This is an edited transcript of Kathleen Richardson’s speech in the afternoon session at the ‘Students for sale: Tools for resistance’ conference, held in London on 15 October 2022. You can watch the recording on YouTube. Kathleen’s speech starts at 1:13:52.
It’s been a real honour today to be a witness to all these testimonies that we’ve heard. It is important to create spaces like this where these kinds of testimonies can be shared. It’s very powerful – so thank you to everyone who has shared today.
I’m going to switch register slightly. I’m the last talk of the day and I am an academic, I’m afraid! I am going to argue for the end of sex robots. I want to problematise the use of the term ‘sex’ that is associated with them and push back against attempts to dilute the meaning of ‘sex’ to include anything.
Initially I considered a better description for these objects to be masturbation robots but, as I will argue, they function as a form of pornography, making them porn robots – pornographic representations of women and girls.
It is a mistake to attribute sex to them as objects and the arguments I set out in this talk also apply to porn dolls, which are also called sex dolls. Porn doll producers regularly pass off their objects as robots in their social media advertising to elaborate more porn in them. It is the porn doll companies that are at the forefront of producing a market-ready version of a porn robot.
In order to make sense of why these objects are porn, this talk provides a critical examination of what porn is, exploring how it functions as a cultural tool to reinforce and maintain the structure of sex inequality, and male domination and female subordination.
Since the porn wars in the 1960s to 1980s, porn has had legal protection and exists as ‘free speech’. By reconsidering the marginalised feminist literature that warned of its harms, I will show how decriminalisation of it has reshaped culture and society in different ways.
Men and boys, and I’m glad we’ve got you (Michael Conway) here, are also impacted.
A third of young people have seen porn by the age of 12 years old and they’re impacted in different ways – men and boys, women and girls. I will argue that the abolition of porn is an ethically desirable goal for both sexes.
I am founder of the Campaign Against Porn Robots (formerly the Campaign Against Sex Robots). I write from the experience of feeling like David tasked with the challenge of taking on Goliath, as many of the ethical arguments to justify them mimic the defence of pornography and the prostitution industries.
There are a lot of academics now who are trying to normalise these objects: they’re writing more texts to do with the normalisation of these objects in our world. I consider this as a form of ‘ethics washing’ – which goes on in prostitution, quite extensively. ‘Ethics washing’ is when ethical narratives are used in the service of rationalising harmful agendas.
As I’m a professor of ethics, I want us to also consider, perhaps as an activity for any of you who are interested, how we might start to write our own ethics protocol around these practices and our own ethical guidelines about how we might think of the harms of porn and prostitution and its subsequent effects.
Before I get started, I need to set the scene a little bit. I’ve coined a term, which I call ‘representational technologies of the human’. It’s a concept and phrase I’ve developed as a result of studying robots and artificial intelligence over the last 20 years.
It’s a nemesis-inspired idea which clusters together objects that are derived from mimicry, imitation and representation of human experience and existence. As objects they mimic a range of things. They mimic representations of women and girls and men and boys, in different kinds of ways.
Representational technologies of the human is an umbrella term that I use. It includes things like porn robots, porn dolls and deep fakes – all kinds of representational entities that are now in our digital and technological spaces.
A representational object represents something, so through this talk I want to get at what’s being represented in these objects.
My definition of a robot might be helpful at this point because I see a robot as an image printed on a surface; the image of a porn robot is a porn image of a woman printed on a surface. That surface often has three dimensions to it but sometimes it can have two dimensions. It’s also elaborated with computation and engineering.
Porn robots provide evidence that they require a surplus of fiction, which is why we have television dramas such as Westworld, Stepford Wives and Blade Runner, that feature actresses playing the role of fictional anthropomorphic female robots. They are reduced, in the current literature and the current narratives, to these objects.
Every single female figure that was ever featured in this kind of film is now reduced to a sex robot. Representational technologies of the human that mimic men and boys, such as in Terminator, are not figures reduced to their sex or a penetrable object for men’s pleasure.
I would say that nearly every representational technology that has been produced in this society is a pornographic version of a woman or girl. There are very few objects, representational objects, digital avatars, game figures, or narratives about science fiction, where the female is not depicted in some pornographic way.
So, what is porn? The term pornography is derived from two words: graphos – writing, etching, drawing, and porne (spelled p-o-r-n-e).
I’m taking this from Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant insights into this area. She describes pornography as “writing about whores”. That’s her word.
Dworkin writes that porne was the cheapest person in the literal sense in ancient Greece. She was the least regarded and least protected of all women. Clearly an absolute sexual slave. I think very many of the testimonies today describe how this figure still exists in our world, and how she is prostituted each and every day.
There is no such thing as a porne – but it’s a sex class role created by a more powerful class. The kind of roles that men and women have as prostitutes or porne or slaves are social categorisations. The porne, then and now, is the explicit tie between what’s going on in these technological fields and women’s sexual exploitation.
I want to change slightly what Dworkin wrote, and this was suggested by my colleague, Kathleen Lowrey. I wanted to talk about robots as a form of representational technology – as a form of writing about, in Andrea Dworkin’s words, whores – but my colleague said actually a better term for it is writing about the porne. So I consider pornography to be writing about the porne. Writing about the sex slave.
But really, when we’re writing about the porne, we are really writing about the abused. We’re representing the abused. We’re writing about the sexually violated. We’re writing about the prostituted.
This was the powerful finding of radical feminism because in the temporal scheme, the abuse always comes before the writing about it.
Before its projection on surfaces – the graphos – the representation of the abuse – that abuse takes place at the proximate and direct level of experience. What goes on in porn is the sexual abuse of the porne, the human being, typically by a male with more economic and political power.
How is this sexual abuse represented? It is expressed by being captured on the surface of material objects. Porn is transmitted through intermediary surfaces and varies between text, dramatisations, art, photography, film, animations or even robots. These are different kinds of writing about the abuses that are taking place. They are all modes of writing.
If porn robots are basically pornography, if they are forms of writing about the porne, then the presence of porn robots in our world and the normalisation of them is something we should be seriously concerned about.
The link with the past is important. The link between the sex slave and the prostituted woman today is important because in the past they didn’t have technology to write the pornography on – they had pots instead. In their pottery they would depict all these images of citizen males penetrating a woman or raping a boy or carrying out abuse acts on animals, and they would keep these objects. The abuse always took place first – the writing came after the abuse. There’s a really fabulous book about this, called ‘The Reign of the Phallus’, which I won’t go into as I’ve got a lot of examples.
Obviously, with film, the acts of abuse are fixed in time and space. They might take place in the professional world of pornography where there are sets and scripts or it might take place in your bedroom with your male partner who wants to use you as his porne so he can create his own pornography.
There are campaigns, for example, to protect these representational technologies. The way in which people do this is to say these objects are split off from the world and they only exist in the imagination. So a cartoon image of a child being abused is only a representation – it’s only an image. It’s a surface – it’s an image on a surface which doesn’t have any underlying reality. They say that there’s no woman being harmed in porn robots, so they’re not a problem.
But the findings of radical feminist scholars like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin was that the abuse has to take place before it can be written about. So when we see these objects and what they represent in our world, they are telling us each and every day, and we heard it from the testimonies today, that the abuse is taking place. These objects, these technologies, become a way to disseminate this writing about the abuse and then the abuse can be copied and replicated by others who want to imitate the practices within it.
It is contradictory because one set of academics say all these objects are split off – they’re imaginary, therefore they should be unregulated. I call that the split off version of the world.
But there’s another set of academics saying that these objects are real and they’re going to be part of our lives. Men, for example, are going to be able to purchase these objects and they can attribute different personalities to them and isn’t that wonderful because now these men, who would have been lonely, can now have these pornographic objects in their lives. There’s a big campaign to decriminalise their use – including their child abuse forms – representational objects in the form of children.
While porn has its antecedents in enslaved cultures pivoted on sex, class and race inequality and the abuse of children, the widespread presence of porn today is a relatively recent phenomena that can be traced back to the porn wars in the 1960s and 80s.
The harms of porn are so overwhelming – we have literally thousands of studies now that detail the accounts of people in much the same way that we have the testimonies of today.
In the 1950s, magazines like Playboy were the primary means by which pornography was disseminated.
By the 1960s, pornography tapped into the free love movement and rebranded porn as sexual liberation to a new hippie generation and we are still living with that legacy today. The male demand for porn increased and the technologised mass media infrastructure was utilised for its dissemination. The demand for more porn, more availability and more freedom to view the kinds of activities that once were primarily carried out by the citizen class on the slave class can now be open to all. They can be experienced by ordinary men.
Porn was initially regulated by obscenity laws and a push to make it legal in the 1950s and 60s began in earnest.
I’ve been looking quite closely at the Civil Rights Ordinance on pornography because some of the work that underpinned Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin actually informed the development of things like the Nordic Model. They had an interesting proposition because they wanted to introduce an ordinance into society where people, women primarily, could sue the pornographers if they could prove that they’d been harmed by porn. This was a concession at the time but ultimately it wasn’t allowed to stand, despite the fact that it was passed in two municipalities.
Pornography is produced because someone is abused. The abuse takes place. The writing takes place but we as campaigners, we as people who believe in a different kind of politics, we need to be able to write about porn as well to show its harms and that gets us into grey areas.
Recently I was asked to review a paper for a journal called Clinical Ethics. The paper was about objections to ‘minor attracted persons’. Have you heard of that term?
I wrote a response about why the article should not be published in the journal, pointing out this term comes out of the paedophile movement and the child abuse industry. However, the journal went ahead and published the article.
People like me in academia are now coming into contact with theories that justify, particularly around child abuse, the development of child abuse in representational forms and the development of this new kind of language to justify it.
I’m not going to let what that journal did lie. In just the same way that people were letting the Manchester academic masturbating to child abuse imagery lie. I think, as academics, we’ve got to get more comfortable with a bit of bounce – as a I call it – because unfortunately, the erasing of any difference between women and girls and pornography is underway.
I don’t think women are regarded as human beings in technology anymore. Women are basically pornography and they’re measured by how much they approximate to their value and worth [in porn], and academics are using all kinds of ethics-washing practices in order to normalise this status quo.
When you do push back, you get lots of reactions – you get a bounce. Either your work gets rejected or it’s not taken into account. The journal Clinical Ethics let an author use the term ‘minor attracted person’ despite the overwhelming evidence that it is linked to the normalisation of child abuse. Hopefully I’m going to write something about that soon.
But anyway, that’s one of the ways I’m trying to push back.
It’s in the field of technology, it’s a bit left field considering the more humanist stuff but I couldn’t actually write any of my work on technology without this very humanistic dimension – without compassion and empathy and the humanity that has been spoken about today.
We don’t have to produce terrible technologies – we can produce new kinds of writing about women. And I am really taken by Fiona Broadfoot’s passion here. The writing that we want about women is about their intelligence, integrity, foresight and imagination. Not them as holes to be penetrated by new pornographers.
I want to abolish the writing about porne. I wanted to abolish these objects and all these pornographic representations of women and girls and I hope that you will join me in that.
Being an ethics professor, I was contacted recently about a group of pro-sex work academics who want to write a set of guidelines to ethically normalise sex robots. I’ve got a book coming out in December 2022 and you can read more there, but I think we should get together and create a small group and write a set of ethical guidelines around prostitution and why it should be abolished and why the Nordic Model is a good ethical practice.
That’s something that we could do together and I could help support that, so on that note, thank you very much and thank you to the organisers for such an important event.
Watch the recording
Here is the recording of the afternoon session of the ‘Students for sale: Tools for resistance’ conference. Kathleen Richardson’s brilliant contribution starts at 1:13:52.
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