Yeah, holy fuck, the morality waters get very murky very quickly when the topic of sex robots come up especially when it concerns taboo and illegal fetishism.

Content warning: moral discussions of sex-bots for very taboo fetishes below.

I think it mostly comes down to people's personal tolerance of "ick" i.e. how much person A judges a fetish that person B has that person A is not into.

Some people are, understandably, completely turned off or even horrified at taboo kinks like age-play, roleplay-incest, CNC, scat, blood, etc.

Heck I've even seen some articles that argue that "mainstream" BDSM is the fetishization of women's suffering and therefore inherently misogynistic. But I don't think that's a common viewpoint and not one I hold either.

Personally, I don't care what sex thing people are into that doesn't involve me so long as it's not causing harm and it's between consenting adults.

So springboarding off your comment about pedophilia and beastiality, which are both illegal for extremely good reasons: would sex-dolls or sex-robots for both/either be harm-reduction or harm-enabling?

On the argument for harm reduction; it's an outlet for those fetishes that has no victim. Therefore it could prevent those who have that fetish from victimising children and animals because it's much less risky and not illegal to use a sex-doll/robot for those purposes in private solitude. And who should care what weird things people get up to in private so long as it does no harm to others.

On the argument for harm enabling; it could push illegal fetishes that are quite rightly shunned by society towards normalisation. Shame is a powerful emotional tool used in animal social groups to discourage behaviour of individuals that are harmful to the group.

In a similar way if someone says something weird in person in front of a group of people they want to be accepted in they get ridiculed, feel shame and embarrassment for saying something weird, and don't say it again in that group.

Now with social media, those people who have the same weird opinion (just to be clear everyone has at least a few weird opinions, no exceptions there) can find eachother and echo-chamber themselves, calcify their opinions into more extreme forms, and occasionally act them out in the physical world causing harm to others.

What happens when the technology of social media collides with the technology of sex bots? Like with the hypotheticals you gave of people "stealing" identities of celebrities to make their own sex bots or styling them after pictures of kids they found online.

What happens when they start sharing tips for making animal sex-bots with more realistic fur, exploring these problematic fetishes with others which normalises the behaviour in the group, until finally one of the group decides that only the "real-thing" is good enough for them now then goes out into the world and does harm?

I don't know which side I fall on. And I don't think I will ever know until I can see some conclusive evidence one way or another.

That's as far as I will entertain these kinds of discussions because my "ick" point is when these trains of thought lead to asking the same question about simulated snuff.

Because that opens a whole other horrifying can of worms of what about making bots for simulated rape, murder, and necrophilia for those with psychopathic tendancies?

And for me it boils down to is the question "do we make objects to sell and commodify humanity's capacity for evil as recreation?".

As you are a sex worker, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on the ramblings above and please correct me if I've made any assumptions or leaps in logic.

Well, on the matter of dolls looking "just like" whoever, I think that should be legal with no reservations. The point we consider those acts you've described heinous and disgusting and so on is because real people\animals suffer. The rest is simply not our business. So if there's no real suffering involved, this is not even up to discussion.

Releasing filmed material with dolls is another issue, I think this should be considered harassment, maybe even on the "rape threat" level. But again - scaled by the real rights being violated, not by what we want and don't want others to do, because that's not our business.

I'm not sure I agree about it being a good outlet, I think you are right about not being sure. That outlet logic doesn't quite work the same with every person. Again, a person on the spectrum (like me) might use that possibility to play, and for them it will really be an outlet. A usual person with weird fetishes might do that too, or want the real thing after playing with toys enough, as with gateway drugs. A psychopath will likely have no use for toys since they only want real power over living beings.

As we all see with the Web and social media, lots of genocidal rhetoric has been normalized in the last decade that wasn't before that. Don't want to mention Azeris, but 15 years ago they (in the Russian-speaking Web) wouldn't go to common places, because those places would expel savages ; now the common places are just as degenerate and hateful. I wouldn't want the same thing to happen with torture and rape fantasies.

So - I think it's a bad thing. In private they may do with dolls as they want. In public and in the Web - depending on how realistic it is.

There's also a substantial male population for whom a woman being subservient is a turnoff, though, with knowing it's a transaction being sufficient. For such people a doll could help with some purely physical stupid things, but those are the least of lonely people's problems, so not very useful.

EDIT: Oh, another person has already said all the same things.