Melina is one of the premium sex dolls 2019 - she is a "Real Life Doll". For 1328 euros, the manufacturers promise "incredibly soft skin, which feels completely natural when touched". The height is from 135 centimeters freely available. As a hairstyle are 15 wigs to choose from. Skin color, vaginal variant, length of fingernails: everything just a mouse click away. Melina's eyes shine, the half-closed eyelids seem to flirt with the camera lens. But the feet have blemishes: If you fold the sole up, you see metal screws.
Sex on demand is becoming easier and easier thanks to technical developments - and more human. Scientists like the Japanese robotist Hiroshi Ishiguro are now developing robot replicas, 3D copies of real people. In 2018, the Berlin-based tech start-up company me.mento announced its vrXcity product, a "first interactive VR erotic platform".
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Author Sophie Wennerscheid: "Happiness is so predictable"
But what does that mean for our sex life? Will sex with other people get boring at some point due to technical progress? In her new book "Sex machina", cultural scientist Sophie Wennerscheid writes about how human desire could look like in the future. Wennerscheid analyzes sex fantasies in film and literature, technical trends in science, tests even erotic platforms. The conclusion: A machine only becomes attractive when it can offer something different from man - and remains marked as a machine with motor and screws: technology and sexuality "do not regard them as basically antagonistic quantities, but as something that makes the radius more sexual Activity expanded. "
Similar and alien at the same time
That's why robots did not just push the human sex partner off the edge of the bed. Due to technical progress, "new interfaces, data cycles and transmission paths of desire" developed. Man and machine are still two different things. However, there are now more points of contact, "techniques that connect the body in a new way with other bodies or things".
Wennerscheid refers to examples from sci-fi, including Alex Garland's film "Ex machina". The programmer Caleb is to test a humanoid robot in a laboratory experiment. The task: How human is Ava for him? From the front, the robot looks attractive: the face is symmetrical and wrinkle-free. Around breasts and hips run rounds, standard compliant. But no hair is growing at the back of the head. In the brain Avas works a machine with calculus: metal plates, pipes that lead down into the hull.
DISPLAY
Sophie Wennerscheid
Sex machina: The future of desire
Publishing company:
Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Pages:
240
Price:
EUR 24,00
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Caleb knows that Ava is a robot. The body is transparent, Ava does not even wear a wig. Still, he falls in love with her as the movie progresses, feeling attracted to her machine body. The Android is similar and alien at the same time. But that's what makes him, according to Wennerscheid, appealing. Because robots, like any high-tech device, are not fully controllable, they would become attractive as erotic companions. In the place of the nature-unpredictable vamp now enters a "out of control technique".
imago / Prod.DB
Alicia Vikander as Ava in "Ex machina"
How human should a sexrobot be?
Wennerscheid demands more openness for sex with machines. With new techniques, fixed ideas about what a "natural" body is and what "natural" sexuality solve and expand. Robotics can open up new worlds of experience for humans. However, it remains unclear in their analysis what constitutes these worlds of experience - and how they can be developed.
The author leaves open, for example, whether the similarity with humans in sexrobots even plays a role. Or, whether people find the "thing" interesting not only because "it is a thing they can do with what they want".
According to Wennerscheid, eroticism results from the crossing of boundaries - and thus from touching human and machine. If a taboo is broken, but it is no longer one. As soon as a fantasy has become reality, the tension is: "Happiness is so predictable that it is no longer luckless." Does it then make sense to fulfill fantasies with technical means?
Wennerscheid refers in her analysis to ETA Hoffmann's "Sandman", as an example of an at least temporary functioning, "strange desire" between man and machine. In the narration, the main character leans on a machine with technical limitations: Olimpia is pretty, but can not say more than "Oh, alas!" She gives everything and nothing. Leaves room for fantasy without ever actively fulfilling it. So the limit remains to a certain extent. The story takes no happy ending, the main character goes crazy as the illusion unfolds. No technician, but the imagination created the perfect sex partner in the machine.