Robots as sex toys are commercially available now. When - and how - will they stop being glorified dolls and become not our sexual playthings but our partners? And what effect will that have on our understanding of ourselves? In this paper I suggest that sexual objectification is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our physical nature that has filtered down from academia into popular discourse, reducing people to "nothing more" than physical objects. The antidote is an updated form of neutral monism, in contrast to the prevailing (reductive) physical monism. Although the current state of the art in robotic sex is indeed primitive, nevertheless, in contemplating the possible future development of robots as sex workers, one finds powerful opportunities for them to play an increasingly transformative role in our understanding of ourselves and what it means to be human.
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