Inhumanity and Sexbots: On Incestuous Relations with Sexbots

Abstract

British multimedia artist K. Davis has joined the campaign against sexbots initiated in 2015 by K. Richardson and E. Billing in the project Logging on to Love. Using photography, video, and sound design, she draws attention to how sexbots rearticulate thewidespread treatment of humans as objects and underlines the commodification of sex. For Davis, sexbots in this sense are not simply human products, but anti-humanist tools. On the other hand, sexbot creators and their proponents argue that sexbots can aid people in their occasional loneliness, but also in reducing the sex trade or becoming an effective therapeutic tool. Therefore, sexbots are a controversy creating boundaries between humanity and inhumanity. By examining these differences, I argue in this paper that being human or inhuman in relation to sexbots can only be fully understood with regard to incest, which can contribute to understanding sexbots in a more symmetrical sense than the one offered by their critics and defenders.