Robotic Dogs For Shut-Ins And Virtual Women - The Allure Of The Fantastical And Unreal

A number of years ago a French friend, Emmanuel de Longueville Bourbon, an aristocrat from one of the country's finest families, a Viscount, resident of a magnificent 14th century chateau in the Auvergne, and a well-known historian, told me about his fascination with poupées gonflables, inflatable, life size sex dolls, anatomically correct and made to order according to customer taste and preference.  

While he had not purchased one, he had visited Le Sex Shop, a small store in Belleville owned and managed by an unlikely couple from la France profonde, an older gentleman and his demure wife who by rights should have been scything and plowing, but who had the foresight and entrepreneurial spirit to become small business owners in an up-and-coming trendy neighborhood of Paris. 

The rent was affordable, the product Chinese and inexpensive, and the demand high.  At first it was the tony crowd from the 7th who bought dildoes and leather ironically to decorate and show off their retro-revolutionary tastes; but then more serious customers for whom the old traditions of la fille ainee de l'Eglise - cinq-a-sept liaisons, mistresses, and cool sexual secrecy - felt outmoded.  

These men looked to San Francisco and the Folsom Street Fair, an open air sexual cavalcade where every sexual desire was met with satisfaction.  Before long Le Sex Shop was doing a land office business. 

It was with the wholesale purchase of poupées gonflables from Thailand that the business took off. The owners bought the property next door, appointed it with kitsch modern irony and heavily sexed accoutrements and placed the best-made dolls as showpieces, the jewels in the crown of sex paraphernalia.  

In those days, explained my aristocratic friend, made-to-order was in its infancy.  Special orders could be placed, and the Bangkok factories could indeed reconfigure enough to offer a modicum of diversity, but the selection was limited - sloe-eyed Thai women, sylph-like Scandinavians, and busty, caramel-colored Fulani and not much more. 

 

My friend was fascinated by the phenomenon.  Would the customers for inflatable women be loners, sad sacks, of marginal interest to any woman? Would they be traditional self-pleasurers who simply wanted to add a more palpable dimension to their act? Or might they be true fantasists, men for whom imagination was more than enough to endow the plastic dolls with spirit and sexual energy? Men who wanted women, had the occasional real one, but were far more at home in a created world of sexual fantasy?

Emmanuel was well known to the owners of the shop - they had been serfs in the old days of his ancestors in Auvergne and their descendants had maintained a dutiful and respectful friendship with the family.  When he asked them if he could observe the trade and try to answer some questions about demographic distribution and type of purchase, they readily agreed and accepted a generous gift to help them restore the outbuildings of their farm. 

Emmanuel was surprised at the eclectic mix of customers - all white, respectable Parisians, but from every arrondissement, family background, and profession.  There were no Africans - true to form they were regular Lotharios whose sexual energies beggared those of any white European and so without need for anything but the real thing. 'Getting their rocks off' daily was the crude American way of putting it; but for all the rest, especially Algerians who, unable to afford multiple wives and having been taught about the sexual plague attendant upon white prostitutes, turned to plastic. 

The owners were not entirely happy having to deal with this class of unwanted immigrants, so built a back room, decorated it like a pasha's harem, and received them with tea, hookahs, and lovely saleswomen. 

Emmanuel never got any real answers except that there was definitely a demand for what would later be known as virtual reality; and as the market became more and more sophisticated and the dolls more and more lifelike and tailor-made, demand increased. 

Many years went by.  The owners of Le Sex Shop retired, and Emmanuel repaired to his chateau; but he never lost his interest in artificial sex.  From his reading of Freud and especially the French neuro-psychologists LeBrun and Matrice he knew that fantasy was at the heart of sexual satisfaction.  As much as normal, healthy males delighted in their assignations, their real pleasure was satisfying deep-seated, persistent sexual fantasies; and now that virtual reality was a real, purchasable commodity, the market for fantasy sex would be unlimited. 

In a virtual world in which brain-computer interface is seamless, dreams, fantasies, and hidden desires become real.  The distinction between 'reality' and virtual reality disappears.  Sex with La Duchesse de Nantes in the Palais de Versailles is not only possible but attainable, configured with the right music, scent, and views. 

 

Even now in virtual reality's embryonic phase, men strap on goggles and headwear, click on the fantasy they prefer, and travel for an hour in marvelously embroidered sexual affairs.  Soon the interface will be solely electronic and the new world of unreality will become the norm. 

Which led Emmanuel to robotic dogs.  The District of Columbia city council, concerned about the welfare of its senior citizens, many of them shut-ins in desperate public housing estates, earmarked a substantial sum for robotic dogs, companions to these poor, lonely Washingtonians.  Thanks to revolutionary advances in lifelike design, the dogs would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.  

Artificially intelligent programs would enable them to come when called, sit up, roll over, and fetch.  Their anatomy would be lifelike, and only minimal maintenance (water to assure wet noses and tongues) would be required. They of course would be clean and odor free. 

Despite his years of studying virtuality, Emmanuel was nonplussed.  The dissolution of perception was incredible.  The old folks gave them water and 'food', played with them, walked them around their apartments, talked to them, and loved them as though they were real.

When years ago long before virtuality reality and artificial intelligence were even imagined, Emmanuel had written his first treatise on the virtues of an 'unreal world', and how we would quickly and easily abjure any notion of bricks and mortar for the unlimited, indescribable world of fantastical invention.  We would all be happy living in a virtual world, happier than we ever had been thanks to the satisfaction of every desire, wish, and dream. 

He had been roundly criticized and laughed at. There could be no replacing a real pot au feu, Brigitte Bardot, or a Mouton Rothschild '68.  Taste, feel, smell were part and parcel of the human experience and could never be only figments of the imagination or tantalizing bits of virtuality. 

Of course Emmanuel was as right as rain.  Powerful AI tools, the explosive advances in artificial reality, and the imminent complete electronic interface between mind and computer, assured the coming of a universal virtual world. 

Woody Allen in his early movie Sleeper a comedy about time travelers to a distant future, created giant chickens and celery and robotic dogs.  'Arf, arf', barked the electronic dog as it grabbed our hero's pant leg.  Such impossibilities are not that farfetched, said Allen who when asked to comment on the DC robotic dogs, only said "Arf, arf" in his now familiar New York Jewish accent, waved, and sat down at Katz's for a pastrami on rye.