{"id":5850,"date":"2012-02-20T23:55:20","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T04:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=5850"},"modified":"2012-07-25T21:30:32","modified_gmt":"2012-07-26T02:30:32","slug":"wont-_anyone_-think-of-the-sexbots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=5850","title":{"rendered":"Won\u2019t ANYONE Think of the Sexbots?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

From 2008 to 2009 I was a fellow (gratis) of the Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technology. IEET is the public face of a non-libertarian branch of transhumanism that considers itself left-leaning progressive \u2013 by US standards, that is. In 2009 I left IEET, because the willful ignorance of biology and the evopsycho blather got to me (as did the fact that there were no non-white non-males in any position of power there). A month ago, they contacted me to ask if I would like to have more of my essays reprinted on their site, and if I\u2019d answer a questionnaire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The quality of the comments on the IEET site made me decide not to publish there. On the other hand, the questionnaire gave rise to thoughts, especially in light of the steady erosion of women\u2019s status across the globe. I won\u2019t quote lengthy specifics, they\u2019re all around us: from US congressmen trying to pass laws that classify miscarriage as murder to the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and its relentless seepage into mainstream politics. Here\u2019s the list of questions, which I call The Ok, The Bad and the Funny:<\/p>\n

The Future of Feminism<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. How do you think “sex selection” is going to impact women? In China and India, millions of female fetuses have been aborted\u2026 do you think this will continue as sex selection becomes more widespread? Or will it even out – or even favor girls? I’ve read that sex selectors choose girls over boys in places like South Korea and Japan\u2026<\/li>\n
  2. Women are advancing quickly in political and business positions. They are now 60% of college students, even in graduate programs. Do you think this trend will continue, enabling women to become the dominant gender in many parts of the world?<\/li>\n
  3. Getting pregnant no longer requires a male mate. Do you predict a gradual or sudden decline of marriage, for this reason? Do you predict more single mothers-by-choice? An increasingly wide variety of family groups?<\/li>\n
  4. Will men become irrelevant, if propagation can occur between two women via parthenogenesis? Is this something that is scientifically possible in the near future?<\/li>\n
  5. Do you think the word “feminism” is going to be dated in 40-50 years, because we’ll moving towards a genderless society? That there will be numerous possible gender options, that are easily changeable? Or will there be “women” for at least the next 100 years?<\/li>\n
  6. How do you think social institutions will change, as nations become “feminized” due to increasing female presence in power positions? Will increasing women’s power effect education? International relations? Economies? Democracy? the environment?<\/li>\n
  7. I have noticed that women don’t seem as interested in cryonics, or life extension. Am I right about that? Why is that? Do you think women are as intrigued by immortality as men? If not, how will progress in life extension proceed in a future where men are declining in influence?<\/li>\n
  8. Do you think male and female sex robots will be prevalent in the future? Will they dominate sexuality? Or will only men be interested in them? Will prostitution, and the sex industry in general, be impacted, or replaced by sexbots?<\/li>\n
  9. Men presently – generally – have greater physical size and strength than women. Will this change in the future, via various enhancements and augmentations? Will the two genders become physically equal in all aspects? If so, how will this change the dynamics between them?<\/li>\n
  10. Genetically, it appears that men are likely to be “outliers” – to be at the far extremes in either intelligence or stupidity. Do you see this changes in the future, via genetic engineering? Do you see women eventually winning 1\/2 the Nobel Prizes every year, or even more, for example?<\/li>\n
  11. There are still cultures that practice customs like Female Genital Mutilation and Arranged Marriages and Honor Killings. Do you see those misogynistic practices ending soon? Or will they be tolerated for several more decades, because many are disinclined to assert Western ideals on traditional cultures? How will notions about “religion” change as women gain in power?<\/li>\n
  12. Do you see other technologies looming ahead that will deeply impact women? A male birth control pill, for example – how would that change society?<\/li>\n
  13. Finally, do you see women entering science and tech in larger numbers? Do you think they have different interests in these fields? Do you think they have goals and inventions and purposes they want to accomplish, that differ from male goals\/inventions\/purposes?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"\"<\/a>The attentive reader will notice several overarching attributes.\u00a0 Beyond the gender essentialism, half of the questions are \u201cBut\u2026 what about the men??\u201d including the angst about family configurations, control of reproduction and, not least, sex robots \u2013 clearly, a burning issue. Also telling is that the questionnaire is titled \u201cThe Future of Feminism\u201d rather than \u201cThe Future of Women\u201d. Insofar as feminism is the simple yet radical notion that women are fully human and should be treated as such, it is frankly stunning that many people, and not just Anders Breivik or the Taliban, are virulently hostile to feminism. This speaks volumes about the prevailing assumptions of the first globally linked human civilization and its likeliest future direction: women’s prospects look ever bleaker as the global economy circles the drain, since women are shoved back into chattelship, illiteracy and poverty whenever there\u2019s a downturn or an upheaval. Variations of Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> have replayed in many places within my lifetime.<\/p>\n

    \u201cFeminizing\u201d keeps popping up in the questionnaire as well. It looks like the IEET definition of the term is \u201cif at least one woman is present in X\u201d regardless of the final configuration. As far as I\u2019m concerned, for any X to be feminized it requires more than 50% female representation — and last I looked, men still own and run just about everything on this planet. Equally importantly, “feminizing” that makes a difference also requires the high female representation to be across the board (not stuffed into the lower echelons, as research techs in science or gofers in corporations and governments); last but decidedly not least, it requires that X not be devalued in prestige, authority and compensation because it is XX-heavy (math in Japan, partly because during the shogunate merchants were classified as below peasants, and samurai did not soil themselves with money affairs: their wives handled all that, hence no prestige was attached to numbers; medicine in the USSR: most doctors were women, and the perks and pay scale of the profession were low).<\/p>\n

    Yet another characteristic of the questionnaire is conflation of cause and effect. As one example, everyone knows that many more women should have won Nobels but they were pushed aside by ambitious men with influential mentors and devoted wives. Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Chien-Shiung Wu, Jocelyn Bell, Lynn Margulis, Jane Goodall, Susan Berget \u2013 to name just the very tip of the iceberg. Additionally, intelligence is far more complex than the isolated genius clich\u00e9 propagated by the IEET questionnaire. As for idiotic suggestions by evopsychos — as a representative example, the contention that men bequeath genes “for brain size” from the Y chromosome, thereby making men routinely more intelligent than women: beyond contributions to spermatogenesis, the next major function determined by Y-linked genes is ear hair.<\/p>\n

    Here\u2019s another example of muddled causation:\u00a0 when women see that most men who sign up for cryonic preservation share the physical and emotional attributes of the male cast in The Big Bang Theory<\/em>, no wonder they\u2019re electing not to join these men in their thermos jar dreams \u2013 or in eternal post-rupture bliss (cryonics\u2019 current zero chance of success strictly aside).<\/p>\n

    I could go on at considerable length but I won\u2019t beat up on the questionnaire too much: it did try to include sciency questions, basic and unfocused as they were. Some of the questions amused me in a sad way, making me conclude that the movement might best be dubbed \u201ctranshumorism\u201d. Nevertheless, the concerns mirrored in it do not bode well for the future of humanity. In the end, we will get the fate we deserve as a species. But I\u2019ll say this much: feminism will become irrelevant when questionnaires like this become irrelevant.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

    Images: <\/strong>1st, the cast of The Big Bang Theory<\/em> (as well as an encapsulation of the dynamics); 2nd, self-explanatory; 3rd, the sex dolls of First Androids.
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    From 2008 to 2009 I was a fellow (gratis) of the Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technology. IEET is the public face of a non-libertarian branch of transhumanism that considers itself left-leaning progressive \u2013 by US standards, that is. In 2009 I left IEET, because the willful ignorance of biology and the evopsycho blather got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}