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Of Dolls and Men: Anticipating Sexual Intimacy with Robots

Published: 07 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Sex and intimate technologies are important in people’s everyday lives. A class of technologies that is becoming increasingly more prominent in discussions of the future are sex robots. In this article, we present a qualitative analysis of posts from a forum where people describe their interactions with sex dolls and their motivations for using them through text and photographs. Forum users use dolls as a content authoring interface, imbue them with agency, and construct meaningful sexual relationships with them. Implications for the design of future robots and autonomous agents in humans’ everyday lives are discussed. We highlight that sex dolls are used for more than just sex; they provide fertile ground for embodied fictions and care of the self. Future, customizable technologies for sexual intimacy and wellness should account for this use.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
    ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 26, Issue 3
    June 2019
    254 pages
    ISSN:1073-0516
    EISSN:1557-7325
    DOI:10.1145/3328720
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    Publication History

    Published: 07 May 2019
    Accepted: 01 November 2018
    Revised: 01 November 2018
    Received: 01 May 2018
    Published in TOCHI Volume 26, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Sexuality
    2. care
    3. embodiment
    4. intimacy
    5. online forums
    6. robots
    7. wellness

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