Technosexual Desire For The Mechanical Bride

By on August 7, 2012 in News 9

How does one love something that is not alive? With humanity becoming both ever more socially awkward and more attached to its devices, the quest to invent the perfect synthetic romantic partner will only intensify. Wired on the film The Mechanical Bride and the history of consumerist technosexualism, which goes back further than you may realize:

“Advertising’s ideal woman is a fragmented body of replaceable parts, whose origin is the assembly-line logic of consumer capitalism,” said de Fren, a professor of media culture at Occidental College who honed her robotics chops in Paul Allen‘s future-tech think-tanks. “The RealDoll is the culmination of that kind of logic. It’s ordered in the exact same way as a car, with detailed customization including head and body type, hair and eye color, breast size and lips.”

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  • dubbydubs

    I’m creeped out.

  • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

    As creepy as it is sickly interesting, oh how fun it would be dissecting the minds of this culture.

    • Calypso_1

      I’d be most interested in knowing correlations between such individuals and those who have similar desires of control with biological humans, be they living or non, and whether this could be used in a therapeutic capacity to assuage their deviancy.

      • Anarchy Pony

        I don’t know, I think it would likely exacerbate the problem, causing a positive reinforcement loop. Culture affecting technology, technology reinforcing culture.

        • Calypso_1

          Ironically, while looking at your reply in Disqus, I was scanning the news headlines and saw in the same column ‘Naked Lady Gaga Making Out With Boyfriend in Water’ & ‘Girl Rescued from Water while Clutching Corpse’

          Sometimes I think the emerging Net-AI has a very fine sense of humor.  

          I understand what you mean about the positive reinforcement.  As a downside, certainly this might be the case if technosex was self-initiated & did act as substitute for some serious issues.  But I was thinking in a controlled milieu with (hopefully) rare cases.  Positive reinforcement with a surrogate would be a good thing to the extent that it removed a real victim from the act and allowed the patient to deconstruct and explore something, while beginning to integrate boundaries and healthy forms of real social interaction with therapeutic assistance.

          • Anarchy Pony

            Well there’s much broader implications beyond the proverbial technosexuality, my meaning being that the society as a whole creates technology that reinforces the society itself, in that the culture of isolation, suspicion, greed, consumerism, and so forth, does not end up creating technology to liberate itself and eliminate such self-destructive aspects as is seemingly assumed by techno-utopians, it actually creates technology that increases isolation, while simultaneously managing to eliminate or at least diminish privacy and intimacy, and certainly to increase exploitation and domination. I was pondering this in the bathroom earlier today. It’s just a sort of vague and broad notion at this point, but I think that it has been posited before by others. 

  • Server

    All I can think of is Krieger’s wife from “Archer”. The future will be grand.

  • http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

    The Mechanical Bride is an obvious nod to McLuhan
    and his first book with the same title
    in which he dissected advertising for its subliminal influences

    McLuhan’s later works explores the coming cyborg age
    where mediums (electro-androids) do the massaging

    the day of equal rights and marriage
    for human & android couples is not that far away