Transhumanism: Technosexual Desire For The Mechanical Bride

August 8, 2012 - How does one "love" something that is not alive? With humanity becoming both ever more socially awkward and more attached to its devices, the quest to invent the perfect synthetic romantic partner will only intensify. Wired on the film The Mechanical Bride and the history of consumerist technosexualism, which goes back further than you may realize:

“New documentary The Mechanical Bride is a moving, weirdly human exploration of artificial companionship. It is also an academic dissection of the male gaze and pop culture’s sexbots, from Metropolis and Battlestar Galactica to actual robotic really like objects.


Advertising’s ideal woman is a fragmented body of replaceable parts, whose origin is the assembly-line logic of consumer capitalism,” said de Fren, a professor of media culture at Occidental College who honed her robotics chops in Paul Allen‘s future-tech think-tanks. “The RealDoll is the culmination of that kind of logic. It’s ordered in the exact same way as a car, with detailed customization including head and body type, hair and eye color, breast size and lips.”