“I was in Berlin, wandering through the bright neon of a sex tech convention, when I found myself listening to a man describe his company’s ‘product’ – an AI sex robot they called an ‘Emotional Support Device’.. He smiled as he told a potential customer, “The best thing is… she won’t answer back.” My stomach dropped and I felt instantly sick. As a psychosexual and relationship therapist, I spend my days helping people navigate the messy, beautiful, often uncomfortable realities of intimacy. Yet here I was, face-to-face with a future where intimacy could be purchased, programmed, and pre-loaded to never push back. It left me wondering: why do we treat loneliness as a problem of not having sex, and why are we hiding behind that narrative to sell sex robots – a narrative that risks pushing us closer to dystopia than to connection?”
