Automating Sexual Injustice: Epistemic Injustice in Fembot Design and Feminist Directions for Equitable HRI
For HRI and feminist technology design, this work identifies a novel form of bias in sex robots and offers concrete design criteria, but remains conceptual without empirical validation.
The paper analyzes how current female sex robots perpetuate epistemic injustice by prioritizing male fantasies over empirical female sexual knowledge, and proposes three feminist design directions for equitable intimate AI.
Current AI-enabled female sex robots, or "fembots," are primarily designed to simulate female sexual responses through a lens of male-centric bias and pornographic stereotypes. This paper analyses fembot development as a failure in equitable robotics, arguing that these machines perpetuate "epistemic injustice" by prioritizing male hedonistic fantasies over empirical truths of female sexual experience in their design decisions. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's framework of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, this analysis demonstrates how fembot interfaces discredit women's lived sexual knowledge and empirical research on female sexual physiology while privileging male-centred fantasies. This paper proposes three Feminist Design Directions including empirical grounding, epistemic plurality, and active consent modelling, which are grounded in Donna Haraway's concept of "Situated Knowledge" and accompanied by concrete evaluation criteria. These directions aim to facilitate a transition toward evidence-based intimate AI that prioritizes epistemic justice, mutuality, and inclusive design for marginalized users including disabled, neurodivergent, and LGBTQ+ communities.