Sex androids: should we be concerned? Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, reckons that we should be. Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, the academic warned that while he was “fairly liberal about sex”, he was worried about the effect such machines might have on people’s ability to form human relationships. Robotic sex toys are already available to consumers in the US and Japan. Amazingly, they tend to be crude approximations of women. I don’t think they’re being aimed at the lesbian market quite yet.

Sharkey particularly focuses on “losing your virginity” to a robot. I’m not sure that’s possible. These are elaborate machines for masturbation. Just as people don’t lose their virginity to their own right hand, or someone else’s, they don’t “lose their virginity” to a thing, however lifelike. Anyway, that whole focus on “virginity” is outdated. People tend to think now about “having sex for the first time”. The idea that virginity is a precious commodity, that spoils or “deflowers” someone when it’s “lost” is a throwback to the days when female identity was constructed around sex and breeding and pretty much nothing else. You could even reflect for a moment on the idea that at least people who prefer sex with machines are less likely to breed. Hooray!

Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that the development is creepy. Sharkey points out that porn has changed expectations, particularly male expectations, of real-life sexual partners. Young womanhood, meanwhile, currently awaits market availability of a robot that will remove all body hair, preferably during sleep, then smother their bodies in aloe vera. I vote that it’s called the Wax Lyrical. But then, I haven’t yet worn a skirt or a dress this summer because I haven’t quite got into a 2016 routine with my fearsome leg hair. The reality of female legs is rarely seen; the smooth result of cosmetic modification is everywhere.

Will young women of the future feel pressure not just to look like porn stars but also to perform like robots?

Is it possible that young women of the near future will feel pressure not just to look like porn stars but also to perform like robots, ever available and always eager to please? That’s certainly what women were legally obliged to do, until recently, within marriage, no matter what kind of inattentive, insensitive or abusive sod their husband was. In huge swaths of the world, it’s still very much the case. That’s the really ghastly thing. Whatever they decide they want, no questions asked, is still what so many men believe they have the right to.

Few women have ever had the courage and skill to put across the horror of such attitudes as perfectly as the victim in the Stanford sexual assault case did. But many parents have defended the vile criminality of their sons in the way that Brock Turner’s dad chose to: “20 minutes of action”, with no concern whatsoever for the way in which the “action” was perceived by its recipient. So appalling. It’s wonderful that so many people are standing with the “object” of Turner’s assault.

Which is the really dispiriting thing about the “advance” of the sex android. It’s not overly optimistic to believe that the argument that women have complete autonomy over their own bodies is getting through. But this development? Automated bodies, designed to look and feel like women – it feels like an enormous refutation. “What? We are expected to see you as complete human beings, with your own minds and thoughts and choices? We aren’t having that. We have the technology to refuse this abomination.”

It’s still hard to get some people – men and women – to understand quite what sexual objectification is. It’s simply an act that reduces a woman to nothing more than a sexual vessel. Sex robots, of course, are its apotheosis. The problem is not that sex robots are available: it’s that they are wanted.

There is nothing less erotic than someone believing or insisting that whatever else might be going on in another person’s mind – even “I do not want this” – they still have the right to have their “sexual needs” met. The people who are attracted to the idea of sex robots are the people who look at women and sex in this way. The idea that business and technology are so keen to oblige such narcissistic and sociopathic individuals is repellent.

Business always has been, of course. The sex trade is huge, as is the use of sexually attractive women to sell absolutely anything possible. At last, the most egregious examples of such cynical and divisive marketing are being abandoned. Many men now understand what this kind of relentless cultural assault does to women and to relationships between women and men. This supposed technological advance runs counter to the progressive spirit. If the sale of sex robots is to be allowed at all, it must be highly regulated.

There’s always been a bit of sniggering about men who use prostitutes (though real contempt, counterintuitively, is directed at the women involved), or who “can’t get a girlfriend”. Blow-up dolls have always been a joke, as have “wankers”. This too is pitiless, petty stuff. Maybe it’s time to take misogynistic sexual dysfunction more seriously. Maybe people who want to buy sex robots need to present the agreement of a couple of doctors, before they are judged emotionally restricted enough to need to retreat to such an inhuman fantasy. Or maybe, out of respect for women, this technology should just be rejected.