Oh, Darling ... Ouch!

[Grendizer]

To no member's surprise, quite a lot of us like imagining our robot companions sporting seams, exposed joints, panels, and other assorted inorganic-look-and-feel bits. We're all different, and as some of you may know from my stories, the inorganic look isn't my style. I prefer androids that are paragons of human physicality (which is to say more human than human . I make no judgments about this, and I go for the Sorayama look by turns, but that's generally not what attracts me to ASFR. What I want to know is entirely practical: for those of you who like seams (etc.), how do you imagine yourself negotiating sex with such a creature without getting yourself pinched or scraped to a bloody pulp?

As I see it, with some designs, even holding hands could be a risky proposition. It's like in giant robot anime when somebody is rescued by, say, a Gundam, and you are wondering how they aren't getting limbs crushed in robotic finger joints. Even being rescued by a human-sized robot could injure you (although at least you'd be alive, presumably).

I am honestly curious about this, because this body type will come along before my preferences are met, most likely. Are we going to see news stories about owners injured by their robots because they did the nasty without considering this?

I'm not blind to the humor in this, but I'm not joking either. I really want to know.

[WilloWisp]

Three words: Electroferrous dermal gel.

The gel is an advanced polymer - a viscous, rubbery liquid when inert, but when charged with a weak electrical current, sets into a flesh-like texture. While charged, any mass of the gel will form a human-skin like texture on the exterior surface, even if that surface is disrupted. If you've got a ball of this stuff, and tear it in half, the area where the halves tore apart will instantly form this skin as well.

Most importantly, however, the gel forms a molecular bond with any ferrous surface while charged. Both the iron bond and the flesh texture can be localized to a very small area of any mass of the gel, based on the magnitude and location of the electrical charge.

When a 'bot is active, small nozzles set at each dermal joint emit a quantity of the gel. As the surface of the gel meets the exterior surface of the dermal panel, localized electrical charges isolate the gel at that point. This continues until the entire edge of the panel is met with an indistinguishable layer of gel skin, charged to the flesh texture, and impenetrably bonded to the metal at the joint. No pinchy.

[Grendizer]

Yes, that's excellent, but where you solve one problem, you create another. It's the sort of solution I'd come up with in a story -- if I were trying to hide the artificial quality of the android. But I think it would turn off some, maybe even many. After all, I don't think I'm off base when I say that a good deal of the sexual charge for many in this fetish comes from the artificial look and feel. If you mimic skin too closely, that could be a problem. But your idea totally works as a solution to the pinch problem.

Of course, you could just drop the skin look, make it translucent, so that the machinery is visible underneath, but since I'm not into this area of the fetish, I'm not sure whether that would work.

[WilloWisp]

The specific coloring is trivial to change, and could even be regulated by the frequency of an AC charge. Transparent, black, whatever. You could even have the dermal gel form a concave dip instead of maintaining a smooth texture across the gap.

[Grendizer]

You are both right. I guess the real issue is the strength of the fetish vs. pragmatic considerations. I can imagine a lot of seams that could end up abrading skin. They would have to be smooth at the edges or nearly microscopic, and at that point you start to wonder if you need them to be visible. At what point does the obvious lack of necessity start to impinge on the fantasy? After all, I'm sure manufacturers wouldn't want laymen opening up androids anyway. Just look how difficult some computer cases can be to open.

And there could be another, admittedly perhaps niche problem. For instance, I collect blades. I hate most blades sold at flea markets, because they aren't meant for actual use. I don't like show pieces, because they feel like lies I'm telling myself. Cheap bars of 440 stainless steel with Conan-style hilts disgust me for this reason. Personally, I'd feel the same way about unnecessary seams and exposed joints. But, of course, a lot of replica and fantasy blades are sold everyday...

[WilloWisp]

Well, I don't know much about maintaining appearances or decorative mow-teefs. I'm an engineer. I solve problems. Practical problems.

The way I see it, whether there are any user-serviceable parts or not, there still has to be a way of performing routine maintenance without ruining the synthetic skin. Now, the entire endostructure could itself be coated in my aforementioned dermal gel, making maintenance a simple matter of discharging the gel. The 'bot's skin would just melt off in a pool at her feet, allowing normal access to the panels which would be present on the metallic chassis... but where's the fun in that?

This fetish has a lot of subtle and nuanced ingredients not common to most other fetishes. Some of us like the contrasting juxtaposition between the obviously mechanical and the seemingly living. Some of us like the "clean" aspect: A 'bot won't usually sweat, bleed, drool, or defecate. Many of us find less satisfaction in the "liquid metal" approach explored in the Terminator films, because it's not intuitively a mechanical device that we can open, dismantle, upgrade or rebuild.

The flesh is an extension of that aesthetic. We expect devices to have smooth casings which won't fall off or melt if the device malfunctions or runs out of power. We expect devices to have access to internal components, even if they're not meant to be user-accessible. We sometimes expect the access points to be plainly visible, though not necessarily while the device is active and functioning. In purely practical terms, technical personnel expect all maintenance points to be reasonably identifiable with a minimum of guesswork.

Fembots are, in our fictional worlds, often indistinguishable from human women. They vary in height, weight, and body type as much as any random population of females. Okay, maybe not quite as much, since we tend to skew towards the pinup/model/actress archetype, but there's certainly more variety than a human repairperson would be able to reliably remember for things like, "Okay, this is a VanGenics 2300, so the facial seam should be 55 millimeters from the outside edge of each eye."

Panels and seams serve a practical purpose. Visible seams serve a practical purpose. Visible seams which can become invisible seams serve a very practical purpose.

[jolshefsky]

I have vastly different real and fantasy lives concerning fembots and my android/robot fetish.

In reality, there are no viable robots to have sex with. No mechanism is sufficiently complex to convince me there is a consciousness behind it. (There's also a certain gross-factor that I'll suffice to say has to do with cleaning.) So in "reality" I like to consider acting, pretending, and, well, fantasy. Lately I've been getting into hypnosis videos – I very much like the notion of a woman believing (or pretending really well) what it's like to be a machine, programmable, electronic, or otherwise just a thing. There's a tangential kink there, I guess, about objectification (limited, by the way, to consenting adults during mutually-beneficial play).

But in fantasy, sky's the limit. I can take a pretty girl I know a little, and make a fantasy where she's confused that she is really a robot – as in actually a computerized brain and an android body. I can take her apart, or change her programming, or make a copy, or swap her head with a different body. In fantasy, she can have sharp edges or protruding wires, and I can never get cut – not even that the edges aren't sharp, it's that there is no concept of sharp in the fantasy. Likewise, I don't get solder fumes in my eyes, and I never need to spend 40 hours debugging some dumb problem that turns out to be a wire connected upside-down.

So in whatever fantasy, we simply omit the parts of reality that are inconvenient. We not only ignore the pinch-points of exposed joints, but we ignore all sorts of physical impossibilities. We ignore psychological things as well: reprogramming, for instance, never causes PTSD or depression. Never anything permanent, anyway, and never anything that makes the fantasy a drudgery.

[Grendizer]

Yes, again both right. Obviously there will be access for technicians, although the extreme possibilities (for instance, nanotech) mitigate against any need for the kinds of obviously mechanical access often seen in the fetish. But, as WilloWisp said, "Where's the fun in that?" Definitely that would be a problem for many of us, although for me it would be fine. In fact, the whole idea of dermal gel is pretty intriguing, and a less versatile version of it makes an appearance in my Teacher stories. But I eschewed the whole idea of panels, preferring soft materials joined by nanostructures programmed to part when given commands.

It is true that our fantasies intentionally leave out the finer points of reality. I rarely see any erotic story containing STDs, for example. But if people can kill themselves jerking off, then I think they will eventually injure themselves when sex with engaging robots becomes possible. Just like with people who drive without wearing seatbelts, no doubt some intrepid users will choose to play with their robots without dermal gel. I realize that's their problem, but I wanted to know if anyone thought it wasn't a problem, or if they had a solution to it that allowed them to go full steam ahead.

But while our community will doubtless be among early adopters, eventually I think the wider public will demand very very life-like models -- sans exposed joints. I don't see wide adoption until a "killer app" android comes along that you can't easily distinguish from a natural person.

[dale coba]

Most important though would be some sort of touch/pressure sensors that would alert the robot that is was about to injure someone with its motion.

California passed a law to allow Google's driverless car on the public streets.
That camera-tech should probably go into fembots, too.
I'm thinking that "touch" isn't going to be much of a factor for fembots, except for the measurement of the pressure to exert in gripping something between her fingers.

- Dale Coba

[Grendizer]

I'm really happy about driverless cars, although I'm curious what their solution is for accident liability (if you aren't driving, can you be at fault?). If they've figured that out in an equitable manner, then the reduction in loss of life could be absolutely huge. I think America loses almost as many folks as we lost in Vietnam every year on the road: 43,443, on average, and 2.7 million injuries. The faster we get mass adoption of reliable AI the better. Even if I couldn't have sex with it, I'd still love to have an android assistant, but I'm hoping for the best of both worlds before I'm too old to enjoy it!

[Miss Pris]

And if you are "too old" to enjoy it, maybe they can just plug your nervous system into an android and then you get to be the sex bot, too! Don't forget to tell your fembot with the sensitive artificial skin to look out for seams

[Grendizer]

I really hope I'm alive long enough that I can discard my body without dying. I don't know that the day will ever come, but I'm rationally optimistic about the notion.

I suspect this ebook and its author are well known around here, but on the off chance it was missed by some: The Day You Discard Your Body