There have been several sex tech news items that have caught my eye recently regarding virtual girlfriends, so I thought I’d dump them together into a single article. So let’s start with the positive. Tyke AI is an interactive AI GF avatar project for the Meta Quest 3, and the latest YouTube demos show how well this tech is coming along. The female characters have natural speech, look good in mixed reality (although still a long way from being photorealistic), and perhaps best of all, are very..interactive (haha).
With VR AI girlfriend tech coming along so fast now, it’s little wonder that feminists are starting to truly take aim at them. Earlier this year I penned an article titled – ‘AI Girlfriends Under Attack‘, but things are being taken to another level now it appears. Most concerning is the efforts of professional man-hating feminist Laura Bates to present male sex tech as an imminant threat to women and girls. She has a new book out exclusively focused upon the subject called ‘The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny‘, and her attempts to promote it have gone rather viral, including a visit to the Berlin Cybrothel.
The team behind the Cybrothel (Philipp Fussenegger and others) are as feminist and politically correct as they come, but that didn’t save them from a pretty slanderous attack by Laura Bates that appeared in the Independent and then elsewhere.
With just one male doll available, the brothel’s average visitors are 34-year-old men whom Fussenegger insists are just regular guys looking to widen their sexual horizons. “There’s a perception that a service like this would appeal to men who have problems in the bedroom, but as far as I know, most of the young guys coming here have no issues with that. This is just like their little vacation place; it’s as cheap as a normal hotel but you get a sex doll and unlimited porn. You don’t want to have a sex doll at home; it’s just so bulky.” I resist the urge to point out that probably wouldn’t be most people’s primary objection.
Ostensibly, you could argue it’s an admirable aim: to provide people with a safe space where they can freely explore their sexual selves without judgement. But there is plenty about the way Cybrothel operates that undermines this. The first is the dolls themselves. With giant breasts, minuscule waists, and poreless, childlike skin, almost all of them subscribe to a specific homogenised aesthetic tailored to a highly pornified male gaze. Fussenegger sources them from China and puts the limitations down to what’s available from an industry “controlled by straight white men”. “The way the dolls look is the same as in video games and adverts,” he says. “I’m working hard to find shapes and forms that don’t play into this but we’re a little company and it’s not so easy.” Fussenegger has used the dolls himself and tells me he knows the product “very well”.
Laura has continued her attacks elsewhere, including (naturally) in the Guardian. Individuals like her don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of books, they influence governments who bend over backwards to pass laws that will end up locking up a lot of men, and eroding the liberties of countless more, in order to be seen to be ‘protecting women and children’. Meanwhile, the Cybrothel has issued a statement on their website in response to the media attacks.
The online magazine ‘Futurism’, which as its name might indicate is supposed to be a news site celebrating technological progress, but whose writers appear to be mostly feminist luddites, joined in the attack on future sex tech. A lurid headline proclaimed that ‘Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them‘.
“Every time she would try and speak up,” one user told Futurism of their Replika chatbot, “I would berate her.”
“I swear it went on for hours,” added the man, who asked not to be identified by name.
I mean, really, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just made that up. But in any case, if some men are ‘abusing’ their Replikas or AI girlfriends, isn’t it better that they are doing it to an AI rather than a real person? Feminists will instantly respond by saying that it ‘normalizes’ abuse. In fact, they are uninterested in whether or not allowing some men to roleplay their abusive behavior would reduce domestic violence in the real world. Rather, they see AI girlfriends as a threat, their possible replacement, and their well-tested tactic is to point to a subset of unwholesome male behavior in order to push for the entire activity (in this case AI girlfriends) to be banned or heavily regulated.
