Dating software, sex toys, sex services, artificial intelligence... Human sex and love are changing dramatically. Desire will not disappear, nor will love, but under the advanced technology and the increasingly powerful self-drive, desire and love may be dismantled and separated until we can no longer feel them.
Reporter/Song Shiting
Akihiko Kondo, a 35-year-old civil servant in Japan, marries virtual idol Hatsune Mirai, making it possible to combine humans with two-dimensional fictional characters
When I was discussing with Huang Yangming, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Fu Jen University in Taiwan and a scientific adviser to "I Am a Scientist", about the possibility of human future sex and love, and whether people can have sex or love with virtual people or artificial intelligence, he suddenly sent me a link: "Hatsune Mirai is married." Last November, Akihiko Kondo, a 35-year-old Civil Servant in Japan, spent $17,500 to tie the knot with the famous 16-year-old virtual idol Hatsune Mirai.
In Kondo's mind, Hatsune Mirai is the one who rescued him from his workplace troubles. Ten years ago, he was suppressed by his female predecessors in the workplace, forced to stop working, once had no interest in women in real life, and even suffered from neurasthenia. After meeting Hatsune Mirai, he gradually found sustenance and slowly came out of the shadow of life. The wedding ceremony of the two is not grand, but it is also warm, a "Hatsune Mirai" doll instead of the heroine "real body" attended the wedding ceremony, many netizens expressed their blessings through social networking sites such as "Twitter", except for Kondo's parents.
In an interview with CNN, Akihiko Kondo expressed his heart for many "otaku": "Society puts pressure on everyone to follow certain love rules, but this may not bring happiness, I hope everyone can find a way that suits them." 」 ”
<h1>Single society</h1>
Once upon a time, Japanese "otaku" like Akihiko Kondo were still in the minority, and they somehow cut off their emotional and interpersonal connection with the real world, choosing to find spiritual sustenance and emotional relationships in the virtual world. But today, the entire human society has an irreversible tendency to otaku.
Recently, an article in The Atlantic called "The Sex Recession" attracted attention, in which veteran editor Kate Julian explored the current interest in sexual and intimate relationships in the United States and around the world. Kate Julianne gave several sets of data: "From 1991 to 2017, the overall percentage of high school students who had interspersed sex dropped from 54 percent to 40 percent. "The reduction in sexual life is not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Australia and the northern Europe, which has always been "cold", the frequency of sex life of young people is declining, and at the same time, the masturbation rate is rising.
In Japan, the hometown of the Hatsune Mirai doll, a "single society" is also forming. In Kazuhisa Arakawa, head of the Singles Research Program at Hakuhodo, in his new book Ultra-Single Society, Japanese people's views on marriage and love have changed radically over the past 30 years.
Once upon a time, Japan, like China, was a "marriage-only society," and all singles were seen as a transitional stage of marriage and intimate relationships, a phased way of life. Kazuhisa Arakawa found that for many years, the probability of Japanese people being unmarried for life has been less than 5%, until 1990, the lifetime unmarried rate of men exceeded 5%, and women did not exceed 5% in 1995. However, in October 2016, Japan officially released the "2015 National Situation Survey Determination Value" statistical results, showing that the lifetime unmarried rate of men and women was 23.4% and 14.1%, respectively. In 2010, the proportion of men in the population was 20.1% and 10.6% for women, and in 5 years, the proportion of men and women increased by more than 3%, setting a record high. According to this trend, it is estimated that by 2035, half of the Japanese population will be single.
This has led to changes in the family structure and social structure of the whole society. In the past, "husband and wife plus child family" was the standard family model in Japan, but in the 2010 survey, the proportion of family members of different family types has been updated - the number of "single families" has surpassed the "husband and wife families" and become the first family type in Japan. By 2015, the figure for "single households" continued to rise to 32.6 percent, while the standard family model data was unchanged from five years ago. According to the immediate results, even if the number of Japanese people continues to decrease in the future, the number of "single households" will continue to grow, reaching 37% by 2035.
In the view of Miki, the founder of Yummy, the joy community, at present, the sexual concepts and sexual needs of Chinese women are changing
In China, similar "sex degradation" has also been hinted at. Miki, founder of Yummy, a community of women's delight, recently did a survey of "post-95" women. "Of the 20,000 questionnaires, 45 percent of 'post-95s' girls never use dating apps, and only about 26 percent of those who use them will try dating." The probability of young women actively preparing condoms is quite high, reaching 90%..." From this set of data, Miki found that "post-95" young people are not as open as the public thinks, at least not in behavior.
They are less keen on finding love and various forms of intimacy, and instead spend more time and time reinventing themselves. "Young people have more ways to release their desires, and sexual desire is released and eliminated in many channels. In our report, many people watch pornography at a higher rate than idol dramas. This situation extends to the marriage and childbearing part, the billy who can accept and is willing not to marry or dink is as high as 70%, and young girls have the ability to please themselves, no longer demand themselves according to the traditional concept of marriage and love, and tend to marry not only for stability. ”
People suddenly seem to no longer need to huddle together for warmth. The ancient Greek poet Theoklitus once firmly believed that "mankind will always need one another," an iron law that lasted for more than 2,000 years. A few years ago, Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, saw this irreversible trend, as he wrote in his book Society of Singles: "Isolation is an unbearable pressure for human beings." In ancient societies, banishment ranked highest among all tortures, after executions. In the 17th and late 18th centuries, the modern prison system began to promote the practice of solitary confinement, because isolation 'increased the deterrent power of punishment' and thus stopped crime. ”
This interdependent relationship remained solid until the 1950s. But today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and more than 30 million of them live alone, and 60 years later, the exception to "human civilization" as george peter Murdoch asserts appears.
"In the final analysis, this is the embodiment of the extremism of individualism, or the development of individualism to this stage will inevitably lead to this result." Wang Min'an, a professor at Capital Normal University, felt that everything had long been fixed.
"If you have to go back, Europe began in the 16th and 17th centuries." Wang Min'an said that during that period, the Protestant Reformation in Europe began to be implemented, and everyone could believe in God alone and was no longer confined to the church. Slowly, from faith to personal life, the awareness of "privacy" gradually emerged. Industrialization and social division of labor have further enhanced the concept of "self", "everyone is a member of the high-speed running social machine, like a screw, only need to complete their own social functions, play their own social role, the connection between people's multiple relationships becomes less, and the motivation and desire for communication are also reduced."
Today's young women care more about reinventing their bodies and looks than they do about intimacy
In Society of The Bachelor, Eric Cronenberg also argues that the prevalence of individual admiration began slowly in Western societies in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but began to have a profound impact on Western society and elsewhere in the second half of the 19th century. "During the same period, four other social changes that spread were quietly taking place — the advancement of women, changes in the way they communicated, large-scale urbanization, and a dramatic increase in human lifespan — that interacted and created common conditions for each other to flourish."
"When this individualism develops to the extreme, the atomization of society appears." "Social atomization" is a concept proposed by the German sociologist Georg Simmel to illustrate the phenomenon of individual alienation and social irregularities caused by the disintegration of the connection mechanism in contemporary society. Wang Minan feels that the "atomization" of Chinese society is later than that of Europe, starting from the rapid urbanization after the reform and opening up, especially in the past 20 years, the development of Internet technology has provided more favorable objective conditions for "atomization". In addition to basic life satisfaction, people's needs for knowledge, communication, sharing, and some intimate relationships can be solved through technology and networks, and the connection between people in reality is even weaker.
<h1>Convenient sex</h1>
The establishment of sexual and intimate relationships is also being swayed by technology and the Internet. From match group and OkCupid, the old online dating sites in the United States, to eHarmony, which believes in scientific dating, traditional offline blind dates are being replaced by Internet blind dates. Today, in the United States, one in every 6 couples who are about to enter marriage met through a dating website or app. Throughout this process, big data seems to be at work. Traditional blind dates usually only facilitate meetings through very little information exchange, but online dating often needs to fill in hundreds of pieces of information, from basic information such as age and education to beliefs and lifestyles, and then to alcohol, sleep habits, sexual habits... Courtship seekers learn more in an Internet questionnaire than they do on a few meetings on a traditional blind date. Of course, even the operators of dating websites have difficulty accurately describing the intrinsic link between these data and the successful proportion of blind dates, but the massive selection of objects and the premise of "if you are not really impulsive, there is no need to meet" have attracted more atomic modern people to try to choose their partners in this way.
Sex has never been more readily available than it is today. If you have an urgent need, just download Tinder or other dating software and gently slide your finger on the screen of your phone, and if you say a few more flirting words, the sex drive of the night can be easily resolved.
Competing with dating apps like Tinder for the market is not Pub or traditional social activities, but increasingly high-tech sex products and disassembled sex-related services. In "Sex Depression," Kate Juliane mentions Japan's wide variety of sex-related services. When all a girl needs is a hug, professional comfort and cuddling services will meet women's needs. When a boy wants to rest on a girl's lap for half a moment, the Japanese service industry can also fulfill the wishes, not to mention the more direct physical sexual satisfaction.
"The cost of communication is too high, it is not as convenient as solving it yourself." Miki once studied in New York, and before going abroad to study, her girlfriend had given her a sex toy, and at the same time, she did not mind making new sexual partners, and between knowing new people and trusting sex toys, she chose the latter.
In recent years, global sales of sex toys have continued to grow, especially in the Chinese market. According to Tmall data in 2016, sales of women's sex toys increased 11 times over the previous year, and the sales of vibrators reached 51 times that of 2015.
Just as sales of women's sex toys have grown rapidly, changes in sexual lifestyles brought about by technology and the Internet have played a more significant role in women, especially in countries with relatively conservative sexual values such as Japan and China. "The sexual revolution in China since the 1960s and 1970s has been a revolution in which women catch up with men on various indicators." Li Yinhe also remembers that "in the 1948 male sexual behavior survey and the 1953 female sexual behavior survey, men and women have great differences in many indicators." For example, in extramarital sex, 64% of men and only 26% of women, a difference of nearly 40 percentage points in the middle. But after the "sexual revolution", especially in the past 10 years, whether in terms of sexual skills, the proportion of sex outside marriage or the proportion of premarital sex, women have rapidly approached men in terms of data.
In the context of the "single society", "single dogs" may become a reality
"Our users are about 70%, especially concerned about whether they have an orgasm in their sex life, they feel that they are already a financially independent woman, the quality of life is also good, how can there be no orgasm, which is enough to become a major regret in life." Miki said that Yummy is of course a group of women who are relatively independent and open in China, but their concern for themselves still has social reference value.
Women have a clear understanding on the road to orgasm: women's orgasms and sexual pleasure do not have to be obtained from men. This is not even a female awakening, and many facts have proved that marriage is far less important to women than men. As the Canadian historian Elizabeth Abbott mentioned in The History of Marriage, Virginia Nicholson interviewed hundreds of women in order to write "Independence: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after World War I." To her surprise, the hopes of the "remaining" women of the 1920s to marry and have children were shattered by the death toll of the war, but they were not conquered by loneliness, some found lovers, some found jobs, and some found love with other women. The satisfaction and happiness they get from life is the same satisfaction that marriage gives.
In Miki's view, neither the terms "low-desire society" nor "sexual depression" are accurate. "People always need to have a relationship with people emotionally, and desire has not diminished, it just has online and offline services, masturbation, sex toys, artificial intelligence, and more outlets to release desire."
<h1>Flirting in VR</h1>
Just like Akihiko Kondo is willing to marry Hatsune Mirai. What makes Akihiko Kondo and many "otaku" fall in love with "Hatsune Mirai" is the wonderful singing voice and sweet shape of this virtual girl, and vr has helped a lot in the process.
In the past two or three years, I have experienced VR movies and games from all over the world at national film festivals and VR technology exhibitions, and at present, VR technology is developing at a similar rate similar to the situation when mobile phones or tablets were first introduced, and the update iteration speed is extremely fast. Some technologically advanced VR images are already enough to create realistic atmospheres and portraits, and if combined with certain forms of external sensory stimulation, the entire movie viewing experience will have a sense of immersion that is close to reality. In 2017, Oscar director Alessandro Gonzalez's first VR work "Meat and Sand" was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the film screening is not only wearing a headset to watch the film, the exhibition site uses sand and simulated wind to create a real Mexican and American border environment, the audience's entire viewing process is like with the refugees in front of them, experienced a difficult journey across the border.
How can similar augmented reality technology not be used in the sex toys market? At present, the research and development of sex toys, including Japan and the United States, regard VR and augmented reality as a major expansion direction. Adult entertainment site Pornhub has reported that VR content views have risen by 225% since its launch in 2016.
The year before, Osaka, Japan, held an adult VR exhibition, "VR + Eroticism", which attracted a large number of men and women to enter the venue to experience. All VR-related experiences have a strong scene, the most basic is the combination of VR pictures and sex toys, men can wear a headset device and masturbate with the plane cup connected to it. The screen in front of you will show the female body and voice that matches the airplane cup, so as to achieve a close to the real experience of making love. More attention to the experience and psychological feelings of the service also appeared at the exhibition, men can wear VR glasses, simulated lying on the legs of beautiful women to enjoy ear plucking service, in front of the "otaku" favorite two-dimensional beauty, the real ear pulling feeling also followed, the overall experience of immersion is very strong.
At that VR show, the most futuristic and popular project was a VR experiment to experience urinary incontinence. At the site, the working group will put a personal device on the lower body of the experiencer, and the experiencer will be blindfolded, and at the same time, drink a small glass of water. After this series of preparations is completed, the experience officially begins. The device that had just been put on the body began to work, it enhanced the feeling of closeness, and began to apply pressure to the bladder of the experiencer, so that people would feel urine. Immediately after, the device will inject hot water into the water bag, and the sound device will vibrate with it, and the experiencer will have the illusion that he is urinating. More extremely, the experiment did not even forget to create vibrations and cold sensations in the neck of the experiencer to simulate the trembling of incontinence when urinating. All of this is superimposed to create a real scene of experiencing incontinence, when many people subconsciously cover their lower bodies with their hands, showing a shy and embarrassed expression.
In this way, the flirting experience in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is likely to become a reality in the near future. In that movie, the male and female protagonist Wade and Ike date in the game, Wade wears a full set of wearable devices with tactile perception functions (especially emphasizing the crotch perception function), the characters of the two are entangled in the game, Edge's hand goes downstream from Wade's shoulder and chest, in reality, the wearable device sensitively captures the touch in the game, instantly transmitted to Wade, and the boy falls into the warmth and cannot extricate himself.
In the near future, virtual lovers and increasingly intelligent artificial intelligence will become the love choices of some people
<h1>Fall in love with artificial intelligence? </h1>
Humans can establish emotions with the "Hatsune Mirai", can use VR technology to find emotional support in the virtual world, and the future of more realistic artificial intelligence to bring emotional comfort to human beings is not far away.
"There is a timeline, by 2050, people can basically accept and achieve sex with artificial intelligence, and even fall in love." Li Yinhe said that the conditions for achieving this breakthrough lie in two points, the first is the development of artificial intelligence technology, robots should be infinitely close to and understand people's consciousness and emotional needs; secondly, the price, when the price of high-intelligence robots is reduced to the consumer level, everyone will not mind having it.
American artificial intelligence expert David Hansen has also predicted that in 2045 (that is the near future point set by the movie "Ready Player One"), people and artificial intelligence will develop an intimate relationship. In 2017, scientists conducted a survey of people aged 18 to 34, and the data showed that 27% of young people believe that it is acceptable for humans to have sex with robots in the future, and even emotional relationships.
At the moment, the obstacle between humans and robots lies in the degree of intelligence, and what needs to be crossed is the famous "uncanny valley". The "uncanny valley theory" believes that when robots are more similar to people, people's favorability for robots and dolls will continue to rise, but after the similarity reaches a certain level, the favorability will decline rapidly, and people will even have a feeling of fear. Therefore, many of the current sex dolls or robots are deliberately designed to have a certain gap with real people, in order not to touch people's psychological "uncanny valley". "The way to cross this barrier may be to make artificial intelligence and people infinitely close, to the point where the naked eye cannot distinguish them." Psychologist Huang Yangming said.
Humans can physiologically accept VR and artificial intelligence, so what about love?
In the movie "Ready Player One", VR technology is closely linked to life, which may be the direction of VR in real life
In spike Jones's film "Her", the male protagonist Theodore chose to try to use the artificial intelligence system OS1 to solve loneliness in order to get out of the shadow of divorce. He is "paired" with samantha, an artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who has a sexy voice line and is humorous, gentle and considerate, and always able to respond to Theodore's emotions at the right time. Men want to meet "women" who have long known each other and are eager to develop this online relationship into a real emotional relationship. As his feelings deepened, Theodore's possessiveness and jealousy grew stronger, and eventually, he had to face reality: he was just one of the 8316 interaction objects that Samantha provided, and while interacting with him, the sexy girl was still nurturing love with 641 users. In this way, this romantic love between humans and artificial intelligence has disappeared in the exclusivity of human emotions.
"When people have feelings with virtual characters and artificial intelligence, there are layers of psychological barriers that need to be crossed, and human beings must have a clear understanding of their intelligence, and they must be able to accept that the intimate and empathetic of artificial intelligence comes from calculations, and even after invading personal data. Just like some of the 'cheating' behaviors of the current love, the man learned some of the other's preferences through the woman's girlfriend, and then made some intimate moves, the original girl was very moved, but later found that all this stemmed from the ventilation message, the feeling was greatly reduced. If humans want to have an emotional relationship with artificial intelligence, they must think about it clearly in advance, and if they are aware of it, the harm will be greater. Huang Yangming analyzed.
When humans are fully prepared and fall in love with artificial intelligence that uses massive data to meet their various emotional and physiological needs, the needs of possessiveness, jealousy, and security in love will be largely eliminated and satisfied, but new problems will also arise.
In the movie "Zoe", the love between humans and artificial intelligence encounters moral and life-and-death problems
American "post-80s" director Drake Doremus is keen to explore minorities and future love in movies, and "Zoe", which was launched on Amazon's streaming platform Prime Video last year, is about the love between people and advanced bionic robots. The high-tech company where the male protagonist Cole works has two star products, one is a miracle drug that can produce sweet love between people, and the other is a high-level bionic robot that is so advanced that it does not even know that it is artificial intelligence. Cole gradually falls in love with his robot assistant Zoe at work, and the weakness of human desire for sincerity in love hurts him, he tells each other the fact that Zoe is a robot, and the two go through a struggle and run-in, and finally accept the reality. The trial continues, and Zoe has an accident, and a car accident leaves her to pieces. Luckily, Cole could fix him, and unfortunately, Cole was able to fix her. The car accident also became a disaster for their love, Cole began to think about Zoe's identity, with the moral and ethical anxiety of "interracial" love, the reality of "I will die, but the other party will live forever" also greatly reduced the realism of this feeling.
In fact, as early as the 1980s, Chinese science fiction writer Wei Yahua tried to solve the real problem of this human love in science fiction. In the novel collection "Dream of the Gentle Land", there is a bridge section where the robot is buried for the male protagonist. But as soon as the novel came out, it caused a huge controversy in the science fiction world. "The robot in the novel never betrays, is 100% obedient, and is later criticized for machismo, which is not in line with the development trend of future society." Science fiction writer Han Song said that many early people and artificial intelligence science fiction, as well as the current cognition of artificial intelligence is still the concept of "anthropocentrism", in the future, this set of ideas may be eliminated.
Even if you fall in love with the calculating "future human being", the greed and demand for love in human nature will not decrease. The philosophical circles that have always had a tradition of technical criticism are pessimistic about this, and Wang Min'an feels that "no matter when and where, human beings are creatures driven by desire, and will always create new needs, which is also the vitality of human beings, the proof of the existence of life, and only death can stop desire."
From the perspective of psychology, Huang Yangming also believes that even in the near future world, in the face of desire and love, people can not "Buddhism": "Artificial intelligence and big data can make the progress of some things slow, but the conflict, boredom or transfer in feelings will eventually occur, and people will eventually face the weakness of human nature." ”
(Illustration Yue Ming)
<h1>Fading love and affection</h1>
When I talk to female community operators, counselors, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophy professors about love and sex, everyone is determined that the pursuit and obedience of people to love and desire will not disappear. Only when talking to science fiction writers about this, they will give more utopian speculations. For example, Wang Jinkang feels that "human feelings (biological feelings) are from scratch, from low to high, and ultimately come from the complex association of ordinary substances (hydrocarbon, phosphorus, etc.), so why does the complex association of silicon atoms not produce feelings?" ”
Han Song always said that science fiction is essentially a realist novel, and many of the plots and creations in the early science fiction world have really appeared in our lives, which makes me more curious about science fiction and love in movies.
Here, first put aside love and discuss "science" for a while. Nature, founded in 1869, has been the "world's leading scientific journal" for more than 100 years with the concept of "introducing the important results of scientific discoveries to the public and letting the public know as early as possible all the progress made in every branch of natural knowledge in the world" and has been the "world's top scientific journal" for more than 100 years. But something interesting happened in 2005, when the European Science Fiction Society awarded the "Best Science Fiction Publication" to Nature. According to Henry Gee, the host of Nature's science fiction column, "At the awards ceremony, no one dared to tell us in person that the things published by Nature were science fiction. "Last year, I read two of nature magazine's science fiction anthologies, both short and pithy works, and within the framework of the entire magazine, these novels are very close to technology, as if they are in the blur of science and science fiction.
Then again, Nature magazine gave me the courage to let my imagination fly into the realm of science fiction, and I became interested in the depiction of love in the science fiction world, perhaps there is the ultimate imagination of the human emotional world.
Looking back at the science fiction novels and science fiction movies that I have seen, most of the love stories in them are more desperate and cruel than in reality, and it is not an exaggeration to say that they are horrors. The first thing that comes to mind are two allegorical love stories, Don't Let Me Go and The Lobster. "Don't Let Me Go" is based on the novel of the same name by Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Casey, Tommy and Ruth, three young people who grew up in the English countryside, spent a carefree teenage time together. For a long time, they all thought that they were no different from other teenagers, going through education, falling in love, chasing ideals, and eventually exhausting their lives in a life of inactivity. But one day, the children got disillusioned news from their teacher, Lucy, that in the boarding school where they were studying and living, all the children were clones, and the ultimate goal of all the children, including Casey, Tommy, and Ruth, was to become organ donors of normal human beings, unpaid, voluntary, and destined to give their lives for it. Friendship, love, the value of cloned human life... The ethical and moral propositions of the future world suddenly came, but fate could not be changed, and the three friends were destined to embark on their own path of dedication.
Because of the coldness and greed of human beings, clones are not equipped with emotions, so how can the "single dog" who has not fulfilled his reproductive responsibilities treat himself? "Lobster" tells you that in the near future, singles can really become dogs.
"You will find that the social background of the science fiction world is often more absurd and more authoritarian, and in some highly technologically developed science fiction novels, the social form is closer to the 'communist society' we aspire to." Han Song said that the stories he sees in many science fiction novels show these two tendencies. "Lobster" is obviously the former, in the context of the future society, the marriage and love of residents must be strictly controlled. The male protagonist, David, had to accept his rights as a human being and fulfill his obligations accordingly. Together with a group of singles, he was sent to a hotel where everyone had to find a suitable partner within 45 days or choose to become an animal and be exiled into the wild. David, who chose to become a lobster, is about to fail in his choice of mate and faces the fate of being exiled. "The Lobster" is ultimately a dystopian movie in which a group of singles who don't want to be paired with people or become animals band together to challenge authority and rules.
Whether it is "Don't Let Me Go" or "Lobster", what they present is a more lonely future world, emotions still exist, but the social relationships and interpersonal relationships on which it depends are disappearing, and compared with the present, the reason why people's emotions are more placeless.
<h1>However, loneliness is always there</h1>
In the world of science fiction, there are a few novels with love as the main line, especially those with a grand world view and background setting, in the world of science fiction writers, love is far less important than exploring the universe and more "realistic" human nature.
In Wang Jinkang's view, love is definitely not the theme of the future world. "Hard science fiction often takes the whole of humanity as the protagonist, focusing on the shocking power of science and nature itself, depicting the sunrise at the birth of the universe and the sunset when the universe is extinguished." Under this structure, love is difficult to become the main line. Wang Jinkang said, "Or from another perspective: the real world (the universe, the living world, human society) has never been 'love first', it is just a psychological illusion of people in the era of pampering and superiority." When hard science fiction strives to show the true face of the world, love naturally retreats. ”
It's not just love that retreats, but also men — men in emotional relationships. "Even the male species dies out, because societies that can reproduce parthenogenetically don't need useless male bees." Wang Jinkang said.
American female writer Ursula Le Quinn's "Nebula Award" and "Hugo Award" double-prize work "Dark Left Hand" explores a certain possibility of gender disappearance in the science fiction world. On a marginal planet called Gessen, traditional gender logic fails. Everyone on the planet Gessen is hermaphrodite, and only during the "Kemu period" when mating and reproduction is required, people are immediately assigned sex under the action of hormones. In a world where gender is randomly assigned, inequality caused by "gender awareness" and gender differences does not exist. When gender does not exist, how do so-called intimate and sexual relationships exist? Whether people will be more relaxed or more confused is the problem involved in "The Left Hand of Darkness".
Han Song also mentioned that in the Chinese science fiction world, gender issues have been discussed many years ago. He has published a set of "matriarchal clan" social series science fiction novels in China. Under the overall framework of that novel, the men in the future world either disappear or become female vassals, and the world returns to a distant matriarchal society. The setting of "Matriarchal Clans in 2438" is that women rule the male world, and where there is domination, there is oppression, and men rebel against oppression, trying to find and build a new world of peace. To some extent, "Matrilineal Clans in 2438" is an irony of the current social inequality between men and women. A similar logic appears in 2077 Matriarchal Clan, where the protagonist spends his life on a spaceship with other men. They had never met a single woman, for in their world women had established sperm banks and could reproduce on their own, leaving the girl who had been born and the boy sent to the place where the protagonist had grown. "Matrilineal Clan in 1983" by Fei Deuterium is a world of emotional regrets, in this matriarchal clan society called Baraterson, women show masculine characteristics in their teenage years, and only when they enter old age do they have the body and functions of women, and have the ability to conceive and have children, so in this world, love and co-conceived life can never be combined.
The future world created by a large number of science fiction novels is weakened or even eliminated by gender differences, which is a rebellion against reality and, to some extent, it also hints at the trend of future social development. After sexual desire is dissolved by rich technology, and gender differences are weakened by reproductive technology and social division of labor, sex-based love will eventually become obsolete.
At that point, if humanity still needs love, the only thing that hinders our emotional connection is our expanding ego.
George Martin's Hugo Award-winning work The Song of Lyanna uses a sci-fi setting to make people choose. On the ancient planet of Santa Creu, everyone lives in the "dark wilderness" of the mind. There is eternal loneliness there, and everything in the world is in a similar loneliness. Only "union" can save a person from loneliness. The practitioners were eager to experience true fusion in the caves of the Saints, and they completed the final step through a parasite called the "Ji Xi Worm". The jifu worm binds people together, and all of them come out of their closed loneliness, open their hearts, fully dedicate their consciousness, and fully accept others. After "bonding", the boundless loneliness disappears in an instant, and tolerance, love and understanding envelop everyone. The latter has a deadly allure, drawing people to abandon their sense of self and get involved.
Someone thus attains eternal union, who overcomes the great fear of self-death and is born again in a selfless way. There are also those who hesitate in the face of their own death.
As a mind reader, the heroine Lyanna has a talent for "union", she quickly gave up herself and gained eternal love and warmth.
The arrogant Wiccachi's inner fears merged, and he was not willing to let go of even a little bit of self, and between self-death and eternal loneliness, he chose the latter.
At the end of the story, Robb, whom Lyanna had loved, shows a contradiction that is closer to human beings. "I'm not sure, maybe I'm still lucky, and I wish there were something greater and more glamorous than union, like the God we knew of a long time ago." Is it true that human beings have two of the most primitive feelings, while Saint-Croats have only one? If so, there may be a way to find, to merge, to escape loneliness without giving up humanity. ”
This is Robb's dream, and it is the dream of all human beings.
(References: Eric Klinenberg, The Single Society; Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Marriage; Nicole Ellison, Rebecca Heino, Jennifer Gibbs, Matching and sorting in online dating.) Thanks to science fiction writers Han Song and Bao Shu, director Yang Chao, and psychological counselor Chen Dui for their information and help)