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Man Builds 'Scarlett Johansson' Robot From Scratch (mirror.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: 42-year-old product and graphic designer Ricky Ma has spent more than $50,000 building a replica Scarlett Johansson robot from scratch. The robot, named Mark 1, responds to a set of programmed verbal commands spoken into a microphone and has moving facial expressions. Ricky said, "When I was a child, I liked robots. Why? Because I liked watching animation. All children loved it. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots. After I grew up, I wanted to make one. But during this process, a lot of people would say things like, 'Are you stupid? This takes a lot of money. Do you even know how to do it? It's really hard.'" Ricky has dressed Mark 1 in a crop top and grey skirt. A 3D-printed skeleton lies beneath Mark 1's silicone skin, covering its mechanical and electronic interior.
I think most of it isn't aspirational or conscious at all, I think it's mostly evolutionary biology behaviors that border on instinctual. I don't think women get together and strategize on the best way to obtain the benefits of male relationships with minimal sexual compliance, nor do I think men (effectively, anyway) strategize on how to obtain sex from women with the smallest amount of effort.
I think evolutionary biology, though, has ingrained sexual behaviors into cultures and maybe even as instinct into people to match desired outcomes with sexuality. For women this means stable mates who will contribute materially to raising offspring, and for men this means women who are sexually compliant and monogamous to produce offspring that are their genetic progeny.
I think the economic model of a cartel is an interesting way to look at the social organization of sexual activity. Women act in surprisingly uniform ways as a group towards various aspects of sexuality that suggest a cartel. Women tend to be very critical of other women who are promiscuous, for example, much like a cartel does when one of its members violates the pricing rules. Prostitution is just a form of promiscuity that is profitable for both parties. Older women frown on older men with younger women, as it threatens the artificial valuations the cartel wants to impose -- the older woman is an inferior product (appearance, ability to successfully bear healthy children, etc) whose pricing normal market mechanisms would discount, however the cartel always wants to impose its own pricing mechanisms, seeking uniform pricing levels regardless of the product quality.
It's also interesting how economic externalities, like job equality and legal equality, influence the cartel pricing arrangements. The cartel itself is somewhat under attack, as its own members now question their pricing model. They still have a product on offer, but they don't know how to value the exchange they receive for it. Some value it low -- women with good job prospects may engage in sex more freely, as they no longer value the material stability of a marriage partner. Some eschew the value completely, disengaging from male sexual relationships. This chaos in the market is somewhat evident from reading publications oriented towards women, and the hand-wringing over sexuality, men, even lesbianism as an alternative lifestyle.
On the latter topic, I'm kind of amazed at the number of stories I've heard lately of acquaintances who have been married and even had children who end up divorced because their wife "discovered" they were lesbians in their late 30s or 40s. This kind of "discovery" would have been unheard of a century ago, and I think more closely reflects the kind of disruption in gender and sexual identity as women leave their childbearing years and no longer have the maternal instinct for childbearing. While some of these women may actually have been social prisoners of a culturally imposed sexual identity, I think its difficult to believe that ALL of them were. I think a more compelling explanation is that these women more likely had no compelling economic interest in their husbands and when combined with a naturally declining libido as they entered the sunset of their childbearing years and are actually making a much more conscious lifestyle choice that simply abandons men as a desirable partner.