Anyone for robotic rumpy pumpy? | Victoria Coren Mitchell | Opinion

Anyone for robotic rumpy pumpy? | Victoria Coren Mitchell | Opinion

The first porn film I ever saw was about a holiday camp full of sex robots. The plot? White-coated scientists look on as holiday-makers’ fantasies are fulfilled by hot droids.

Connoisseurs may guess that this was the 1978 classic Sex World, an X-rated pastiche of the Michael Crichton thriller Westworld.

I didn’t see it in 1978, I hasten to add. I watched it on a jumpy, white-lined VHS tape in the early 1990s, when I was 18. How today’s teenagers will scoff at the idea of discovering porn so late in life! But I tell you what, kids: I made up for lost time.

The main thing I remember about watching that film is the effort to put robots out of my mind. I do not find the idea of robots sexy. Not even Mr Spock.

(I have written that deliberately to annoy people, ie my husband. I bet Mr Spock isn’t a robot. And I bet my husband will think the difference between a robot and whatever Mr Spock “is” is an important difference. It is not.)

Anyway, the idea of being able to see actual people having actual sex, on camera, was so mind-blowing that the only obstacle to enjoyment was this pesky automaton plot. The narrative’s determination to persuade me that these were not real people fought a distracting battle against my brain’s dazzled attempt to take in the fact that these were real people.

In the end, I had to let my tired mind accept the whole robot thing and concentrate instead on the idea that “real scientists” were watching.

What can I tell you? Robots don’t do it for me, but scientists… hello, professor! Do let me help you out of those wet spectacles.

I was thinking about this during a recent debate about the “realistic sex robots” that will definitely exist within 10 years, according to experts and an eager reporting press.

Academics from Sheffield and Delft have warned that we must be ready to grapple with unprecedented ethical complications (and it seems that’s not all we’ll be grappling with).

Meanwhile, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, has written a typically strong and articulate essay for the New York Times about the dangers of robots that can’t give consent and might end up “normalising rape by giving it a publicly acceptable face”.

The focus of concern is an existing robot, classily named Roxxxy TrueCompanion, with various programmable personalities including “Wild Wendy”, “S&M Susan” and “Frigid Farrah: if you touch her in a private area, more often than not she will not be too appreciative of your advance.”

In my experience as an investigator, there is no legislating for people’s sexual psyches

That does sound dodgy. Then again, why should we assume customers will have sex with Frigid Farrah? Perhaps the point is for a million ordinary, healthy buyers to nod gloomily as they walk away from Farrah’s daily rejection, in order to increase the joy of that one day every couple of months when Wild Wendy comes out of the traps. I think we’ve all been in relationships like that.

In my experience as an investigator, reviewer and one-time director of pornography â€" as I say, I made up for lost time â€" there is no legislating for people’s sexual psyches.

(I mean that figuratively. Literally, of course, there is a great deal of legislating for people’s sexual psyches, and not all of it pointless.)

The company behind the Roxxxy TrueCompanion boasts that its robots “allow everyone to realise their most private sexual dreams”. Oh bless them. Everyone? Because the doll has four settings? My lord. There are people out there who can’t get off unless they’re wearing a welding mask and listening to Gilbert and Sullivan while a giant postman tickles them ’til they wee.

People are complicated.

And yet people are, at the same time, uncomplicated. There is nothing new under the sun. In prehistoric times, primitive men used tree stumps and rotten turnips for the same purpose that they now use the Roxxy TrueCompanion. Does the scene turn more sinister if the caveman gives his turnip a nice grass wig, or less so?

When it comes to rape, I’m persuaded this is not about sexual fantasy anyway, but only violence. If a man’s going to do that, he’s got something wrong with him that shouldn’t be affected one way or another by a robot. “Normalised” rape would have no attraction for that pervert: transgression is half the point.

I hope that’s true, because otherwise my involuntary reaction to this debate is quite wrong. I admire Laura Bates and I fear and condemn rape â€" of course I do. Nevertheless, I think there’s something funny about a sex doll that doesn’t want to have sex with you.

I mean, no sex dolls want to have sex with you; the imagination always had to do most of the work. It’s a long time since I’ve been in a sex shop, but you used to be able to buy a “simulacrum”: essentially, a bit of plastic with a hole in it. No doubt, while enjoying the device, some people imagined the hole to belong to Marilyn Monroe, others to an unconsenting donkey. Or a relative. Perhaps some users simply dreamed they were humping a doughnut. (Although it would seem an unnecessary expense to buy a fake plastic doughnut when you can get six of the real thing for a pound at Lidl.)

Or, of course, you could buy a full-on doll. You know, those inflatable ones with the weird puffy faces. Whatever effort was put in to create the “Miss World doll”, the “Jenna Jameson doll” or the “Miss Black Fantasy doll”, there was no getting away from the fact that you were basically rogering a lilo.

This has been going on forever â€" certainly since Ovid wrote of Pygmalion kissing and fondling his statue until the gods took pity. Is there great danger in the statue becoming increasingly lifelike? We have to pray there isn’t.

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