26. Should We Be Worried About Teledildonics? With Robbie Arrell

Ethics Untangled

Should we be worried about teledildonics?

*CONTENT WARNING. This episode contains frank descriptions of sexual practices of various kinds, and discussion of sexual assault and rape, including rape by deception.*

Teledildonics is a word that refers to the use of networked electronic sex toys to facilitate sexual or quasi-sexual interactions between people at a distance. It's a relatively new type of technology, but one that is becoming more advanced. Clearly, it's a technology that opens up interesting new possibilities! But Robbie Arrell, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks it also raises some serious concerns, not all of which have yet been fully understood. In this conversation, Robbie outlines some of these worries, and begins to consider how we might address them.
Some further reading:

• Robbie's chapter entitled "Sex and Emergent Technologies" in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality in which he discusses teledildonics: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003286523-49/sex-emergent-technologies-robbie-arrell.
• Robert Sparrow and Lauren Karas's paper "Teledildonics and Rape by Deception" that Robbie makes reference to in the podcast: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17579961.2020.1727097

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
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