minutes before switching back to the real game. Also, the ridiculous “refereeing” done by a random man with a striped shirt and whistle required liberal use of the “mute” button. Puppies are cute enough, calling a foul for “unnecessary ruff-ruff-ruffness” tipped the scale from precious to nauseating.

Wildcard: Two words--Hamster. Blimp. When the Puppy Bowl camera switched to aerial perspective, they used a box full of hamsters crawling over miniature blimp controls. The Hamster Blimp is genius. The Hamster Blimp combined with the bunny cheerleaders, puppy players and kitty halftime show made the event an outburst of adorableness.

Grasping in the Dark

Bulletin, 2010

In my hand, I hold a tiny, sleek device that promptly delivers my junk mail, Facebook updates, texts, and tweets with a delightful, cheery chirp. On my lap, a computer delivers to me on-demand music, anthologies of obscure and popular TV shows and endless sites to entertain me for hours. I love this. However, I have noticed a peculiar trend.

Clustered within the labyrinthine stacks of the legendary Powell’s bookstore, I stumbled upon the merchandise. Among the mounds of stuff, a laptop case caught my eye. Emblazoned on the front of the otherwise plain case was an inky, black drawing of an old-fashioned typewriter. Next to these cases were similar ones for an iPod, with old-fashioned gramophones drawn on the covers. Above the cases, a placard stated that they were called “Luddite Cases.” Below that, it gave a description of the Luddite Movement, which was an attempt by 19^th-century Brits to combat the (as they saw them) degrading forces of the Industrial Revolution.

The Luddites fought to destroy the means by which the Industrial Revolution affected their lives, largely focusing on the terrible conditions within the textile mills of the day. Their mission included destroying the mill machines they felt were ruining their society. Today, we romanticize the past in commercial products, and various cultural anachronisms are held in high esteem. Unlike the Luddites, however, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. Rather than destroy our iPods or our laptops (which, I don’t actually believe would solve much), we merely place them in handy, trendy, uber-expensive cases that reference nostalgia for a “simpler time.”

For just twenty-four dollars, I can, without kidding, listen to my iPod while simultaneously protecting it from the elements in that says I prefer to sit in the parlor and drop the needle on the gramophone to rock out. But the harking back to a history that perhaps never existed doesn’t stop with bags and cases. We don’t want to experience life as it was; we want to experience life suspended between then and now. Our cultural phenomena suggest both an embittered grasping towards a festishized history, and an utter dependence on and connection to modern accoutrement. Someone put the second part of the equation to me as, “becoming a society of people who think milk is made at the store.”

The trend of simultaneous entrenchment and refutation of technological reality seems to be built on one thing: realness. In a world where entire histories of conversation can be deleted with one stroke of a key, pictures only exist in clickable albums, and a physical letter in the mail is both alarming and alien, we grasp for a tangible reality—a realness we can feel. While binary, html, and the movement of electrons across millions of miles of wire mean something, they simply aren’t real. We are quick to make a fetish out of things that are handmade, vintage or in some way more tangibly individual than anything else, but we also want these things and our technology too.

One example of this is the idea of a “ranch vacation,” wherein the traveler can head to remote Montana or Wyoming to “work” on a ranch and see “Western frontier” life. Like the pioneers we are so quick to romanticize, we can ride a horse around a farm for a week and call it

ranching. Of course, few of those vacationers actually want to partake in the backbreaking, time-consuming and often exponentially unpleasant duties that go into running a working ranch. Likely, no one feels the urge to assist in the unseemly task of pulling a stuck calf out of a birthing cow or, gasp, actually kill an animal in an up-close realization of the circle of life. No, thanks, we would rather just watch the Lion King.

I assume these vacations are fun, and, if Montana is universally like any part I’ve seen of it, stunningly beautiful. However, when can we admit to ourselves that we just want to feel something real? One of the most popular Montana vacation ranches, Montana Bunkhouses, promises eager travelers “a real experience with real people.” This taste of “reality” can be tailored just the way we like it to fit our desire for immersion. On their homepage, Montana Bunkhouses suggests, “Those seeking adventure may sign up for authentic cattle drives, trail rides, or a pack trip. Others may prefer to ride in the pickup and visit with the rancher on daily rounds to feed and care for livestock.” Experience the thrill of a day in the saddle amidst a herd of horned bovines…or hop into the Dodge Ram and throw some silage into a trough.

Another example of this is the growingly popular TLC show “BBQ Pitmasters.” This show focuses on a group of traveling barbequers as they compete in contests nationwide. In a world of plastic food, drive-thru windows and preservative-packed microwave meals, it makes sense that we are drawn to a style of cooking that references an older era we imagine to be the epitome of masculinity. We imagine the BBQ Pitmasters as modern tribal nomads, cooking large quantities of raw meat over an open flame. Proving our reliance on the machinery of modernity coupled with our longing for a realer past, the show uses the technique and technology of today, while still paying homage to primal cooking. In each episode, the barbeque masters use state-of-the-art grills, high-tech culinary technique and sophisticated sauces while still connecting to the metaphor of the man cooking his kill over an open fire. The show’s popularity represents another fusion of our desire to return to realness while retaining the equipment of today.

On a smaller scale, I find myself involved in this exact sort of charade as I make the trek to Greenbluff every year. Often in the weeks leading up to Halloween, I look down upon those who buy their pumpkins at Safeway. Pshaw, how can they not go pick their own? I ask myself, my theoretical arm tiring from mentally patting myself on the back for getting a “real pumpkin.”

Aside from finding an excuse to eat two pieces of pie in one meal, I find myself wanting to return to Greenbluff because it seems more real. Somehow picking a pumpkin in Northern Spokane, where a docile pygmy goat sulks in a square cordoned off by chicken wire allows me to buy into the ruse that I am experiencing the season. Being at Greenbluff gives us, the idea of realness—touching, smelling, seeing and hearing the sounds of the season—no matter how canned they may be.

On the occasions that I darken the door of the gym, I am mesmerized by the Expresso Fitness Bikes. On these popular bikes, one can set the screen to project a mountainous trail, a grueling street climb or a dirt path. Granted, the snowy Spokane winter prevents much in the way of bike riding any time between November and March, but these machines may very well be the embodiment of the trend. We love the fact that we can ride a bike in a warm room at the gym, but we also want to pretend we are on a mountain trail, making the competition more real. With their computerized pacers, pixilated landscapes and rising popularity, these bikes give us exactly what we want—modern technology with a hefty homage to a glorified tangibility.

In the debate surrounding our place in the trajectory of history, we find ourselves in a proverbial no-man’s-land. We are not firmly planted in modernity, as we suffer from an undeniable discontentedness spurred by historical anachronism. However, we cannot claim full post-modernity as we are still indelibly tied to the technology that is paramount to material modernity. Perhaps the person who buys a pumpkin at Safeway hasn’t given up, they simply don’t buy into the sort of one-foot-in philosophy of things like Greenbluff, Luddite cases, Expresso Fitness bikes and Montana Bunkhouse vacations. Some of us are not so lucky and we find ourselves stuck in the middle, caught between the nebulous reality we experience and the yearning for a concrete reality we want.