[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 45
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 32
Part 33
Part 34
Part 35
Part 36
Part 37
Part 38
Part 39
Part 40
Part 41
Part 42
Part 43
When Helper and I arrived at the room, Lars informed me that my block of time wasn’t for another hour. I spent it hunting down Eric and Ellie so I could put them on the charging cradles I’d set up by the bed. “What a day it’s been”, I thought. When at last Lars emerged, rubbing his eyes and handing me the key, the embrace of that soft, springy mattress was the most heavenly sensation conceivable.
At least until Helper joined me. “Helper…” started, voice stern. “I don’t think we should...” She shushed me, then draped her leg over mine and nuzzled my neck. “Listen, Helper. About the other night. I was so out of my mind with fear over what might’ve happened to you. I...let myself do something I really shouldn’t have when you appeared. I was just so relieved to-”
But she wasn’t even listening. “Hold me” she whispered. “I’m scared.” I lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking “I’m scared too.” After a while of stewing in my own troubled thoughts, Helper spoke.
“Why is love so complicated?” I didn’t have a satisfying answer at the ready, but it turned out to be rhetorical. “It isn’t a problem for me that you’re a human. It isn’t a problem for you that I’m a machine. It’s only a problem to the others. But why does that matter what they think when I don’t want to be with them? I want to be with you. Only how you and I feel should enter into it.”
I wanted to explain it simply. But like she said, it’s a complex topic. So I spent some time digging around in my memory for examples that would make sense to her. “Helper, human social dynamics are a convoluted mess that can only be understood if you remember that we’re primates. I don’t recall how many zoology education packets you’ve been through. Do you know much about how wild apes live?”
She shook her head, dried tear residue on her cheeks still faintly luminous. “In ape societies, there’s an alpha. One male who rules absolutely. What do male apes want that kind of power for? Mainly to control sex. Who sleeps with who, and when. They hoard most of it for themselves but dole it out here and there to obedient, allied males who reinforce their authority.”
I briefly recalled Big Red’s speech down in the bunker, but neglected to mention it for the sake of simplicity. Helper asked why controlling sex is important. It was difficult to answer that in a way that didn’t make us look bad, so I sacrificed dignity for clarity and laid it all out.
“Human males commonly have jealous and insecure feelings about women. They guard their hearts fiercely because emotional pain is something they are taught from a young age to suppress, so they never learn how to properly deal with it. As a result their romantic dealings with women are in large part predicated on fear.
Fear that she has been with other men before, ones she found more sexually skilled. Fear that there’s some other man in her past that she’ll always love more. Because all positions of power were held by men until relatively recently, it wasn’t difficult to impose behavioral rules on women designed to limit their opportunities for sex or romance prior to marriage.
This was done in order to ensure that girls of a marriageable age would be wholly inexperienced in carnal matters and thus have nobody else to compare their husband’s sexual performance to. This practice coddled and assuaged male fears of unfavorable comparison, but deprived women of the same enjoyment of life available to most men via brothels and mistresses.
This is how sex became so powerfully stigmatized, in order to keep young women fearful of expressing themselves physically so that they arrive at an age suitable for marriage psychologically and emotionally conditioned for male comfort.
We haven’t evolved much since then, except that women now have sufficient social and economic bargaining power to leverage the same sort of sexual control against men. There are now numerous criteria women look for in male suitors that they are weighed against and turned away if found wanting.
Women now commonly court and sleep with several men at once, and men concern themselves more than ever before with what they can to do be more sexually appealing to women. As you might imagine, the more traditionally minded men in society are not at all pleased with this development.
At the root of it, we’re afraid. That someone will break our hearts, mainly. Sex is so intricately bound up with emotion that sexual freedom was among the earliest casualties of that fear. Heartbreak is a pain beyond anything possible to experience from physical injury, which humans often go to great, sometimes cruel lengths to prevent.
Controlling women was an attempt to remove risk from the equation. To force things to turn out in a way that wasn’t hurtful to men. But it ignored the suffering of women and their right to autonomy. That still happens today, just not exclusively to women.
Same sex pairings were another popular target of that stigma for centuries. Because it disgusted men, many of whom were in fact disturbed by the arousal of their own dormant homosexual desires that they couldn’t accept, the same structure of social control which repressed women was also used to repress gays.
They are mentally ill, it was argued. They don’t know what they want. Of course the male judges and doctors making these pronouncements felt they were in a position to decide on their behalf, often concluding that what their subject really wanted was a variety of torturous medical treatments designed to diminish their affection for members of the same sex.
So great is man’s desire to cultivate sexual behaviors he likes and suppress the ones he doesn’t that the dominant religious traditions on the planet revolve in large part around dictating what sort of attitude women should have, what attire they should wear, why they must remain silent in church lest they dismantle these rules by argument, and of course that they must never hold a position of authority over any man.
Who else could be the central object of worship in these religions, but an all powerful masculine deity who not only impregnated a virgin without so much as laying a hand on her, but also conspicuously holds all the same opinions about how human sexuality should be constrained as the average man alive at the time these traditions began?
The ultimate projection of man’s ideal self. A magnified, exaggerated embodiment of male virility with which to frighten both women and gays into restraining their own desires for the comfort and happiness of men.
So you see, it’s hardly a new problem. Sticking our noses into one another’s bedrooms is a time honored human tradition, as is presuming to know what someone else wants...and what’s good for them...better than they do.
You press on that nerve because you are womanly and very desirable to men, sexually. But you’re not a woman, strictly speaking. Nor are you easily dismissed as a simple robot. We have established ideas of where those two fit into society, and into gender politics. Not so much with you.
Who is this, they ask. How should I feel about this strange new arrival? Is it okay to develop feelings for this creature? Is it safe? What does this mean for the age old struggle between men and women? Will it tip the scales one way or the other? It confuses them, and confusion makes us angry. It throws a large part of their understanding of human social dynamics into disarray as they refigure it all to accommodate the new variable.”
Quietly absorbing it until now, Helper lamented our overly anxious, belabored handling of love. “I was right to begin with. Humans really do make-make-make it more complicated than...it needs to be. When labels like ‘robot’ and ‘human’ are subtracted, you-you-you and I are simply a pair of beings...each of which feels happier in the presence of-of the other than it does alone or...with anybody else.”
I deliberated internally over whether she had a naive view of the matter or if it was in fact refreshingly, efficiently clear. Those two things often look very similar. Unable to decide, I instead lay there savoring the warmth of her body next to mine.
“Do you want me to plug you in again tonight?” She shimmers happily and nods. I fumble around in the darkness for the tip of the retractable charging cable in her lower back, fumble some more until I get it into the outlet correctly, then crawled back into bed with her. In spite of everything it’s exactly where I wanted to be right then and I was bone tired, so I started to drift off.
Stay Tuned for Part 46!
That’s true! But that’s why every single person want to fall in love, because it’s simple, but at the same time complicated. In reality it could all be as simple as it gets, but people make it too complicated.
When he tried to explain Helper why it’s all so complicated by asking “how wild apes live?” And Helper started answering his question like a teacher to his students. That actually ape male makes all decisions when it comes to mating. With humans it’s natural as well, especially when you press on that nerve, where something doesn’t seem natural. When people crossed this line or press on that nerve, they are being judged. I personally don’t judge, I try to avoid it as much as I possibly can. Who says I’m right and you are wrong? It as well could be the other way. At the end, do what you want to do and respect what everyone else does.
This is thev frst time of reading your story. Wow, I've missed a lot, I will have to go back and read the previous parts.
Trust is the most important thing in a relationship. It is understandable that many women will not want any helper, especially women helper. Men can also be very jealous. Hahaha
What a good way to explain how machismo created a stigma towards sex and women in the past, besides being so primitive on an emotional level and how that should change.
Alex touched a very good point about the step we should take as an egalitarian society.
L ove is always complicated since it is not equal, there will be someone that loves more. I like the use of repetition of some word you adopted in episode. I just wish the area of robot could be liking to the real life. I can't wait for the new episode brother.
Today's episode seems more like a lecture on philosophy. #bringbackodie
Hi, I was following your novel recently and I liked them. With respect to this chapter, not everyone talks about sexuality openly and not all people value women because in the past times they did not take into account the opinions of women. Sex is not only a satisfaction if it is not a need that we all have both man and woman I hope to continue reading your novel.
It is difficult to find an explanation to everything about helper sexuality, I see helper as a little girl who asks how babies are born or where they come from, it is a very complicated explanation since their understanding is very little or it is about Do not hurt your feelings or not cause a trauma. As for helper, she is already a mature woman or a mature robot, who has to understand everything so she does not like things as they are or have always been with women and their restrictions, so to speak. I know you're afraid to ask about it or if you understand why it looks like it was put the other day.
Once you fell asleep, do not say because we think of other men if you fall asleep. Sincerely: THE WOMAN
Your stories that I read about robots are very interesting and exciting. Next story about your little robot is different between the part, but the story is connected. The story this time that I take a little bit of it is about a woman's sex. Hahaha .. thanks for sharing @alexbeyman.
Hollé is normal that fear is present in you, and that issue which you were dealing with helper, is a very sensitive issue because sexual evolution is something that includes us all, and on the other hand as you say yourself from small we are taught in our teaching the meaning of the feelings or rather we ourselves realize when they are presented, you have to think that yours with helper is something strange but true and above all it is something that you decided to do and you have to keep going . And a tip for the next do not fall asleep hehehe.
Hello, my novel has caught my attention. That is why I read the previous chapters and I liked them a lot. with respect to this chapter, nowadays the man feels displaced by the woman since nowadays the woman is not afraid to choose the person or man that satisfies her in the sex, and with respect to the same sex couples already Nowadays it is no longer so strange to see them, although not all people see it badly and are mostly criticized in society.