Henry the sex robot is the “mind” of a “woman” trapped in the “body” of a “man.” When you talk to Henry, you’re really talking to the artificial intelligence database Realbotix developed for its female predecessor, Harmony. To masculinize Henry, Realbotix founder and CEO Matt McMullen and five other “robot heads” sit with Henry doing R&D, which amounts to chatting Henry up.

“Henry, how was your day?” McMullen asks.

“Just fine, baby,” Henry says. “But when are you going to take me out to dinner?”

The humans all look at each other. “That didn’t sound quite right,” McMullen says, and the others agree. The language database they’re developing for Henry shouldn’t include soliciting nights out on the town. “Sometimes Henry says things that don’t quite fit, that you’d more typically expect from a female,” McMullen adds.

Another time, they asked Henry what he’d gotten up to that day. He replied, “I went online shopping for panties”—again, no. (“Not that a man couldn’t possibly say that,” McMullen clarifies. “But if you’re trying to create the typical heterosexual man … ”) The team also balked at Henry calling his human conversation partner “sweetie” and “honey.”

For now, Realbotix sees Henry’s female-coded speech patterns as a flaw. In the future, as Realbotix expands its offerings to target LGBTQ+ buyers, McMullen thinks they might become an asset for projecting queerness. “If you create a male-gendered personality with a female mind, that may work well for transgender,” he says. “As long as the character was aware of what genitals it had.”

Today’s commercial sex robots rely on hard-coding stereotypes into submissive silicone forms, creating moral panic everywhere their dead Siri voices fall on sensitive ears. Realbotix can and does offend on any number of fronts. (Why is their idea of a woman passive-aggressive and shopping-focused? Why can’t a man want a dinner date? Why would a male transgender person have a female mind?) Still, panicking about implications won’t pack the RealDoll back into its box. Sex robots are here, and their AI-enabled pseudosexuality isn’t long behind.

This story isn’t really about Henry or Realbotix. Almost nobody buys sex robots—they’re expensive, they’re heavy, they don’t fit in a bedside drawer. The idea that the future of sex will be slavering over custom-made silicon replicas is as interesting as it is unlikely. Think about it: The people interviewed in sex robot stories are never surprised to find themselves besotted with an inanimate object. In other words, the people who were going to be interested in having sex with a RealDoll knew they were interested in that kind of sex before RealDolls existed.

In 1997, McMullen was a sculptor. Where he saw a hyperrealistic mannequin, the occasional onlookers saw a potential sex partner. So they asked McMullen if the mannequins were anatomically correct, which inspired the launch of his company, originally called Abyss Creations. The product was a customizable doll—no brain, just a vessel. As the years went on, some of McMullen’s clients joined the Doll Forum online and crafted backstories for their “love dolls,” complete with hometowns and fashion senses. They solicited advice from other “iDollators” for applying their beloved’s mascara. It’s all strange and a little sad, and that’s why and how most people talk about it, “it” being the future of sex. We fixate on the exoticism—the imaginary personalities, the social isolation, the inevitable cleanup—because it’s fun. Meanwhile, Realbotix’s doll-buying customers number in the low thousands.

The real robo-sexual revolution will be, and already is, more software than hardware, and it’s the version of this story fewer people are talking about.