A short drive north of Toronto, $60 buys a half hour alone with a life-sized doll that’s “warm and ready to play.” Customers take rented sex robots to a private room in a warehouse, near an emissions testing center, before returning them for cleaning.
The owner of KinkySdollS told the Washington Examiner he will open a second location in Houston this month, with a goal of 10 U.S. locations by 2020. How? Because there’s no regulation.
“The States is a bigger market, and a healthier market, and God bless Trump,” said owner Yuval Gavriel.
Although widespread in Europe, there are no known robot brothels yet in the U.S. Gavriel rejects the label, saying he runs a “showroom” that allows people to rent dolls, test them on the premises, and decide whether to buy one.
Before opening shop in Canada last year, “I consulted with a lawyer and the lawyer said, ‘Listen, there are no rules to it, but if you are smart you don’t go out and say you are operating a brothel,’ ” he said.
For the Houston location, which also will feature on-site, short-term private rentals, there’s a coalition of four investors, including an attorney, who said there are no regulations there either. “He went through all the laws and all of the regulations and currently there are no regulations for this kind of service,” the owner said.
Experts and activists say it’s time to consider regulations, however, at a minimum to protect consumer safety and public health.
“I can buy two or three or four of these on the Internet and in Washington, D.C., or New York, or anywhere I want, I can set them up and charge people $100 an hour to use them,” said John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University.
“It might make a very funny skit on ‘Saturday Night Live’ if one of these go wrong, and control mechanisms break and the thing starts pulsating more than it’s supposed to,” he said. “But that could create a very real physical hazard.”
The sexbots range from a heated slice of silicon with a face, for the approximate price of a laptop, to more than $10,000 for lifelike models. Banzhaf said it’s time to hold legislative hearings so reasonable rules can be written before sales explode.
Who cares?
Organizations urging regulatory action are small, operating as ad hoc international committees.
The Campaign Against Sex Robots, led by U.K.-based robotic ethics professor Kathleen Richardson, is sympathetic to an outright ban, seeing an insidious threat to society and unhealthy alternatives to human contact.
“You’re probably thinking, ‘This is just a vibrator, and why don’t you launch a campaign against vibrators?’ ” Richardson said. “I don’t think there’s an argument that women are going to be able to marry their vibrators by 2050.”
Another coalition, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, is led by Netherlands-based technology ethics professor Aimee van Wynsberghe, who opposes knee-jerk regulation.
FRR is beginning to research potential benefits for people with disabilities and the elderly. “They don’t have the same kind of access as you or I. They can’t use Tinder, or go to the bar to pick someone up,” van Wynsberghe said.
Banzhaf, who scoffed at the notion of near-term robot marriage, said there should be an effort to review whether abuse-simulating dolls increase or reduce human victimization, an unsettled debate.
But Banzhaf said regulation can’t wait too long, warning brothels would become entrenched interests, difficult to dislodge once they open. “They are moving very quickly because there is a tremendous amount of money at stake,” he said.
Regulate what?
The opening push for regulation is an effort to ban sex robots that resemble children.
With little discussion, House lawmakers unanimously passed the CREEPER Act by Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., in June to ban importation and interstate commerce involving “any child sex doll,” though the Senate has not acted.
Donovan said in a statement that his bill would “help better protect innocent children from predators” and urged the Senate “to follow the House’s lead and swiftly pass this legislation that would benefit our communities.”
The proposed ban would change criminal law, but regulators also have a potential role in consumer safety and public health.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission enforces standards for some parts that may go into robots, but has no apparent rules for sexbots as a whole, spokeswoman Patty Davis said.
“There are no CPSC mandatory standards for this product,” Davis said. “Certainly there are component parts like batteries, and the [artificial intelligence] system itself that would have standards associated with them, but there are none for sex robots, as a product, that we are aware of.”
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, would be able to regulate sexbots as medical devices if sellers claimed the bots “treat, prevent, cure, mitigate or diagnose a disease or condition,” such as sexual dysfunction. But businesses can side-step risk with careful wording.
Then there’s the entirely separate matter of local brothel rules.
Whether brothels are allowed to open has historically been a local issue, though very few U.S. localities allow prostitution. Many cities, however, allow bathhouses where sex partners aren’t paid, and Banzhaf believes robot brothels are legal in 49 states. Alabama has a sex toy ban.
Existing laws may result in uneven results. In Canada, a second Toronto-area brothel was blocked under an expansive reading of a law restraining adult entertainment.
Gavriel said he’s not hostile to regulation, and feels businesses might be able to tip off police to predators. He said his business spent a significant amount of money to create a sanitation station and encourages condom use for dolls, which include male and transgender models with varying degrees of artificial intelligence. Women are among his clients, he said.
“I’m a very conservative person. For me it’s a business and for me it’s to put my foot in the door of AI. … Artificial intelligence is going to be big in the next 20 years,” the owner said, adding he deeply opposes prostitution, and feels technology could reduce it.
Constitutional questions
Federal law contains vague restrictions on interstate commerce in indecent material, though prosecutors must convince a jury that items exceed subjective local standards.
The Supreme Court has protected private possession of obscene pornography, but not the act of receiving it. And the court has not ruled on whether there is a right to buy sex toys.
The Supreme Court in 2005 declined to hear a challenge to Alabama’s ban on sex toy sales. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld the ban, warning that overturning it could lead to prostitution.
Fifth Circuit judges later overturned Texas’ sex toy ban, rejecting then-state Solicitor General Ted Cruz’s 2008 contention that “there is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals” for non-medical reasons outside of a relationship.
Texas did not appeal, leaving divergent federal circuit rulings.
For now, KinkySdollS has no plans to open in Alabama. The owner said he’s in discussions with investors in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with prospective partners also in Arizona and Atlanta.
