A feminist on sex machines: Kate Devlin

Amazon link

Dr Kate Devlin's Wikipedia entry.

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The concept of a 'machine for sex’ is a wondrous, powerful one. As the author notes, its arc aligns with all of human history. Devlin describes ‘sex toys’ from prehistory and antiquity right through to the present day.

The term ‘sex robot’ itself is rather reified. Better is the idea of an artefact with which humans may engage sexually. Such an artefact might be genetically engineered, machine fabricated or some hybrid in between. Sex devices interestingly inhabit the intersection of science and technology, genetics and evolutionary biology, and the myriad social sciences.

If a sex robot is defined as a thing, as human property, then they existed once, currently don't really exist and may exist again in the middling future. In antiquity slaves were property and presumed to have no agency. It was routine and uncontroversial for elite slave-owning males to buy and use nubile male and female slaves for sex. As Kyle Harper recounts in his “Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425”, consequences included masters becoming (stupidly) besotted with their slave sex-objects, wifely jealousy .. and unintended offspring who would join the next generation of slaves.

Antique ‘sex robots’ were, from a functional point of view, poorly implemented. Their inner drives and motivations were not aligned with their 'function’ which made ownership fraught and only manageable through sustained terror.

Devlin’s first degree was in archaeology so she will know all this. It would have been good to read about the social, ethical and even practical implications of the widespread availability of high-functioning ‘sex robots’ in antiquity. Devlin's discussion is however (pp.116-117) superficial, flagging only the usual oppressively gendered roles found in all premodern societies stabilised by male violence. She also notes a pre-Christian sexual disinhibition of which she approves.

“Turned On” is not a book of science with some feminist advocacy. It is instead a feminist tract anchored around the topic of sex-with-artefacts (p.213). What’s this for example - a mocking rebuke to the transgression of equal outcomes?

“Why do we experience things? How do the mechanisms of our bodies and brains give rise to conscious sensations? Where does that consciousness come from? You don’t have to have an answer in the Great Zombie Debate. The philosophers can’t agree on it either, Which is why you have a bunch of very clever middle-aged white men amusingly inventing words like‘ ‘zoombie’ and ‘zimboe’ to put forward their own variations on the theory. “ (p. 102)

My emphasis. It's certainly of the moment, but it jars.

Devlin tells us she is a feminist, an ideology developed to further the interests of liberal professional women like Dr Devlin. Like all ideologies, it’s protean and eclectic, cherry picking arguments which support the cause. A characteristic of ideologies is that they narrate a world their proponents wish they were in but which rarely coincides with actuality or realistic possible outcomes.

Consider objectification, something she takes strong issue with. The discussion is phenomenological: an example might be a builder wolf-whistling an attractive woman in the street; or a bunch of women hooting and laughing at a male stripper at a ‘hen party’.

In the broad-brush triune brain model, primary drives such as lust are associated with the (animalistic) brainstem formation; emotional attachment with the mammalian limbic system; and rational interaction with hominid cortical systems. It’s not much of a surprise that humans can exhibit sexual behaviour dominated by any of these loci.

Objectification (the mode of lust-dominance) would then be a brain-stem determined form of behaviour. In more refined circles we expect cortical inhibition/mediation of primary drives to deliver more measured, prosocial behaviour factoring in social context. Our biology is complicated in social settings.

There isn’t any such framing in Devlin's book. Just normative presumption that objectification is out there (for some reason), that’s it’s wrong and that current sex doll designs play up to it. This is to sell the reader short, replacing analysis with moralising.

Naturally we don't wish to succumb to the naturalistic fallacy; humans with their small group evolutionary history are imperfectly adapted to large scale societies. There are plenty of natural urges we need to regulate and indeed legislate against. There are few easy answers here as Devlin would be the first to argue, in contexts such as the legality and ethics of child sex dolls.

Devlin adopts the fashionable feminist view that phenomenal gender differences are purely social constructs. This despite the enormous weight of hard evidence (evolutionary, neuroanatomic, genomic, physical, psychometric) for well-defined and reproducible biological differences between the sexes. Differences which are hardly obscure, but recognition of which might undermine the claims of her interest group. Public choice theory assumes its usual relevance here.

Devlin interviews the CEO of RealDoll, Matt McMullen, and gives him a hard time about the overwhelming preponderance of hyper-sexualised female dolls and robots. 'Where are the less-sexualised dolls, the male dolls?' she wants to know. Actually this is a point she takes up with all the doll manufacturers she meets. The replies she gets are defensive, framed in terms of male-female differences in sexuality leading to skews in demand. Devlin is having none of it, blaming biased marketing and uncritical social conditioning (pp. 153-154). Time for a quick review of microeconomics (supply-demand equilibria?) then as I reflect on the democracy of markets in probing the world as it actually is.

Then we read this in a meandering discussion of rape fantasies and the claimed lack of any genetic influence:

“If anything, rape would theoretically reduce the reproductive success of our ancestors as it takes away selective genetic choice. “ (p. 233).

Reality is more nuanced. Rape is historically (and currently) commonplace in intergroup conflicts. It's plainly adaptive for males in the absence of draconian ingroup penalties. I suggest a quick read of Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene".

Gendered social roles have historically been oppressive to women. There are biological reasons (eg male physical strength, aggression and paternity-uncertainty) which interlink with social reasons (eg within-family inheritance) which are specific to different kinds of society and which need to be explicitly teased out. If capitalism appears to be intrinsically gender-blind in its desire to free everyone up to maximally work, then the deleterious effects on human self-reproduction also need some analysis.

A perennial science-fictional trope referenced by Tom Whipple, The Times science editor in his review, is that of the perfected sex robot as a kind of sterile mosquito (which has already resulted in some local extinctions of this malaria disease vector).

This is not a problem we'll face anytime soon but is there something to it? Devlin is unworried while Whipple remains concerned. Plainly it’s hard to assess an unknown artefact but with universal and easy access to contraception in the west, perhaps we already have a natural experiment. Check those Total Fertility Ratios.

We are already selecting for women who positively want children (rather than just sex); ubiquitous effective and sterile sex robots would select for men with a similar drive. Let's hope there's that much variability in the gene pool.

In summary Devlin's book is an easy and amusing read: somewhat superficial; an interesting tour of the sex doll/sex toy landscape which will be unfamiliar to many readers; intriguing confessional snippets from the author's private life.

The book is not particularly scandalous or salacious, it's not very conceptual or analytic and its opinions are conventional liberal left. Put aside a slightly sprawling and uneven structure and it reads like an extended New Scientist article.

Incidentally, if Dr Devlin or her co-workers were ever to read this review, they would not be won over. It is in the nature of ideologies to be believed by their adherents and they provide powerful mechanisms of contextualisation and framing to theorise their opponents. This review would be framed as a defence of the patriarchal power structure: discredited gender essentialism.

We are truly the victims of our own axioms.

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Further reading: "So Beautiful".