<p>“A charming, insightful, and fearless guide to the new frontiers of sexuality.”<br /><b>Steven Pinker, Harvard University and author of <i>How the Mind Works</i></b><br /><br />“Roanne van Voorst is one of the Dutch writers I admire most. She’s radical and nuanced, idealistic and open-minded. Whatever she writes about, each time she broadens your horizons and opens your world.”<br /><b>Rutger Bregman, author of <i>Humankind: A Hopeful History</i></b><br /><br />“As an anthropologist, Roanne van Voorst has the ideal method for gaining insight into something as corporeal as the future of intimacy: she immerses herself in the worlds she wants to understand … Searching for practices that liberate love requires an open mind, which is precisely what she possesses. Empty moralising has no chance with her.”<br /><b>Marjan Slob, <i>De Volkskrant<br /></i></b><br />“Van Voorst ultimately sounds a cautious note that none of these great technological or chemical inventions can really replace the surprising (and we might even say, endearingly annoying) aspects of human interaction…Without human interaction, or its replacement by images, disembodied voices and screens, we will not develop; we will get no feedback on our behaviour. If we outsource our decisions to machines, particularly about love, we will be reneging on a central feature of our humanity itself.”<br /><b><i>The Critic<br /></i></b><br />“excellent”<br /><b>Miranda France, <i>Times Literary Supplement</i></b></p>

Love is the most important and intense experience of our life. It pushes us to elation, to heartbreak, to sing for joy and sob in disappointment. Connecting in this way to others is an essential quality of being human: without love, we don’t learn and develop properly as children and we don’t flourish as adults – in short, we’re starved of what we need. But love is on the verge of monumental change. Sex robots are already on the market, polyamory is gaining ground, drugs are being developed that can make you fall in love, and AI and robotics are set to revolutionize how we relate to each other. Debates about whether more than two people should be able legally to get married are heating up; at the same time, an increasing number of people have decided to stay single and who go by the name of sologamists. The futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst spent three years researching love’s fluid landscape and immersing herself in today’s latest trends to gain insight into the human of tomorrow. She cultivated a virtual friendship, hired a rentable friend and an erotic masseuse, shared a bed with sex dolls and flirted with artificial intelligence. She dated and danced in a virtual world, spoke to polyamorists, sologamists, sex workers, pansexuals, asexuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals, men, women, and people who don’t accept the binary gender label. She wanted to know how changes to love are changing our species. This book is her brilliantly engaging answer.
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Acknowledgements Preface 1. Adventures with sex dolls 2. Six in a bed 3. From digital cupids to cheek cell samples in an envelope 4. Quarrelling with your lover? Just take a relationship pill 5. In love with an avatar 6. On unhappy robots, programmers in attic rooms and artificial stupidity 7. Rented friends, sologamists and co-living spaces 8. The future of sex work: sex care, digitalization and inclusive pornography 9. On sexless youngsters, elderly people in love and ethical pornography 10. A gender revolution and the end of the heteros Afterword Sources Notes
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781509558421
Publisert
2024-04-19
Utgiver
Vendor
Polity Press
Vekt
544 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
160 mm
Dybde
31 mm
Aldersnivå
G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
344

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

Roanne van Voorst is a futures anthropologist, writer, columnist, and president of the Dutch Future Society. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam.