Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://theconversation.com/sex-technolo...ated-99849

EXCERPT: People living with disability are largely excluded from conversations about sexuality, and face overlapping barriers to sexual expression that are both social and physical. Media portrayals of sexuality often focus on a visual and verbal vocabulary that is young, white, cisgender, heterosexual and … not disabled.

My research into inclusive design explores how design can – intentionally or unintentionally – exclude marginalised or vulnerable people, as well as how design can ensure that everyone is included. That might mean design of the built environment, everyday products, or even how information is presented.

UTS has been collaborating for over a year with Northcott Innovation, a nonprofit organisation based in NSW that focuses on solutions for people with disability, to understand the barriers people face, and how inclusive design can help break them down. When it comes to sexuality, new technologies have a role to play – but we need to look at both the opportunities and risks that these developments bring.... [COVERED: starting the conversation; inclusive sex toys; social media and intellectual disability; sex robots]

MORE: https://theconversation.com/sex-technolo...ated-99849

It takes absolutely no courage or boldness to ask out a sex robot. It is a real lowering of standards to date one. If one is having relationship problems with one, one need only take it apart and tweak the circuitry. It's a real sad state of affairs. Anyone who has one can testify that it is no replacement for the real thing.

Quote: it's complicated

It's always complicated. I can only speak for myself but if it wasn't 'complicated' I'd have years of my life back and be in a different place doing different things. 'Complicated' is one hell of an understatement..
Many years there was a girl called Ingrid on the periphery of my friends and acquaintances. She was in a wheelchair but you (or at least I) couldn't help but notice Ingrid. I finally met her while queuing in a bank.
"You are Ingrid?" I asked. Turned out not to be the worst line ever..
We walked home together (sometimes wheelchairs just vanish).
And we went our separate ways and I didn't ask her out.
O C2 u r chickenshit chickenshit chickenshit.
She kind'a vanished from the city about then - never to be seen again.
Yeah. Complicated. Regrets, guilt, possible criminal charges, they're all in there.

(Sep 2, 2018 02:30 AM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: it's complicated

It's always complicated. I can only speak for myself but if it wasn't 'complicated' I'd have years of my life back and be in a different place doing different things. 'Complicated' is one hell of an understatement..
Many years there was a girl called Ingrid on the periphery of my friends and acquaintances. She was in a wheelchair but you (or at least I) couldn't help but notice Ingrid. I finally met her while queuing in a bank.
"You are Ingrid?" I asked. Turned out not to be the worst line ever..
We walked home together (sometimes wheelchairs just vanish).
And we went our separate ways and I didn't ask her out.
O C2 u r chickenshit chickenshit chickenshit.
She kind'a vanished from the city about then - never to be seen again.
Yeah. Complicated. Regrets, guilt, possible criminal charges, they're all in there.

Nice of the elusive Ingrid to grant her name to some of those wheel-less armchairs and side chairs out there.

No connection, again, other than the name... But my brother once had a boyhood crush on an Ingrid: Ingrid Pitt. Blame it on those predatory Hammer movies I guess, that some horror host show had a big enough budget to afford (as opposed to those deteriorated public domain films that even MST3K dallied with much of the time). He and a couple of his friends constituted a childhood fraternity vaguely precursory to that kind as exemplified in Stranger Things, where they would argue over complex issues like whether Pitt or Barbara Steele or Goth knows what other now vintage film femme fatale was tops.

Back on semi-topic: I didn't know that Barbara Gordon (AKA Batgirl) eventually became a paraplegic after being shot in the spine. Stayed in the business as the Oracle, apparently a kind of geek version of Ironside, serving as consultant for superheroes.

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You're healed!



Cure?

Disabled people want social change, not bodily cure...

One thing that BJ Miller said about Hospice patients that really stuck in my mind was that all they really want is to feel unburdening to those they love.

"I've known many people who were ready to go, ready to die. Not because they had found some final peace or transcendence, but because they were so repulsed by what their lives had become -- in a word, cut off, or ugly."—BJ Miller

I would imagine that the biggest obstacle to anyone with a disability is social inclusion. 

I loved that movie the Intouchables. Philippe Pozzo di Borgo remarried and had two other children. He, of course, was rich, but he was well aware of his privileges, and felt a certain responsibility to speak out.

In 2015 he published a book: "You and I, I believe". He talks about the role physical closeness, desire and sex played in his life.

"Unfortunately the accident makes you lose your sexuality. The first thing they offered me in the hospital after my accident was a talk with a sex therapist. Today they've cut budgets, and the first position they've eliminated in that of sex therapist. But the sudden loss of sexuality is a big problem for those involved. It's a completely banal neurological consequence of the accident that you lose this world of emotion and experiences. I had the great fortune to be married to women who came to terms with the loss of my sexuality. Women already have a great advantage, in that they have more reason and sense than men. They're more adaptable."

His first wife passed away from cancer. He said that they’d put their heads together at night, the 'I' into 'You' and 'You' into 'I', and together they’d escape."  

That's pretty hot, isn't, C C? 

But what if we could develop a sex chip?

"Tipu Aziz, a neurosurgeon at the University of Oxford, speculates that better knowledge of the brain’s pleasure centers—combined with improved surgical procedures and control of electrical pulses—may make a sex chip in the brain a reality. “Lack of sexual pleasure is a huge loss in one’s life, and if one could restore that, that would enhance someone’s quality of life enormously,” Aziz remarks."

(Sep 3, 2018 02:09 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ][...] In 2015 he published a book: "You and I, I believe". He talks about the role physical closeness, desire and sex played in his life.

"Unfortunately the accident makes you lose your sexuality. [...] I had the great fortune to be married to women who came to terms with the loss of my sexuality. Women already have a great advantage, in that they have more reason and sense than men. They're more adaptable." [...] He said that they’d put their heads together at night, the 'I' into 'You' and 'You' into 'I', and together they’d escape."

That's pretty hot, isn't, C C?

 

Yah... sounds like physical limitations opening new doors -- psychological congress, ideo-affective union, trans-somatic love soaring to new heights.

Maybe down the line, evolution-wise, even beckons toward some "group marriage" version or rather Sturgeon's fictional "homo gestalt". But the latter was a development into behavioral oneness instead of sensual-emotive integrity: More Than Human.

Quote:[...] His first wife passed away from cancer. [...]

I won't speculate if a thanatological journey itself for a couple could add a new, short-lived dimension of its own... Skirting too much with morbid territory, there.

Quote:But what if we could develop a sex chip?

Fitting, since the mind is the real source of eros. The involvement of the latter becoming a lot more apparent and necessary after the effortless, artless, automatic physiological reactions of adolescence and the post-teens subside. Even "My brain? It's my second favorite organ!" Woody Allen firmly acknowledged that during an interview once, prior to his notorious career juncture of "that white dude sure lucky it made headlines long before the #MeToo era!" (Preemptive edit: Good grief lords of coincidence, I see they even mentioned him in the article. Forgot about that futurological prototype "the orgasmatron".)

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(Aug 30, 2018 04:53 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: [ -> ]It takes absolutely no courage or boldness to ask out a sex robot. It is a real lowering of standards to date one. If one is having relationship problems with one, one need only take it apart and tweak the circuitry. It's a real sad state of affairs. Anyone who has one can testify that it is no replacement for the real thing.

I guess Sects "Robots" are slightly better. But only from the standpoint of the exploiting cult leader.

"While Jones banned sex among Temple members outside of marriage, he voraciously engaged in sexual relations with both male and female Temple members. Jones, however, claimed that he detested engaging in homosexual activity and did so only for the male temple adherents' own good, purportedly to connect them symbolically with him." --Jim Jones

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