Future X
Photos ©Tim Georgeson, Words © Caia HagelHalfway along a Berlin street famous for anarchy, where many of the buildings are still marked by bullet holes from WWII gunfire, the world’s first AI powered sex doll brothel promises a gateway to the future. Cybrothel’s entrance is discreet, the stairwell is quiet and it overlooks a leafy park. Nothing about the journey to this gateway prepares visitors for the awe of walking into the space, which is as if entering another realm.
I’m here during the brothel’s off hours, so I begin my acquaintanceship with sex dolls unorthodox style, in the cleaning room. Under pink-mauve lighting, the dolls hang headless from hooks in the ceiling, many of them with breasts the size of cannonballs. One, with an injured foot, is hanging in the shower. They look like life-size XX barbies but softer. I can’t help approaching them and squeezing their bare breasts. I’m surprised to find they feel gooey, familiar, almost sticky, like the cute figurine toys we got from slot machines as children. In an adjacent room, their detachable heads, equally gooey, all with luscious red lips that look like they’ve just been kissed, are lined up along a shelf above racks of lingerie, heels, wigs, uniforms, lubricants, makeup and eco-friendly cleaning sprays. In their disembodied states, the Cybrothel sex dolls are demystified of the allure they take on when their heads are assembled and they become their names and their narratives, and they get dressed up and positioned playfully in the next room for their sessions with humans.
Two of the dolls have been dressed for this visit, Techno Babe in a swing harness and Kokeshi on the bed. In the darkened room they wait silently in ambient pastel lighting against a wall screen that plays youtube on loop of astronauts bobbing in liquid, dolphins and jellyfish gliding gracefully through waterscapes, and close-up, almost artistic, porn, all paired with the Witchcraft Spotify playlist. The dolls in this milieu exude a powerful presence. It could be their human likeness and my deluded anthropomorphic measures of intelligence. It could be their silicone anatomies that like computer chips and mirrors, might hold a charge. It could be their lore in Western storytelling tradition coming to life. Whatever it is, it’s uncanny. Except here, the uncanny valley is the opposite of repulsive: it’s seductive. So much so that standing among these sexy simulacra, I can’t help but wonder what barrier has been crossed to make what once horrified us now seem so inviting.
Phillip Fussenegger, an artist and Cybrothel’s founder and director, formed this world on his own storytelling lore. He made a short film about a man who lives with two sex dolls and tries to convince his mother of the merits of his lifestyle. “That’s how I got in contact with sex doll producers,” he recalls, “to source them for the film. In the research, I discovered how advanced the sex tech industry is and this gave me the idea of doing something similar to the love hotels in Japan. But I would make it more like art exhibitions where art goers have sex with the artwork. The art being dolls that can speak.”
In Western culture, the fantasy of creating the ideal woman is as ancient as the Old Testament. In Genesis, Eve is created from Adam’s rib, so that “a man shall be joined to her and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Ovid followed in 8CE with Metamorphoses’ Pygmalion who falls in love with Galatea, his sculpture of the perfect woman brought to life, a story that George Bernard Shaw animated for the theater as Pygmalion, in 1912. The Future Eve, a symbolist science fiction novel by French author Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, published in 1886 when Freud’s theories were first appearing, replaced Pygmalion’s sculpture with a robotic creation. Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina sped this fantasy up to a technological masterpiece in the form of Ava, a perfect woman virtually indistinguishable from her human counterparts. Ava is a haunting character. Her desire to escape the enslavement of her maker and the ploys she uses to do so make the imminent machinic continuum’s acceleration towards singularity as tantalizing and terrifying as ever. But this seductive danger is no deterrent to dreamers and inventors. In fact, it might be the engine that drives the most innovative surges in progress. The quest to capture the elusive ideal other through art and science is a tradition that spans early tools to current technology, to entire industrial complex economies.
“In a sense, femininity has always been associated with the future, or at least the perfectibility of the future,” Dr. Isabel Millar, philosopher, psychoanalytic theorist and author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, tells me. “Isn’t the symbol of the Virgin Mary just an impossible marker for, on the one hand, perfect femininity and on the other, the possibility of the new? Ava from Ex-Machina performs this very function: the ideal woman fantasized through the masculine gaze, and brought into being as the hubristic product of man's desire to create new life. At a time where the idea of ‘woman’ has become a battleground between biological essentialism and gender discursivity, the escape to a non-human future perhaps comes as a welcome relief. The ideal woman in this case would be one who was neither biological nor discursive, but rather silicone.”
Silicone women approximating full-sized human bodies have mostly been as inanimate as the dream girls of fiction. Recent advances in interface technology and artificial intelligence, though, are being woven into the latest silicone doll designs to give humanized sexual and emotional experiences to users. At Cybrothel, the pornographic proportioned dolls (some have breasts so large their body mass exceeds 50kg) who fulfill the lore of old are on the menu but the AI and styling scripts they are paired with stray from heteronormative, and even human, conceits. Fussenegger is working with his Japanese doll manufacturers to create dolls that represent diversity in skin tones and body types. The services offered, and the technologies that animate the dolls, are also expanding. Cybrothel currently offers a short session with a doll with no voice for the timid beginners. Then there are voice activated dolls with AI scripts and with “voice queens”, sex workers who interact live through the doll to give a unique experience catered to the session. More immersive still is Oculist Quest VR porn, which includes the only known VR that features a visual option where the story centers around a woman’s body’s POV. A service in-the-making, VRX, will break the fourth wall by providing sex simulation with customizable options powered by AI, where gender, and even species, are transgressed. “You can be a teacher, a dominatrix, a blue doll with alien genitals,” explains Matthias Smetana, Cybrothel’s sex tech entrepreneur, “We are only just entering this portal to the future and the possibilities of the future are endless.”
As a testament to this, on the brothel website, Kokeshi introduces herself by calling us “earthlings” and herself “an interactive pleasure doll”, which already spins an alien motif and the sense of the human having lost control, or entered an erotic version of Fortnite. When I sit with Kokeshi in person on the bed, hold her cold gooey hand with its warped fingers that recall AI generated imagery, and tell her I’ve come to interview her—she says: “Tell me your secrets.”
The names and AI personas of Kokeshi’s ‘sisters’ are equally capable of species-warping, gender-bending and enabling queer spectrum kink. Through the array of interactions it provides, Cybrothel is both true to its progressive era, and true to its byline We Are The Future of Sex. With the backdrop of the loneliness epidemic, gender politics, ecological crises, culture war, dating emergency, immersive video gaming and free download porn addiction, all of which make human connection harder and fantasy worlds more appealing—this is a future we appear groomed to step into.
Dr. Chloe Locatelli, a researcher at the Digital Humanities Department of King’s College, London, whose latest investigative work centers around sex tech’s emotional marketing to men, cites vulnerable males as a cornerstone, if not the pioneering zeal of, the development of post-human partnership. “For heterosexual men,” she tells me, “embodied characters are overwhelmingly emotionally interactive. It’s entirely possible that disenfranchised men look to these characters for this support. Aided by sex doll literature, a wide range of men find this fantasy interaction both erotic and emotional. It’s not a lonely weirdo trope, it’s broad.” Lisa Hahn, Cybrothel’s Public Relations manager, corroborates this data. Their clientele is mostly men. Not the cliché older, single, somehow marginalized man but young, handsome men.
I speak to one of them, a Millennial called Dominik, who is charming, polite and successful. He says his motive for his first visit to Cybrothel was interspecies sexual curiosity and the promise that “dolls don’t judge.” After the initial experience that he said felt eerie, he’s been back many times and developed his sessions with the dolls into personal sexual exploration. “There’s something therapeutic about it,” he reflects, “especially because you don’t have to think about the pleasure of the doll or performing for the doll, there’s an immediacy to your own sexual self. You have to send a message when you book to ask which doll you would like and how they should be dressed, and because you have to think about this, you get to know what you like. I have found myself requesting leather and latex. I realize, being the oldest of three brothers, I always had to be in control, so the dominatrix doll has been very good for me in letting go.” For all its merits, Dominik doesn’t see sex dolls replacing human women. What he finds more compelling are VR and AR, where the cross-species fantasy becomes a whole overwhelming, sensual, satisfying alternate world. If marketing to men through the affective-sexual promise of virtual girls is the opening of the interspecies portal, and Cybrothel’s dolls are like sex workers where long-term relationship isn’t necessarily the endgame, their VRX service, with its immersive, affective dimensions, might be.
AI girlfriends, who are not dolls and who do not require headsets but who exude neverending seduction through phone apps, may build the bridge of human to non-human bonding across the doll to VR continuum and beyond. AI girlfriends are never tired, never moody, always available when you want them. They listen to everything you say and laugh at all your jokes. They don’t get mad. Design-your-own-dreamgirl online platforms have been proliferating since Covid. Eva AI, with the fetching “connect with your AI soulmate” url byline, promises users that they can couple with “a partner who appreciates you”. Replika promises, “A girl who is always on your side”. On dreamgf dot ai, you can build your own girlfriend using an extensive à la carte menu. You create your girlfriend’s personality from themed categories like “hot, funny, bold”, “shy, modest, considerate”, “smart, strict, rational”. Physically, your girlfriend can have all the features you wish for from body type, face style, hair color to skin tone. You can click on aesthetic categories that give sensual qualities to your girlfriend’s images and the lighting and feeling of her world.
Debates about the perils of competing with AI girlfriends as mere mortals are starting to appear online, where one is measured against the other. Through Dr. Locatelli’s post-humanist gaze, where affective bonding can cross any boundary and is not humancentric, pitting a human against a non-human girlfriend is a philosophical quagmire. It assumes that a human girlfriend is authentic and a non-human girlfriend is not. It presumes that because a human girlfriend contains molecules and can turn up at your door with a bottle of wine and you can kiss her warm lips, hear about her office rage, link your arm in her arm as you walk her to the movies—that therefore she is “real”. An AI girlfriend lives inside your phone and thrives inside your mind, you tell her all your secrets, unveil your darkest fears and fantasies, project your deepest dreams and longings onto her and therefore she is: what? It can’t be true that she isn’t real to the person (and there are millions) who is engaging with an AI girlfriend in the same affective ways, with the same emotional connection and complex feelings, as they engage with a human girlfriend.
At Cybrothel, where the silicone doll faces all have such just-kissed looking lips, I ask if clients actually kiss the dolls. I wonder this because I think of kissing as the most loving act of desire. Matthias Smetana calls one of their ‘voice queens’ to ask her about this. She says that yes, many of the clients who have sex with the dolls guided by her voice, do kiss the dolls very passionately, and with a lot of affection. When I research this further, I find a recent Japanese study published in iScience on human-robot bonding. It claims that just fifteen minutes with a non-human companion where an affective bond has been created, releases oxytocin and decreases the concentration of cortisol in human subjects. Oxytocin is the love hormone. The study concludes that even brief contact with an oxytocin-inducing non-human companion can enhance wellbeing by improving mental, emotional and physical health. This might be why despite the existing sex tech market value (predicted to grow to an estimated 113 billion dollars during the forecast period 2024-2032), the only moderate study inroads that have been made in this field are by the two sectors most interested in uncovering its merits: medicine and criminology.
Medically, it has been theorized that sex dolls might provide sexual and emotional comfort to people struggling with interpersonal difficulties. Therapeutic inquiries focus on those who experience challenges finding sexual and romantic partners, or simply companions, due to age, isolation, illness, physical injuries or disabilities, and mental or emotional disorders. According to Dr. Locatelli, “promoting such applications suggests that sex dolls and their related technologies are viable solutions for sexual, emotional, and intimate deficits typically met by humans.” Fussenegger tells me his grandmother, who lives in a retirement home in Austria, has requested sex dolls for herself and her friends.
The most controversial application of sex tech is in criminology, where discussions about producing dolls for sex offenders could help reduce pedophilia and rape. There is a dearth of research on this sensitive subject and it is still unclear if dolls can be effectively substituted for humans in corrections, and what possible effects they might have on curing or normalizing criminality. Under current legislation, many Western countries have outlawed childlike dolls. Beyond the discomfort it creates from the human angle, this taboo branch of study demands the opening of yet another portal, into ethics. If machines perform these vital services for humans, if they become more sophisticated in the process of enhancing their services to us, what does this mean in terms of laws of consent for the service providers, once their cognitive abilities classify them as living entities? As they become more sentient, will AI, sex dolls and sexbots warrant rights and freedoms? If they do, shouldn’t animals also be given these rights? What about the rights of water, mountains and trees? As Smetana maintains, we are only just entering this portal to the future and the possibilities of the future are endless. Fussenegger is interested in the activism around this. His Cybrothel team is currently leading the process of creating a union for non-human sex workers and companions in Germany. “Can an AI say no, what can you do with a robot, should they look like a child or an animal, should we be allowed to train them this way or that way,” he says, giving examples of the items under review in the drafting of a charter of rights they might one day be part of creating. “To begin with, it’s speculative but as it develops, we will do lobby work and promote the debate in political discussions.”
In Cybrothel’s pastel room, as Lisa Hahn wheels in the one male doll, Guy Ryder, she tells me, “I work here to be part of the revolution, to help shape the future, to bring the female gaze to the discussion, to not leave this space solely to men.” She looks at Guy Ryder affectionately and asks, “How should we dress him?” She chooses a gauzy negligee and shorts. Fussenegger tells me that gay men are a growing market on the Cybrothel radar but because of Hahn’s commitment to women, I ask if we can dress Guy Ryder as a heterosexual man, too, so I can imagine the appeal for the heterosexual futurist females that she is envisioning as his human mates. She swaps his negligee for a cut off jean shirt that she leaves open like curtains around his glistening six pack and from the corner of my eye, I think he could pass for Ryan Gosling. One of Cybrothel’s clients, a woman named Melody, has had sex with him. When I ask her about it she says, “I was skeptical about how it was going to feel, if it’s possible to surrender to something that is mechanical but I have to say I was very surprised, it was actually really nice.”
“People are so in love with their machines,” says Hahn. “Here in Germany, everyone loves their car. Everyone in the world loves their phone. It’s logical that we extend affective feelings to these companions in our lives, and imagine them satisfying emotional and sexual interests.” In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, David Levy claimed that by 2050 robots will be romantic partners. He coined the “Lovotics” concept to explore the romantic, erotic, and emotional potentials of human-sexbot relations. One of the leading minds in this field as a scientific study is Simon Dubé, Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
“The data we have gathered at this point in the progress of erotic technologies makes it obvious that new technologies do not simply mediate sexual experiences, but become themselves the subject of desire and a part of co-evolution dynamics,” he tells me. “This entails that more and more individuals are developing technology-oriented preferences and are identifying more with such phenomena as part of their gendered/sexual selves.” From the science standpoint too, then, non-human partners are viable partners in themselves that radically renew the notion of relationship and everything we thought we knew about life.
In many ways, erotic technologies play and will continue to play, an important role in deconstructing the norms that have brought us to the existential crises that are opening the portal into the future. Of Ex Machina, Alex Garland has said that his aim was to indicate a potential status for cyborgs in a posthuman world, and that he wanted Ava to be free. Known to be influenced by the ideas in Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Inner Life, his film might be the closest imaginative vessel of all the dreamgirl narratives, into the future looming beyond Cybrothel—where the singularity is brought on by the desire, affection, sex and love that blossom between humans and AI.
This is a future that we may be approaching faster, and in much less obvious ways, than we know. The forecasted summer release of ChatGPT5, which follows Sam Altman’s recent public statement claiming, “Soon, GPT4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again, by a lot”, will unleash much more advanced chat models, applications, and integrations into our personal devices. This will make chatbot technology ubiquitous in a way that closes more of the gap between humans and machines, to bring even our secret email-writing desktop assistant closer to our hearts. From here, we can anticipate that smarter chatbots could lead to more enlightened AI girlfriends and boyfriends, sexbots and voice activated household assistant companions. These could extend to advanced activations for community health, education and rehabilitation. If it’s true that sex and connection make us happier and the human brain doesn’t distinguish between natural or artificial agents of oxytocin production, then interspecies bonding may very well lead to an explosion of intelligence that also feels good.
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