BUSINESS VOICES
McMullen is the artist and design director behind Realbotix, who brought the core team together. He started Abyss Creations, the manufacturer of RealDoll, out of his garage in 1997. For the past 20 years, he has been creating “The World’s Finest Love Dolls”, as well as undertaking multiple custom projects along the way. McMullen’s dolls have popped up on more than 20 television shows and also co-starred in ten films.
a line written by the American relationship advice columnist Dan Savage: “Relationship graveyards around the world are crowded with tombstones that read: ‘Everything was great… other than the sex.’” Indeed in one online poll 40 per cent of people answered “no, it wouldn’t bother me” to the question, “does it still count as cheating if your partner has sex with a reallife looking sex robot?” In Germany and Spain, there are already robot brothels and some hope sex robots will eradicate the “world’s oldest profession”: prostitution.
MARRIAGE WITH A ROBOT?
The author David Levy goes a step further, predicting that sex robots won’t just exist to exercise any frustrated libidos. Soon enough, we’ll be falling in love with them “in droves”. He predicts that the first human-robot marriages will take place by 2050. “I think there’s
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an important point here,” he argues. “If I’d said to you a hundred years ago that people of the same sex would be marrying each other in a hundred years’ time, you’d have me carted off to the nearest lunatic asylum. Look how wrong you would have been.” He thinks “women will be just as interested as men”, but admits, “my wife doesn’t agree with me at all… She thinks that any man who is interested in having sex with a robot has something wrong with him.” Dr Kathleen Richardson of De Montfort University, Leicester, and founder of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, is concerned that what underpins the production and sale of sex robots is the notion of “using others as objects” and compares the purchase of them to the buying of real women. “Men who visit prostitutes don’t take her or him out for coffee, get to know them, find out if they’re mutually attracted to each other, and decide to have a sexual encoun-
ter. They bypass it all and visit someone who will basically do what they want.” She argues that Harmony, who is programmed to flirt and bat her eyelashes whenever a man flips the right switch, is an extension of this, a being who perpetuates the idea that “it is okay to use others for your own gratification and carry it forward into a new world of technology”. Curiously, David Mills agrees with Dr Richardson in his conception of the sex robot he is poised to buy: that all she really amounts to is “Siri in a doll”. He’s buying Harmony now because he wants to be at the very forefront of cuttingedge sex technology — and at £7,000 a head, if he saves up, he can just about afford it. “I don’t hold on to the theory that next year’s doll is going to be able to cook dinner for me, play tennis with me,” he concludes. “If they could build something like that it would cost a billion dollars.” ●