What To Read

Jeanette Winterson, known for her unconventional novels like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body and Frankissstein came out with an essay collection last year that imagines our future living in a world inundated with advanced AI. Now out in paperback, 12 Bytes is an especially timely read for its provocations on how the AI boom is shaping humanity.

Read an excerpt of the book below.

From Zone 3, Hot for a Bot

In Europe, China and Japan, there is more of a focus on renting dolls to take to hotels, or using them in what is, I suppose, a brothel. In Paris, there’s a sex-doll hotel that’s registered as a game centre, because brothels are illegal in France, and in theory, as a doll isn’t alive, it can’t be a sex worker, and so a collection of dolls can’t be said to be working in a brothel. LumiDolls opened a sex centre in Barcelona using only synthetic females, and has since pushed out, or pushed in – I am not sure what the correct term is here – to other parts of the world.

LumiDolls are intending to set up a global franchise model – on the lines of Ron Lord’s X-Babes, a fantasy I wrote into my 2019 novel Frankisstein: A Love Story . Why not go the whole Ron, and partner with car-hire companies at airports so that businessmen can collect their doll on the way to the hotel?

Dolls have fantastic leg-spread range. They can be folded up like a Brompton bicycle. Presumably they could come with their own discreet travel bag? We’re not all extroverts.

And if sex dolls are used instead of real live sex workers? Is that ‘better’? What do we mean by ‘better’? Better for the ex-sex workers? Better for the partners of some of the men who like Away Days?

Is sex with a doll cheating on your partner?

One of the saddest paradoxes of long-term relationships is that often one partner wants sex while the other doesn’t. The one who doesn’t will usually be the one asking for a separation if the one who does gets it elsewhere.

Why should a relationship that is no longer sexual end because of sex?

Perhaps Matt McMullen is right: get a love doll. The doll-in-the-house scenario could be one solution to the constraints of monogamy. If your partner will accept it, then there will be no blackmail, no extra expense, no divorce, and the man gets the extra sex he says he wants. The woman of the house might be relieved that she no longer has to service her pestering husband.

Whether this will improve, or further undermine, the relationship is unclear. A doll with an AI function can be programmed to reassure the wife that she is no threat. Perhaps they will become friends? As someone who came of age in the gay subculture of the 1980s, I know how important it is to challenge norms around sex and assumptions around relationships. Sex in a committed relationship is not the only place for sex, nor the ‘better’ place for sex.

Monogamy is not right for everyone. It may not be right for anyone – at least not for the whole course of a long life. Interference of religious teaching, as well as social oppression designed to keep women at bay sexually, and confined within the home, make it hard for any of us to read our own desires, or to make moral decisions based on anything other than rules from another era.

This isn’t a call for a permissive manifesto – it’s a call for honesty…

“Hot for a Bot” is excerpted from 12 BYTES © 2021 by Jeanette Winterson. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.