What happens when the legendary American passion for invention collides with the legendary American passion for sex? Eye-opening, provocative, and entertaining, this book reveals the amazing story of our national quest for sexual innovation--straight from the files of the U.S. Patent Office. Covers over 800 unusual and often incredible devices.

A humorous, thoughtful exploration of American sex machine inventors and users, told through photographs and interviews.

As powerful interacting social and physical forces, gender and technology shape our experiences, cultures, and identities-sometimes in such comfortable and subtle ways that it takes effort to appreciate them; sometimes in such conspicuous and explosive ways that everyone recognizes their importance. Delving into these issues is an opportunity to discover how technology promises or threatens to rewrite our ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender identity.

"I lost my husband to a sex robot." You'll start hearing women saying those ominous words in the next 7 to 10 years. And when it happens, we'll all ask: How did we get here? With humor and insight, Rise of the Sex Machines lays out how culture and technology are hurling us toward the end of romance, relationships, and love. They're even changing the nature of sex itself.We have devolved to a culture of "insta-sex," where you can get your orgasm to go. Just look at Tinder and the "swipe-right/swipe-left" culture in selecting your preferred mates. Like many other aspects in our lives we demand instantly-food, music, books, movies, market information, banking, ride-hailing-we're beginning to expect our sex to be also fast and easily accessible. And people are deciding relationships are just too damn hard. That involves time in caring, being attentive and being selfless. What matters to many is the narcissistic immediate gratification. So sex robots--what's not to like? You'll get your sex quickly and just the way you like it. She won't get older, fatter or uglier on you. You can always upgrade or just replace her. You can never "cheat" on her, and she can't cheat on you. And she'll never accuse you of harassment, rape or assault. From the ever-waning interest in religion, to feminism's dismissal of men, to the new "masculinity is toxic" movement, to people choosing not to get married or have children, and to the ever-expanding embrace of multiple sexual identities and sexual freedom, author Barak Lurie shows us the factors that are conspiring to push us into the arms of sex robots. And brace for a shocking ending. It'll be a twist you never saw coming.Sex Robots will be a reality. They're already here, growing exponentially in numbers. They cannot be stopped. The more important question is: Who will resist?

Available again in paperback, this study offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture. Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation. The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal ‘meat’ or posthuman machine. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.

A pioneering study of the relations between gender and technology.

Poetry. "With these exquisite SEX MACHINES, Jamie Townsend gives us the Baroque energy of a painted rose casually opening onto a profane, profound, ornate, and complex realm where 'we don't have to choose.' Epiphanies occur, are recognized and undermined. Desire, identity, love, fun, and tragedy vie for our attention as Townsend proves there is a sexuality to fate, 'an effacement of its ongoing effacement.' Sonorous and seductive, SEX MACHINES might just reveal the 'culmination of your basest fantasy' where 'We can all go fuck ourselves.' Read them and weep."--Laura Moriarty