 And there was some history in the past couple of years of that happening, of people's smart sex toys being hacked. Intense sexual love. In some sense, and that's why I like it, you know, in what sense it is even. I think it's really unfortunate that people use porn as a source of sex education, as a performer. It's pure fantasy. What we're really talking about is an idea of agency. A, I know we keep looking backwards, but we've all moved on from Freud and even from some of his descendants, hopefully. And B, when we are talking about sex, all of the acts, whether this oral sex, anal sex, group sex, all of those things have existed since antiquity. So we're not suddenly coming to liberation. We are returning to the idea that humans own their bodies that can choose what to do with them with each other. Because fundamentally, the idea of sexual liberation was really us breaking away from Victorian era norms and beyond that constructed a false cage of respectability for women to sit in, for the most part. And then said, oh, well, you know, we liked hiding our dirt, but now we want it to be public again, but also we're uncomfortable with breaking away from these norms. The largest amount of porn produced in the Victorian era included all of the acts that Freud said were deserving and unnecessary. Perhaps he was just approved, but the rest of us can make a choice every day in every way for what we want to do because sexual agency is what matters. Not the false construct of liberation or repression. I can't repress Olivia, I think. Well, you can't repress me. Well, I have to say something really important because you keep saying, oh my goodness, I'm going back, we've grown up, we've grown up. I think they were so much wiser, two and a half thousand years. I disagree. What they said was that pleasure, pleasure, including sexual pleasure was practically the opposite of genuine happiness. And I think happiness is what we're losing now. We don't know how to be happy. We think it's to do with with sex and pleasure or eating. It's not. It's what we do. No, it's about even making a garden or bringing up a family or singing or making a picture. It's about it's about playing a piano really well. In fact, real happiness involves a lot of unhappiness because you struggle. It's doing what we human beings do best. No, that's survival. That's not nothing to do with happiness or any other emotion. Survival is sad. Survival is sad. But let's go for civilization. Let's go for this. Olivia, humans absolutely can choose what makes them happy on an individual and a structural level without it necessarily being tied to sex or lack thereof of sex. You may or may not approve of the fact that some people both enjoy sex and gardens. But that really has nothing to do with anyone else. This is Harmony. Harmony is motionless from the neck down. She's just a doll from the neck down. From the head up she has some animatronics so she can move her face. She can smile, turn her head slightly and blink. And she speaks. She has an artificial intelligence personality. That's interesting. It's a standalone personality so you don't have to have her and the personality integrated into the doll. You can carry it around with you on your phone or your tablet and have conversations with her. But it's essentially just quite a sophisticated chatbot. So sex robots have been in the headlines for a while, but then that's the only one that's gone out there. So what's all the fuss been about? Well, this one on the left, this true companion, that's what they say it's going to look like on the top left. This is what it actually looked like when it was unveiled at a trade show. There is a big difference. This one is particularly interesting because this has been on the headlines for years and yet no one's ever seen one other than that model. Now the guy who makes them says that he's got thousands of orders, but we've never seen anyone admit that they've got one. And in that kind of community you'd usually hear someone talk about it. So I'm a little skeptical about whether or not this exists. Don't think it really does. In the top right, sorry, is an engineer called Sergei Santos who has invented a sex robot called Samantha. Samantha's been on the news because it was reported a few months ago that she was mauled, was the word that was used at a trade show. And there were lots of headlines about this sex robot has been attacked, sexually assaulted, raped at a trade show. I thought this sounded a bit weird, so I dug into that story and then I talked to Sergei as well. And essentially what happened was he put the robot on display at a trade show and said to people, yeah, of course, go ahead, have a touch. It's a delicate object. And so people did. They went and they touched and groped. It wasn't a sexual act. And of course it did get damaged, but not to the extent that the newspaper has made it out to be. Samantha's an interesting robot. He built her. Sergei's not interested in what the doll looks like. He's interested in the mechanics and the AI behind it. So he just used a sex doll's body. He inserted sensors and pressure points so that you could touch, squeeze. That's her squeezing the arm. And she would respond. And he was quite interested in trying to work up a consensual relationship in that you had to approach her in certain ways in order for her to respond. So if you went straight for the breasts, for example, there wouldn't be much reaction. You had to start by stroking and touching arms and things like that. So it was quite an interesting concept. And then we have Harmony, that I just showed you pictures of, the real doll version. And if I can play this video, please. This is Harmony. I think we're going to hear her voice here, unfortunately. But you'll see some of the facial movements. And it's actually fairly subtle. I mean, she's not going to pass for human at all. But it's a pretty subtle thing. She also has a really soft Scottish accent, which is really, really strange when you're in the middle of a hot call at California Sunshine looking at these things. So Harmony was released alongside another model called Solana recently. And they're also, within the past two weeks, a male version has been featured from real doll on the cover of New York Magazine. So the interesting thing is, why are they all in this form? What is this about this hypersexualized female form of the sex dolls? Because I think that's really quite unimaginative. And it doesn't really reflect the way robotics in general is going. And it comes with a whole host of problems, ethical issues, legal issues, all sorts of things that I think we can avoid by doing a very simple thing. I think that we're all probably on this panel agreed that the sort of technology that people are afraid of, something that fully mimics a human woman, Allah, the cult classic Cherry 2000, is not only a long way off, it's not in many, many generations, lifetimes from ours, what computing would have to be able to do. So we can kind of take that idea and set it aside. Because we do have robots that turn back flips and we have robots that when it chess, these are not the same robots and also their intelligence is not generalizable. My washing machine cannot also cook my rice. It can't take what it's learned about by washing and apply that to another problem, which is great news. But quite recently I saw a take in the press that was actually saying sex robots will be great because they will replace sex workers and then no woman has to be abused as a sex worker. Again, obviously I have problems with this as a former sex worker. When you think about, sorry, my cultural touchstones for things like this are Star Trek The Next Generation, we had Mr. Data, who could physically mate, he looked humanoid, he could physically mate with a lot of different species, but he really couldn't give you pillow talk. And if it's just the act of getting somebody to reach orgasm that constituted what sex work is and what sex is, I would not have been that effective an escort because it would just be people turning up. They want the chat, they want the human interaction. When you look at things like they're absolutely horrible but the review boards for escorts, the most cutting thing that a client can say about an escort is that she was robotic. That would kill your career overnight. So it's only ever going to be a minority of people, the love doll people who want a flashlight that talks to them. But if what we're talking about is just reaching orgasm in a way, women have been bridging this gap with Hitachi's imagination for years, but that does very much depend on our own imagination being involved. And really to kind of assume otherwise is to assume that the work of sex while it's a very basic need, it's actually one of the most complex relationships. It's the most complex thing we do. So when people are saying, oh great, we'll have sex robots and we could put the sex industry out of business, it's kind of assuming that what I did as an escort is no more complicated than what Alexa does when you ask her to refill your birdseed order. So overall, you know, sex workers are not, and sex in general is not, to kind of misuse the Rodney Brooks phrase, we are not fast cheap and out of control. Intense sexual love. In some sense, and that's why I like it, it's, you know, in what sense it is evil. It's not this Buddhist smile, I love you all and so on. It's, okay, imagine you are a shappy single man, woman, whatever and you have a relatively satisfied love. You meet with friends, you have a good job, maybe here and there, a one night stand, life is okay. Then you fall passionately with love. It will ruin all your life. And it's precisely the position of I love you. You take a particular human being, no, and basically. The commercialization, the ownership of our sexuality by big business, if you like. It's not new perhaps, perhaps throughout history, you know, sex is sex cells, but the degree to which how we respond to sex is entirely public controlled and commercially controlled seems to me to indicate the death of sex because so much of sex itself, the act, the feelings depend on a certain level of autonomy, choice, but also intimacy. We have the right to keep our sexual cells away from the prying eyes of those who want to make money out of us from social media, from these very dangerous new things that are happening of putting images on social media without consent when they are particularly used by men against women. So what I would really like for us to think about is to what extent intimacy and personal power and choice that we all, or many of us have sexual desire is now entirely stolen from us. And I find that very problematic. I have a young daughter, I have, you know, when I talk to my students that I teach at university and the number of them, and this is really important because I'm of the generation of the 60s and 70s where sexual liberation and the pill supposedly freed us. But what it actually did is what Germaine Greer later came to understand that it made prisoners of us because for men there was no cost, they could just eat, eat meaning have as much sex as they wanted and expected it and demanded it. And we were not cool unless you delivered it. That is even a thousand times worse now. Young women do not feel they have the right to refuse it. They do not feel they have the choice. I have spoken to so many young women who have told me that they do things they don't want to do sexually because that's what's expected culturally. So I think we're in a bad place. You know, I think I'm on this panel to represent not just a male perspective maybe, but also a previous generation, a generation that did not grew up with porn. I mean, we found it, but we had a work to find it, right? You had a work to find it. Real to reals and magazines and things like that. It wasn't just available at a click of a button. It wasn't just everywhere. And of course, no dating apps. So I've never used one. I have no idea how they work. I guess through my kids. But you know, you actually had, as you said, Miriam to muster up the courage to go and ask a girl out. And for all of us, teen years, at least for most of us, teen years are difficult. And doing that was difficult and hard. You know, I'm tempted to say it's easier now that you have apps and you can do it digitally, but I don't really know. I suspect it's always hard, courtship and relationships and finding somebody and figuring out who's right and who's wrong and the fear of being rejected and the building up the confidence. All of that is probably just as difficult today as it was back then and will probably be that in the future. So I don't know to what extent, with regard to dating apps, it's really had an impact. You know, we always, no matter what the issue is, we've always blamed technology. Again, I'm dating myself, but people used to complain bitterly about kids who were growing up watching television all the time and how awful that was making them asocial and undatable and they never left the house and never asked anybody for a date. And you know, those kids survived somehow and they grew up and they did okay. So blaming technology is always an easy out and I suspect it's probably not true. I mean, with regard to porn, I think the two aspects of porn, there is a certain fantasy, but there's also an element of education, again, coming from maybe a generation where we didn't know much about sex, certainly not kind of the kind of sex that today you can get access to at a fingertip. And there's a sense in which that was not very good. And there's a sense in which porn educates us a little bit about, I mean, my generation was probably much more repressed and about sex and about preferences and about experiences and about what we like and what we don't like and experimenting and so on. And I think pornography at least exposes us to the variety and teaches us about what's possible and maybe we'll try some of those poses and it turns out that nah, they don't work, but of course there was always, I remember buying it, what was it, the Kamasutra book, right? I mean, that has many of those poses and they don't work, you know, maybe they work, but they're not very pleasurable. So there's always been a desire to figure this out and to increase pleasure and find what works and what doesn't. And I think that kind of exploration is a good thing. People should go out then and try and discover and figure out for themselves. But there is also downside to porn, I think, when you confuse fantasy with reality or when you use the fantasy to replace reality and you replace masturbation and pornography to replace actual relationship and actual intimacy and actual sex or even the one I extended and I'm not, you know, I don't want to come out as I'm against one. My previous comment was about that's all you do or you do that all the time, right? You know, once in a while, yeah, I'm sure it's a lot of fun. But if you don't want to go out there, you don't want to try, you don't want to actually engage because you're getting some simulated replacement through pornography and through masturbation. If it replaces intimacy, and if it replaces dating and relationship and ultimately we haven't talked about love, if it replaces love, I don't know what a fulfilled life is if it doesn't have relationship and love and sex. I think people are missing out to the extent that they are replacing with some fake fantasy. Again, there are opportunities out there and it's to learn about those things and it can be obsessive and again, it can replace the real thing and that's a tragedy if it happens. I think it's up to each individual person's preference. I think if someone wants to be totally asexual and live as a monk in the mountains and that is what makes them happy, they should go and do that. I personally, sorry you're on, I love a good anonymous romp in the hay. I gotta say there's something particularly fun and exciting about that and I don't think it has to be necessarily a lack of intimacy if it's someone you don't know there can be something especially beautiful about that kind of connection where it's very fleeting but very intense. I think people should really try to get in tune with what they want and what makes them happy and I think people, some people aren't starting to do more of that. I do think that there can be a lot of online discourse though that can get really toxic where people will shame someone for having different preferences than them and there's this sense of righteousness from people who have different preferences. You should only have sex within a marriage or sex is evil and bad and you should only do it to make babies. I think it's really unfortunate that people use porn as a source of sex education as a performer. It's pure fantasy, we're shooting these scenes and it's often two hours for a short five minute clip so there's a lot that's cut out that you don't see. I think this country really needs proper sex education and not just about the pure mechanics of it but about pleasure. I do think that other people from diverse viewpoints making more porn would be great too. So much of it is kind of the same stuff and I get what certain people are into but I think there could stand to be more diversity in porn. I do think as well that dating apps have really made it difficult for people to date in the way that they used to. I'm a big fan of dating your friends and people that you've known for a long time but I think people can get very anxious about that now and I think meeting people off of dating apps is very easy to construct a fantasy about them or for them to portray themselves however they want to be and eventually you realize, oh my goodness, maybe this is not... I didn't know what I was getting into whereas when you date within your friend group obviously there's a potential for more drama but you also kind of know what you're getting at the end of the day. You're like, all right, I've seen this person date five different people before. I kind of know how their relationships went, how they ended, what the conflicts were and so I think in a lot of ways it's a much more natural way to date. On the issue of porn, I wanted to ask you is it your sense, I'm really interested to hear what the rest of the one hour and 55 minutes are cut out, what are we not seeing and what should we be seeing that maybe might help people have a more realistic perception of sex rather than the five minutes as you say that are cut down from that that perhaps has a kind of false representation of what's really going on but is it the watching porn and particularly the fact that people are watching porn younger and younger and having access to more and more extreme forms of porn obviously there's a gamut of taste but there's also the kind of pornography that I think just even 10 years ago you would have had to go really niche to finds that's now much more easily accessible to younger people. Is that leading in your view to a kind of is that affecting people's sense of what sex is and their desire to engage in it? I mean, how is porn affecting people's desire sense of desire would you say? This is a very interesting question because I think I experienced it from both ends both with my experience escorting and seeing clients and with my experience as a performer we'll be doing crazy positions in porn that this is less something that happens in my videos but my friends who do very mainstream porn it's like they'll be like getting their leg up over there and they'll like spend like 10 minutes getting into the perfect position wiggling around it's so uncomfortable and they're like, oh right, we'll shoot, let's roll and then they shoot like 10 minutes of that and they're like, okay cut and then like let's do this, it's so unsexy in this way being on one of those sets I mean it is kind of fun of course taught to watch people having sex but it's way less sexy than you might think but when I would have clients sometimes where I would just be like, oh my god this guy watches so much porn and just thinks that's how sex should be and has never really had like actually good sex and it would be such a tragic thing where they'd be sort of like, you could tell they have this checklist where they're like, alright we gotta do I don't know how explicit I'm allowed to get in here missionary, then cowgirl, then like I'll finish in doggy style and like all this stuff like oh I wanna check all these boxes and get all these little moments and it was just like you're not really like in the moment when you're doing that you're not like actually genuinely connecting with the other person and I think that is something that people who use porn as a sex education tool and are not actually connecting with themselves and their bodies tend to get into