Chobits: Why do people want to have sex with robots?

9:34 PM 7/13/10

I just finished the first book of Chobits. I didn't know there were two books. The second one isn't on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. I don't know if they're getting another copy of it, or what, but eventually I'll read it.

It's making me think about several things.

cuteness
social superiority
which instinct is left out
raising children
someone unable to judge you
pet names: sick, helpless, incapacitated, etc.
competing against someone and being unable to compete for reasons that are permanent and unchanging
death, self-preservation, children, immortality
touch, hugging, asking for what you want, social appropriateness, rejection

Cuteness: Cuteness is a real thing. It's not just subjective opinion. It's not just in the eye of the beholder. Cuteness is something that 'science' is able to describe. It's something universal. They can describe what makes someone cute or not cute. If they have big eyes in a small face, that's cute. That's only one of the traits that make someone cute. You can look up 'cuteness' in Wikipedia to see what I mean. They show images of the faces of babies and adults.

Japanese animation, and manga books, draw the characters looking 'cute.' Everybody and everything is cute. In American comic books, the superheroes aren't cute - they're realistic looking adults.

The persocoms in 'Chobits' are cute. It triggers your protective instincts and makes you love them. You can't help feeling that way when you see something cute. (Persocoms are computers that look like humans. They have different levels of artificial intelligence. Some of them are more realistic, others are less realistic and more like ordinary computers.)

Social Superiority: Why would people fantasize about cute, or sexually attractive, people who weren't really people? Why would we want androids or any other humanoid robot? Why would that be a good thing? Because they are socially inferior. They can't judge you and they can't boss you around. You tell THEM what to do. It doesn't matter who you are. You can be socially the lowest person in the entire world, and it doesn't matter - a computer will obey you, because a computer is socially lower than the lowest person in the world. It automatically obeys you and has no choice. You've gone your whole life being disrespected, bossed around, told what to do, socially rejected and looked down upon, but it doesn't matter - the computer will obey you.

A real girlfriend or boyfriend might act socially superior to you. Sometimes they will reject you, disobey you, laugh at you, boss you around, tell you to do things you don't want to do, or tell you to stop doing things you want to do.

I'm thinking of all this in the framework of Ichazo's Instinctual Types. The instincts are what I'm most interested in right now. Social, sexual, and self-preservation are Ichazo's three instincts. Different people have one of those instincts as their strongest, most well-developed instinct, while the other two instincts are weaker. The dominant instinct determines their behavior and determines what is or isn't important to them. Whatever you care about most is determined by your strongest instincts.

The social instinct is what makes people want to be able to boss someone else around, and it's what makes us want to be treated with respect, treated as equals, listened to instead of ignored, to be treated as though it matters what we want or don't want. When several people make decisions together, the socially superior people decide what gets done, and the socially inferior people are the ones who have to give something up, lose something, and not get what they want. However, the socially inferior people get protection by being in the group and by doing what they're told: this is what happens when a business owner hires 'inferior' people to work in his company, but he takes all the financial risks, and he's the one who loses millions of dollars if the business fails. He's taking a risk of losing something too. He protects the 'inferior' people working for him, because they're not the ones who lose millions of dollars when the business fails.

'Which instinct is left out': On a web forum about the instincts, someone commented that it helps you figure out what your instinctual stacking is if you notice which instinct tends to get left out the most. Which area suffers most while you try to meet the needs of your strongest instincts? I can give an example. The 'evil' characters in the His Dark Materials books - Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter - were both strong in the sexual and social instincts, and both were weak in the self-preservation instinct, weak about raising a family and protecting and loving their children. They didn't understand how to love their children until the very end of the books. They were more interested in accomplishing big social goals, or achieving social status.  They also were able to have sexual relationships and fall in love and attract partners - Mrs. Coulter especially was known for seducing everyone she spoke to. The self-preservation 'family' instinct seemed to be their weakest - that one was 'left out' because of all the other things that mattered more to them.  Mrs. Coulter might have had a slightly stronger family instinct than Lord Asriel, but even so, both of them were weak in that area.

Raising children: Raising a child is similar to teaching a persocom, training an artificial intelligence. The child is socially inferior to you. And I hate to say this, but it's the truth: a lot of people have kids because they want someone to boss around. It's something I read in Nathaniel Branden's books, too - he's a psychotherapist and he saw it with his clients. They'd have children, hoping that finally, SOMEBODY would be forced to listen to them and obey them, after they went their entire lives on the bottom of the social ladder. When you have a helpless baby or a little child, you can scare them and force them to do what you want. I've seen these people walking around in public with their children and talking down to them like they're worthless and inferior. You would never, ever talk to an adult that way. You would treat them with respect. They treat their children with horrible disrespect. They ignore them when they cry or get upset, tell them they're bad and they're stupid, tell them not to cry, tell them to shut up. I get angry when I see people talking that way to children.

When you raise a child, it's true, in the beginning they will listen to you and they are inferior. But sooner or later, they start to develop a mind of their own. Then they want to say 'no' to you, they want to do what they want instead of what you want them to do, they want to become a different kind of person than you want them to be, and as they get older, you have to let them be who they want to be. It's inevitable. They can't be 'inferior' to you forever.

Someone unable to judge you: This is why I like animals. I love animals because I can touch them freely, and they don't judge me. They don't tell me that I'm ugly or I'm weird or I'm creepy. For whatever reasons, animals almost never think I'm ugly and creepy, although every once in a while, I do find a cat or dog that just doesn't like me, but it hardly ever happens. Usually, cats and dogs are happy and delighted when I reach out and pet them. We instantly make friends and they're excited to see me every time I go to them.

Ugliness: I've been battling with the voices for the past couple years because I have chosen to grow my mustache and not bleach it and not wax it. The voices insist that all of my social insecurity is because of having a mustache. This is not true. I was socially insecure when I was a teenager. I had a little bit of a mustache back then, but it was not very visible, and I bleached it too. It was nothing. I was just ugly.

Some people thought I was ugly, and some people thought I was cute. It was unpredictable who would like me and who wouldn't. Some people, and some animals, and some manga book characters, are so irresistibly cute that EVERYONE is guaranteed to love them instantly, no matter who they are. I was never that way. I could only get some people, some of the time, to like me. So there was always a risk of being rejected. I couldn't go up to someone and touch them like I touch an animal, like a dog or cat. I couldn't just go up to a cute guy and give him a hug because I thought he was cute. He might think I was ugly and gross, and he'd rather touch someone else, and if I tried again, he'd think I was even more gross and creepy. And this was back during the time period when I was 'normal looking,' when I cut and styled my hair, didn't have a visible mustache, and did all the 'normal' things I was supposed to do. I still couldn't be sure that someone would accept me. I still was at risk of being rejected. This was when I was a teenager, when I was still 'cute.'

(Nowadays I describe myself as 'nice body, ugly face.' I think that I do have a nice body and I wouldn't change anything about it... although I guess if I could change anything, I would want to have longer legs and a shorter body, because I found out that I couldn't do certain things in gymnastics, like a back walkover or a back handspring, because I had a low center of gravity due to my short legs and relatively long body. I couldn't kick my legs back over because the center of gravity was in the wrong place, but everyone else could do it. It also makes it hard for me to dance, and I enjoy dancing.  I could show this easily in a diagram the reason why short legs and a long body gives you a low center of gravity. But anyway, this is something that I don't need to worry about in everyday life. My ugly face is more of a problem for me. I am still ugly even if I do conventional grooming and get rid of the mustache. I still can't just go out and get anybody I want, whoever I want, without worrying about being rejected. And I know that 'ugly faces' actually exist, because I myself look at the people around me, and I see 'ugly faces.' I know that I myself look at a face and think it's ugly or beautiful or cute.)

Pet names: Curtis calls me his pet names frequently. But I can't say pet names. I have never, ever been able to call people pet names, in my entire life. I never called anyone 'honey' or 'sweetie' until I was an adult, and I had to deliberately teach myself how to say it without choking. I say it but it comes out sounding strangled and unnatural. My voice tightens up. I can't say those words. But, like I said, I forced myself to learn how to say 'honey' and 'sweetie' and those are the basic pet names that I'm physically able to use. This was after I got used to having a boyfriend, in my adulthood.

However, there are situations where, all of a sudden, I'm able to speak. It happens in an emergency. It happened once when Eric and I and his daughter Tiana were in a restaurant, and she either ate too much, or got food poisoning. She ran towards the bathroom, didn't make it, and started throwing up on the floor in the middle of the restaurant. I'm terrified of people vomiting, but I was her protector, because Eric and his other friend who was with us had walked outside the building after paying their check. We had been on our way walking out of the restaurant when this happened, and they were already outside, and I was the only one left with Tiana when she ran for the bathroom. So I had to help her, and there was nobody else there but me.

I started automatically blurting out every soothing pet name I could think of, 'come on sweetie, it's okay hun, let's get you to the bathroom, it'll be all right...' I took her to the bathroom and helped her get cleaned up. She was crying and she wanted her daddy, and I couldn't get him because he was outside and he had no idea that anything had happened.

That's the only moment when I can call someone names, if they are sick, helpless, incapacitated, unable to speak, in an accident, or whatever. It makes them socially inferior and puts them in a 'needy' position, where I am strong and valuable to them, instead of weak and useless. I called Curtis 'hun' once, although I don't think he heard me because I muttered it so quietly, but it happened when he had cut himself really badly, he was bleeding, and he came to me looking for band-aids while he was panicking from his adrenaline rush (he has some kind of bleeding disorder and his cuts are a big deal when they happen).

I decided to call him some names in a text message, and of course I can write them, but I cannot speak them out loud, especially since they were unusual names that I don't ever say, nothing like 'honey' or 'sweetie.' I chose words that were truthful and accurate, but nothing I could say out loud. I chose the name I chose because, when he leaves work, everything seems dark and depressing when he's gone, like the light has gone out of everything.

Competing against someone, being unable to compete: I was thinking about this with regard to 'age.' I keep fighting with the voices because they are insisting that he's scared of me because of my age, or rejecting me because of my age. I keep telling them, that's not the problem. It's hard to explain though. Age DOES cause some problems. There are things you know about because of being a certain age. For instance I can't talk to Curtis about what it was like when the first Challenger space shuttle exploded while we watched it on TV when I was in fourth grade, because he wasn't born yet when that happened (*Note, I don't really CARE about talking about that particular subject, and I don't think about it, but it was just an example*). But I could mention that to someone my own age and they'd say, 'yeah, I remember what it was like when that happened,' and we could relate to each other. Things like that DO have to do with age. Your culture might be different. A lot of things can be different, for instance, you might be more financially comfortable because you've been settled into your job and saving money for years, while a young person still doesn't know what job they want to do and they're still having money problems.

An old person competing against younger people - that's more about 'cuteness' and the way you look when you get older. It's not just about wrinkled skin, either. The cuteness changes, your face changes. There are a lot of things that make teenagers more attractive than older adults. I've had people tell me that I don't look like I'm 35. They say I look younger, like maybe in my late twenties. I don't have lots of wrinkles, I haven't suntanned much, my skin isn't sagging, but even so, I'm still not as cute as a fifteen-year-old, because they still have the 'cute' shaped face, as their face and skull aren't fully grown yet.

The 'Chobits' book talks about people competing with the persocoms, and persocoms competing with people. Both sides feel left out. The robots feel sad because they'll never be real people, and the people feel sad because they'll never be young and cute and perfect and obedient and able to do all the things the computers can do. This is a big spoiler, in case anyone is actually reading those books, but, the main robot, Chi, can't have sex, and she was designed to be unable to have sex, designed that way on purpose, and this is one of the main issues of the book. She's different from the other persocoms who ARE designed to have sex, because people WANT to have sex with robots. So she needs to be loved by someone who won't have sex with her. (I wonder if there will be a 'Pinocchio' type of ending, where something happens to make her become more human? Or is she going to die? Or will she be with another robot?)

The idea is that you are competing against people who have something you don't have, and never will have. I mentioned that when I was talking about bisexuality and the fear that if I'm with a bisexual guy, he might be more attracted to men than he is to me. And no matter how hard I try I would never be a man. ("No matter how hard I try" is probably a 'joke' from the voices, because I let my mustache grow. But I am not 'trying to be a man.' I am following a natural grooming principle, letting every hair grow that my body is genetically capable of growing.)

In reality I am threatened by the young teenage girls that Curtis usually goes out with - he never goes very long without having a girlfriend, and he's almost always with SOMEBODY, although the relationships are unstable and he's had a lot of problems with them. Still, he dates other young teenagers, and I can't compete with them. I'm not 'old looking,' but I'm unhealthy - I have chronic illnesses, chronic problems, weird disasters that never end, strange things and terrible things going on in my life. All those young people who are friends with him, they have problems too, I'm sure, but they're still young and full of energy and life and they're more fun to be with - not boring and depressing like I am.

Being called 'creepy' was worse than the part that said I was 35. This was the email that supposedly came from him, on MySpace, supposedly when he was drunk - although I'm not even sure if he actually wrote it himself. It said 'Look ur 35 okay, it creeps me out, I want to stay single for a year or two.' Saying that I'm 35 doesn't bother me as much, because I know it's not really the problem. It's irrelevant. It directly goes against Curtis himself, who once brought me over to the seafood department into a conversation with the guy Branden who was working there, and had me tell him how old I was and what year I was born, and both of them were saying to me that I didn't look like I was 35, I looked like I was somewhere in my twenties, and both of them spoke of it in a flattering way to me. So the email directly went against that, and I didn't really believe that part of the sentence. It was 'creeps me out' that I believed.

I have told him about my hearing voices, I've told him that I hear voices and they make me do things that I don't want to do. That's creepy. I've told him I have people hacking my computer, messing with my emails, messing with my telephone, stalking me everywhere I go. That's creepy. I've sent him dozens of text messages, without getting answers from him, and they're strange and unusual text messages written in a different style than text messages usually are, talking in a different way than people usually write a text message. And I've given him several notes, although not a lot of them, but I've handwritten notes and given them to him. Those things are creepy. He could think I'm a dangerous, delusional, crazy person who might attack him and hurt him. 'Creepy' is believable.

I'm unable to compete against 'normal' people who don't hear voices, don't have drug residues giving them mood swings, don't have chronic fatigue making them unable to accomplish any goals. His friends and girlfriends are 'normal.' They don't have those same problems that I have, and they're not 'creepy.'

Continuing on the list of topics that I wrote at the top of this blog: Death, immortality, self-preservation instinct, children. I didn't have a lot to say on this. I'm reading the Chobits books and I'm not seeing as many themes about immortality, about robots not being able to die, about what a big deal it is that robots never get old and die. One of the robots did die, after having memory problems and then getting hit by a car. I'm not seeing 'immortality' as a main focus of the book. It's more focused on sex and relationships and love. 'Immortality' is there in an abstract way. The robots can have their memories erased, while their body is still intact, so part of them dies while their body remains alive. But it's not focused on that so much. Or, when I read it, my attention isn't focused on that theme.

I was just going to say that having children is the only real way to get immortality, but it's a partial immortality. The children are partly you, partly someone else, and partly themselves, but it does keep alive a part of you forever until the family line stops having children. The Chobits book doesn't talk about robots having babies. It focuses on robots having sex, for pleasure, and as part of a romantic love relationship, but having babies is never mentioned, and neither is the theme of wanting to have babies but being unable to have them.

That theme is very important to me as a 35 year old unmarried childless woman, with lots of health problems and personal problems that make it difficult to get married and have children. I want to have children before it's too late. 'Too late' is a concept that women have to worry about. Men are physically capable of having children, their entire life, however they still have to worry about being unattractive and being unable to compete with younger people, if they want to have children, so yes, men still do in a way have to worry about being too old to have children. Men can only have children with a fertile, pre-menopausal woman, so they have to be attractive enough to get with a woman that young. This is about having children, NOT about having a relationship and sex for pleasure. Anyone of any age can still have a relationship with SOMEBODY, although the passionateness, the feelings, the amount of attraction, all of those feelings will be different - it's like, imagine there's a really ugly person who 'settles for' another really ugly person, because that's all they can get. But in reality, they desire the magazine models, and the gorgeous teenagers, and all of the attractive people that everyone else wants, but they know they can't get them. But that's not what I'm talking about when I talk about having children. All that matters is being able to attract someone who's young enough to still be physically able to have children.

I've been interested in all of these subjects ever since I started reading about ephebophilia, hebephilia, and pedophilia, and read the blog of someone who is a hebephile, and learned more about how it feels for someone to be so strongly attracted to young people that they are less interested in adults, and to realize that I myself feel that way, but maybe not as strongly.

Last topic on the list: asking for touch. This is a rejection fear. The 'ew, get away from me' response. Or 'you did that once, but don't do it again, and don't keep doing it.' When you touch someone and you like it, you want to touch them again and again and again, every day, and you want it to be reliable, so that you can touch them every time you feel like it, every time you want to.

You don't want to go up to them, ask for touch, and have them be in a bad mood and say something mean to you and tell you to leave them alone. You want to know that they will always say 'yes' to the best of their ability, even if it's difficult for them.

That's why I'm an animal lover - they almost always say 'yes' to being touched. People, however, will be in bad moods, or they're in a hurry, or they're worried about something else, and they can be unkind and rushed and mean and rude to you. I even had it happen with Curtis once, but it was clearly an accident. I walked up to him, and I felt trusting and comfortable, and I said hi to him and was going to stand there for a minute talking to him. But he said, 'WHAT?!' in an angry, irritated way, and I said, 'nothing...' and I backed away and started to leave. But he knew that I was hurt, and so he started to talk to me again and keep me from leaving. He was just in a bad mood for whatever reason, he needed a cigarette or something, I'm guessing. People get irritable when they need a cigarette, when they're hungry or sick, when they're on drugs, or when they're drunk.

I HATED Eric when he was drunk, and he got drunk A LOT. I don't like talking to drunk people. I don't like the slurred speech, I don't like the angry irritable behavior, I don't like how they say mean, hurtful, cruel, abusive things to you and they're not responsible for what they say, and they say or do the worst possible things that they could do.

The fear of rejection, the fear that someone will be rude or angry or irritable, that it will be the wrong moment, even if they're nice to you SOMETIMES - the fear that they'll be inconsistent and unpredictable, that they'll do something all of a sudden and you don't know what to expect - that makes it hard for me to touch Curtis. I can tap him a little bit on the shoulder or the back for an instant, but not much more than that. And I can hardly ever do that, and when I do, it is a big deal. I'm terrified that one of these days, he's going to say something about it, like 'leave me alone' or 'I'm busy right now' or 'quit it' or something. He could say something cruel and hurtful and thoughtless.

It goes beyond just being afraid that he'll tell a manager or call the police. In the beginning, when 'they' were forcing me to try connecting with him, when they were forcing me to start writing notes to him and trying to text message him and asking him to call me on the phone, when they started forcing me to do those things, they only thought that I was scared of getting arrested, getting convicted of a crime, getting accused of sexual harassment, or getting fired from my job for harassing another employee.

But it's more than just that. It's true, I am afraid of those things. But I'm afraid of something more unpredictable, the 'bad moment', not knowing what to expect, not knowing if THIS time will be the wrong time, if maybe he's been tolerant of everything I've done up till now, but THIS time he suddenly decides to say something cruel and push me away, and I don't know when to expect that moment. And if he did that, even once, even just a little bit, it would be very, very, very hard for me to try again afterwards, just like it was terrible for a long time after I got the 'Look, ur 35 okay, it creeps me out, I want to stay single for a year or 2' email. (And I still don't know whether or not he sent that letter himself, sent it while drunk, sent it because he was a puppet, sent it because someone else suggested he say those things (like Carrie for instance), sent it as a way of saying "I read your blog," (because I wrote a blog saying that the voices called me the 'COW', which stands for Creepy Old Woman), or whether it was sent by someone hacking his email... or whether he sent that because it's true and he really means it. I still don't know.)

Being consistent: Being in a consistent mood is one of the most important goals that I have, the main reason for why I'm interested in the Feingold Diet, hyperactivity, eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones, and also, cleaning drug residues off my clothing and belongings. All of my relationships are damaged because of my mood swings and my inconsistent, unreliable behavior. Every day, nobody knows what to expect from me, because I could be in a bad mood, on drugs, haven't eaten anything, sick, etc. This is very important to me and I want to fix it. I want to fix it BECAUSE it ruins my relationships.

The voices told me today something which I don't believe is true, but part of me believes it MIGHT be true. They were telling me that he WANTS to get another phone call from me. The voices always do that. They try to make me believe that he misses me, that he wants to hear from me, that he needs me, and all that, but I don't believe those things. I think he forgets about me, and I cease to exist when he walks out the door of Weis. I only exist when he can see me, and when he can't see me, it's out of sight, out of mind. That is what I assume is the truth. The voices are always trying to make me believe that I matter to him, that he misses me when I'm gone, that I'm important to him, that he needs me, that he wants me to call him, that he keeps checking his voice mail to see if I've left him a message. It makes me angry when they try to make me believe those things. I think that in reality, he's just home watching TV or playing video games or hanging out with his REAL friends and girlfriends and family and his son, and doing ordinary things, and HE'S NOT THINKING ABOUT *ME*. I try to tell them this, I try to tell them that that's the realistic thing to believe, I try to tell them that this is what's most likely going on in the real world, but they keep insisting that I'm important to him and he misses me, but, for whatever reason, he can't bring himself to call me, or email me, or do anything like that, even though I've asked him to... which is why I rented the movie, 'He's Just Not That Into You,' out of curiosity to see what their explanations were for why a guy doesn't call you.

It's very annoying when I feel as though I myself am much more realistic, and much less delusional, than 'the voices' who are controlling me. THEY are the crazy ones, NOT ME. But I'm the one who gets all the blame, I'm the one who gets called crazy, because I hear voices that come from mentally ill murderers and criminals pushing buttons on a machine so that they can hide behind me and be as crazy and stupid as they want to be while I get all the blame. I'M the one screaming at them, 'HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO ME!!!' and they're the delusional morons who refuse to listen. And no, I'm not literally screaming that at them, that was a joke, but you get the idea. I'm telling them over and over again that there are ordinary, mundane reasons why he's not calling me: he's not that attracted to me, he forgets that I exist when he leaves work, he has other people in his life who are much more important to him than I am. THOSE ARE THE REASONS WHY HE'S NOT CALLING OR EMAILING ME. I tell them this, over and over and over again. I get sick of fighting with them about it.

***
All of those thoughts were provoked by that manga book. I've enjoyed reading it.