The Paradox of Sexuality: The rise of Sex Robot industry in China

Shahzada Rahim

The beginning of the 21^st century altered the socio-structural dimension of the human identity ranging from the bifurcation of human gender into superficial sub-categories and the commodification of humans as an ‘object’. This marked the birth of a new post-modern human agency, whose identity came to be defined by varied superficial bondage to commodification, consumerism and objectification. The fear concerning the emergence of commodified post-modern human agency was speculated by famous French philosopher Michel Foucault in his famous book “The History of Sexuality” published in 1976. In the introductory section of this book, Foucault writes; “So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex, but rather show how "sex" is historically subordinate to sexuality”.

Today, the so-called post-modern world has forcefully subjected human agency to a nomalistic understanding of the world that contradicts the natural state of human beings. One primary example of this social erosion is the emergence of the Sex Robot industryaround the globe, which is forcefully eradicating the notion of “Sex” as a natural spectacle of human beings. The biggest producer and promoter of Sex Robots is the People’s Republic of China, where the industry has grown to unprecedented proportions in the last decade.

The rise of the sex robot industry in Chinaand its growing popularity across the globe demonstrates how the post-modern human agency is being structured, nurtured and organised. This shows a decline of human civilisation under the auspices of Western modernity that started from the destruction of the traditional social strata through individualism and secularism. During the initial phases, the so-called Enlightenment Europe celebrated the eradication of traditional values like human association with religion, customs and family but over the course of a century that turned out to be suicidal for Western civilization.

Additionally, in the wake of the fourth industrial revolution which is characterized by mass mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence, the very essence of human civilization is at a crossroads. Under the so-called modern onslaught, every natural state of human beings ranging from biological, physical and psychological was subjected to commodification. The emergence of the Sex-robot industry is a prime example of this commodification human natural state, which is forcefully transforming humans from individual subjects into an object of singularity. This means the artificial isolation of the human species from its natural statehood by erasing identity in the ontological sphere. Today, the sex robot industry in China is worth $500 billionglobally as per estimates for 2022, which reflects the exponential growth of this industry in the past decade.

According to Chinese sociologists and experts, the growing popularity of the Sex-dolls industry in China is due to the decades-long state policy of the “One Child” policy, which has contributed to the huge gender imbalances. For instance, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), China had more than 700 million men by 2014, or 33.76 million more than the population of women. Particularly, across the age scale, therate between unmarried men and women born in the 1980s was 136:100 as per NBS estimates. Hence, to reduce gender imbalances, the sex-robot industry was promoted at the state level to bridge the mounting gender gaps. Perhaps, this reflects how ignorance and state control over the family institution could result in socio-culture disaster.

According to Lin Degang, who is the owner of China’s largest sex toy service provider Chunshuitang, the organic gender imbalance due to the state-sponsored One-Child state policy, more than 60 percent of online sex toy buyers are men, especially those below the age of 40. Perhaps, this is the peculiar manifestation of the so-called modern state-based social engineering to control the population, which appears to disaster for China in terms of demography. Moreover, as per reports, modern China ranked top in terms of Singles nearly 200 million adults which makes up around 14.1% of the total population. Despite the growing economy and massive development, China is facing a severe demographic meltdown that poses a huge threat to its social stability in the decades to come.

Under the communist government, China has become a managed society in which the state holds total control over every aspect of society. The Chinese governmentperfectly understand the declining state of demographics and the socio-economic consequences associated with it. For that reason, to maintain social stability in the face of grave gender imbalances, the Chinese government is actively promoting the sex robot industry to artificially maintain social cohesion. Nonetheless, the problem of declining democracy is not limited to China alone rather the whole world is facing a downward spiral in terms of population growth. In this respect, the Chinese sex-robot industry is perfectly exploiting this opportunity by expanding its sex-robot market beyond the Chinese borders. According to estimates of the state media China Daily, the biggest export market of Chinese sex toys is South Africa (almost 20%), with South Korea and Russia being the second and third largest importers.

Hence, the exponential growth and popularity of Chinese sex toys across the globe clearly demonstrates the emergence of singularity and the subsequent decline of human civilization. The paradox of sexuality in the age of hyper-technological onslaught is the result of state-sponsored social engineering, which is actively pushing human civilization towards a total collapse. The growing popularity of the decadent commodified culture through technology like sex robots poses a grave danger to the natural identity of human beings with grave consequences for the continuation of civilization. Moreover, the growing decadence in the socio-cultural sphere resulting from artificial social engineering using technology to alter the ontological foundation of human civilization signals a calm before the storm.