This article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of emerging commercial sex technologies negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social fiction articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification. To do so, I analyze the design and marketing of consent-recording applications and sex robots programmed to refuse consent. I draw on science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist and queer theory to investigate both how sexual consent is imaginatively scripted into digital technologies and how imagined digital technologies suggest that we approach and value sexual consent. My analysis foregrounds critical readings of the design imaginaries of promissory digital technologies—speculatively suggested through design and marketing materials—to situate them within cultural politics of consent and digital technology as they express desires for specific worldbuilding fantasies about gender and sex.

sexual consent, gender, design imaginaries, sex technologies, sex robots, consent-recording applications

In recent years amid increasing public attention in the United States to rape culture, various technology developers have promised products to record sexual consent between prospective partners. The #MeToo movement's rise years after Tarana Burke's activist work supporting women of color survivors of sexual assault, the credible sexual assault allegations against political figures including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, and the outrage following Brock Turner's light sentencing for sexually assaulting Chanel Miller represent some of the high-profile flash points in the cultural politics of consent. The development of consent-recording applications—digital software and devices designed to mediate and record sexual consent—aim to address anxieties over sexual consent in practice. But while the technologies themselves are not widely available or in use, the negative responses toward consent-recording applications emphasize the reductive, harmful, and misogynistic assumptions and implications informing their conceptions of sexual consent and inattention to gendered power under patriarchy.

This article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of several sex technologies in development negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social technology, a socially constructed fiction.¹ By exploring the design and marketing of technologies such as consent-recording applications and sex robots programmed to refuse consent, I argue that consent is scripted into the imaginaries of emerging commercial sex technologies through fictions of consent articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as an obstacle to sexual gratification. I draw on science and technology studies, digital media studies, and feminist and queer theory to investigate both how designers imagine scripting sexual consent into digital technologies and how imagined digital technologies suggest that we understand sexual consent itself. My analysis foregrounds critical readings of the design imaginaries of emerging digital sex technologies—suggested through promotional materials—to situate them within the cultural politics of sexual consent and digital technology in the United States and much of the West as they shape desires for specific worldbuilding fantasies about gender and sex.

Sex technologies, like other technologies, are not neutral. As Lynn Comella emphasizes, commercial “sex toys and related products convey a powerful set of ideas about sex and gender” in their design and promotion by rendering particular erotic subjects, desires, and uses legible and marketable (2017, 114). Sex technologies can range in function, purpose, and user, as designers create and marketers sell them for a variety of erotic practices to different target consumers. This includes technologies that impact sensation (vibrators, blindfolds, lube, etc.), shape bodies and bodily contact (dental dams, condoms, slings, etc.), envelop and cover (sleeves, sheets, etc.), penetrate (anal plugs, strap-ons, dildos, etc.), support fantasy and role play (costumes, props, etc.), simulate interpersonal interaction (blowup dolls, sex robots, etc.), and mediate communication between partners (dating websites, chat rooms, hook-up applications, etc.), among others.²

Furthermore, designed technologies and technologies in the process of design cohere specific imaginaries. According to Lucy Suchman, imaginaries are the envisioned social and material arrangements, ideas, and values that inform and result from culturally situated practice (2007, 1n1), and technological design imaginaries emerge from technological design and marketing. In the context of sex technologies, Bo Ruberg emphasizes that the imaginaries of such technologies negotiate “implicit assumptions about which people and which desires matter when it comes to the intersection of sex and tech” (2022, 2), which has long shaped the historic and ongoing development of sex technologies themselves. These implicit assumptions mark who are the intended and implied users of a technology, which express, following Elizabeth Ellcessor, the “hegemonic arrangements of uses, users, and circumstances through which a [technology] and access to it are constructed and reinforced” (2016, 63) in the technology's imaginary. In contrast, actual users are those who use the technology once it is available, whether they are intended users or not. Nonetheless, critical attention to intended and implied users in the design and marketing of commercial technologies, including technologies in development, highlights how designers and producers construct and identify preferred users as having (or as encouraged to have) specific wants and needs to satisfy.

As one example, Ryan and Jenn Cmich promoted the LoveSync device to improve communicating sexual desire between partners (LoveSync 2020).³ First launched through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2019, the LoveSync is a pair of networked electronic buttons, one for each partner (and it presumes couples as its users). Users can discreetly press their respective button to toggle recording individual interest or disinterest in sex. The status of each user's LoveSync button is withheld from their partner unless both buttons simultaneously record interest in sex, in which case the device alerts both partners of mutual willingness. Partners could then enjoy the benefits of increased sexual activity, all while minimizing the risk of possible face-to-face or explicit rejection when approaching a partner who may potentially be uninterested in sex. Although LoveSync's Kickstarter campaign successfully raised $21,600 on a funding goal of $7,500, popular press coverage noted how using LoveSync could replace explicit conversation about sexual desire entirely (Bryan 2019; Farokhmanesh 2019; Valens 2019).

This criticism of LoveSync's potential use for eliminating rather than encouraging direct conversation about sexual desire between partners demonstrates how the uses of technologies matter. Following Sara Ahmed, use matters because it manifests “forness” (2019, 7), the expression of purpose that motivates what is used, how, and by whom. LoveSync's imaginary characterized the possibility of rejection of sexual advances as a potentially adverse problem in relationships. The Cmichs asserted that LoveSync was for users unsatisfied with their sex lives and that the device would help them to “never miss a chance for romance” from fear of potential rejection (LoveSync 2019). LoveSync's solution to what the creators framed as awkward conversations regarding sexual desire involved a device for removing the need for such conversations altogether in order to circumvent the potential risk of rejection from one's partner. Consequently, the intended users of LoveSync's imaginary desire increased frequency of sex, feel wary of determining mutual interest in sexual activity with their respective partners, and wish to avoid conversations about interest in sex with said partners.

The possible uses represented in a technology's design imaginary—by its designers, manufacturers, and advertisers—suggest particular kinds of preferred user subjects. LoveSync's promoted design reduces the negotiation of sexual desire to a synchronized match of button presses recording willingness for sex without conversation rather than supporting users in understanding that negotiating sexual desire and rejection are constitutive parts of healthy romantic relationships. LoveSync's design imaginary encourages users to understand the process of determining mutual sexual desire between partners as an awkward obstacle to sexual gratification, rife with potential for rejection that threatens relationships themselves. The meanings of intended and implied users that designers and marketers of sex technologies construct through the design imaginaries of sex technologies reinforce, negotiate, and contest specific conceptions and representations of sexual subjects and erotic practices, communicating what sexual pleasure is, who should get or is in need of sexual pleasure, how they are to use such technologies, with whom, and why.

To consider further the significance of technological use, I draw on Robin Bernstein's contention that recognizing technologies as scriptive things emphasizes how material artifacts suggest and scaffold meaningful user behaviors through cultural scripts—socially situated templates of action (2011, 71-72). Bernstein emphasizes, however, that like how a theater script provides a structuring possibility for a performance but is ultimately nonbinding, so, too, is a scriptive thing (71) because individuals negotiate literacies, desires, and improvisations in unanticipated and variably situated ways to execute scripts in actual technological use. Despite the possibility of deviating from such scripts, however, the intended and implied scripts of scriptive things contribute to the shaping of preferred users and uses in a technology's design imaginary.

LoveSync's intended use to match mutual willingness for sex among partners involved recording sexual consent through scripting interpersonal processes of discussing, determining, and withdrawing consent between potential sex partners through processes scripted into digital code. Although characterizing sexual desire on a spectrum ranging from “need/passion” and “interest” to “disinclination” and “aversion” in promotional materials, the creators of LoveSync reinforced an understanding of sexual desire as a reductive binary of “interest” and “disinterest”—consent and non-consent, respectively—through their device (LoveSync 2019). This simplified scripting of consent reproduces the pervasive model for consent in the US (Pateman 1988), which is rooted in Western liberal humanist philosophy and contract law that constructs consent as a binary form of conditional permission by a purportedly autonomous subject capable of self-determination (Greenblatt and Valens 2018a, 3). Consent presumes agency by a free and self-possessed subject; however, agency and, subsequently, consent are circumscribed by the limits that articulate how agency can be enacted. Attending to the social construction of consent itself, Joseph J. Fischel demonstrates how dominant cultural understandings of sexual consent overburden the concept to stand in for a broad range of criteria, including individual autonomy, willingness, and desire, while simultaneously remaining insufficient in use as consent is often treated as a self-evident binary without adequate attention to power inequities that constrain consent in practice (2019, 3-4).

Consent is a sociopolitical, economic, and legal fiction constructed to articulate an autonomous and free liberal human subject but is not manifest in lived reality structured through systems of oppression, particularly with respect to gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and other axes of social identity.⁴ Liberal humanism, following Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “covers over and devalues racialized and gendered work to produce the ideals of freedom, autonomy, and morality undergirding the figure of the human” (2019, 165) as a self-possessed subject capable of consent centered in white able-bodied masculinity, which has been centrally generated through violence against Black subjects under racial subjugation. Hortense J. Spillers (1987), Saidiya V. Hartman (1997), and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson (2020), for instance, illustrate how US chattel slavery actively and continuously denied Black slaves the capacity for autonomy and consent in order to treat them as property incapable of the self-possession granted to white subjects under a humanism shaped through white supremacy. US chattel slavery bolstered a self-possessed white subject whose autonomy was contrasted by the captive Black body controlled by others (Atanasoski and Vora 2019, 193). Nevertheless, the autonomous and self-possessed liberal subject and their presumed consent remain fundamental fictions organizing contemporary US life under ongoing white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and other systems of inequity and ideologies of power.

In understanding consent as a social fiction or script, my aim is not to dismiss consent. Rather, drawing on Fischel's argument that we need to “screw consent” (2019, 4), we must critically work to tighten, refine, and re-script the dominant cultural constructions of consent to address more precisely what consent should mean, how we use consent, and also what it cannot accomplish. To do so requires interrogating consent itself, including in emerging technological design.

Various emerging consent-recording mobile phone applications—such as Good2Go, LegalFling, We-Consent, Consent Amour, and YesMeansYes, among others—seek to provide technological solutions to anxieties over sexual consent. In so doing, these technologies in development reinforce an understanding of sexual consent as granting permission by those recognized as self-possessed for another to have access to one's own body. For example, Good2Go, which garnered controversial press in 2014 (Buist 2014; Gibson 2014; Hess 2014), promised to assess whether a potential sexual partner was “good to go,” willing to and capable of consent to sex (“Good2Go App” 2014).⁵ An application user would hand their phone to a potential partner to complete a series of prompts about their consent and their sobriety level from options including “Sober,” “Intoxicated but Good2Go,” and “Pretty Wasted.” Selecting “Pretty Wasted” would result in an alert from Good2Go that they “cannot consent,” demonstrating that the application incorporates sobriety level into its consent calculus. However, there are no criteria for a potential partner to determine the difference between the imprecise sobriety states that the application uses—what is the line between “Intoxicated but Good2Go” and “Pretty Wasted”?—and no means to validate self-reported sobriety level.

While Lee Ann Allman, Good2Go's creator, sought to design a tool to reduce sexual assault on college campuses, Erica Buist, for the Guardian, emphasizes that “[Good2Go] gets more sinister when you consider who would download it—men who are nervous of being accused of rape. Is this something non-rapists lose sleep over?” (2014). Proposed consent-recording applications predominantly require users to record in advance their consent to sex, thereby reassuring users that the program will protect them. However, these consent-recording applications, rather than protecting potential victims (disproportionately women), script the consent process for those paranoid that they may be accused of rape (primarily men) through their function to record agreement to consensual sex. Men worried about accusations of sexual assault are the implied users in imaginaries of consent-recording applications.

LegalFling's approach, as another consent-recording application, was even more paranoid as it marketed aggressively the supposed legal weight of the record it offers.⁶ LegalFling claimed to “[create] a legally binding agreement, which means any offense is a breach of contract” (“LegalFling” 2018). Central to the application's promotion by the Dutch technology startup LegalThing was that LegalFling would store records of consent contracts using blockchain technology, relying on perceptions of blockchain technology as a secure form of decentralized record-keeping used for cryptocurrencies (Golumbia 2016; Swartz 2018). Emphasis on the application's purported, though not verified, viability in court—from its “lawful” name to its assertion that it is “legally binding”—suggested its intended use in sexual assault cases and its orientation toward legal fears. But like Good2Go, LegalFling received criticism during its promotion as “a deeply flawed representation of sexual consent” (Ehrenkranz 2018; also Bernard 2018; Cole 2018).

By promoting simplistic solutions to worries over consent in practice, the imaginaries of consent-recording technologies like Good2Go and LegalFling scripted sexual consent using the dominant understanding of consent as conditional and contractual access to oneself as property by presumably fully autonomous subjects. Such approaches fail to consider consent as a complex negotiation, including how coercion, intimidation, and deception may shape the use of these technologies, how they may enact harm in use, and how they communicate understandings of consent itself. In the promotional video for Good2Go, the creators claimed that the consent-recording application offered an “opportunity for two people to pause and reflect on what they really want to do, rather than entering an encounter that might lead to something one or both will later regret,” promising a seemingly empowering approach to encourage discussion of sexual desire between potential partners (“Good2Go App” 2014). However, that Good2Go contrasted this promise with anxieties about potential regret emphasized how such attempts to use digital technology to record sexual consent can reproduce suspicious, individualistic approaches to consent itself. Ultimately, these sex technologies, in mobilizing fears of accusations of sexual assault, scripted consent as a burdensome obstacle through registers of anxiety, fear, shame, and frustration that impedes sexual gratification.

While the imaginaries of consent-recording technologies like LoveSync and Good2Go aimed to script use behaviors through a consenting fiction among sex partners, the Roxxxy sex robot represented another way that designers can script a fiction of consent into devices. Douglas Hines—founder and chief engineer of the US-based robotics company TrueCompanion—began promoting a prototype of the Roxxxy at the 2010 Adult Video News' Adult Entertainment Expo as a sex robot constructed in the image of a woman and programmed to perform different personalities, such as “Wild Wendy,” “S&M Susan,” and “Young Yoko” (“TrueCompanion” 2017).⁷ Much can be criticized about the misogynistic logics governing the design of these programmed personalities, such as how “Young Yoko” was described as “oh so young (barely 18) and waiting for you to teach her” (“TrueCompanion” 2017). But the promotion of the “Frigid Farrah” setting drew particular concerns across online outlets in 2017 (Bates 2017; Prakash 2017; Taylor n.d.). Critics noted how the “Frigid Farrah” persona would afford users the ability to enact fantasies of perpetrating rape against women, since TrueCompanion advertised that “Frigid Farrah” would perform the denial of consent, as the “reserved and shy” personality would, “if touched in a private area, more than likely... not be too appreciative of your advance” (“TrueCompanion” 2017). Although TrueCompanion responded to such criticism by affirming that “rape is never an activity that should be supported or encouraged,” the company refused to acknowledge that “Frigid Farrah” would enable users to participate in fantasies of perpetrating rape even if that was not the intention, dismissing the criticism as “pure conjecture.”

A fiction of consent animated the promotion of the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” setting; the programmed persona would anthropomorphize the technology itself through representation of a fictional woman refusing consent. In describing this effect as “animated,” I engage critical work on animacy, the cultural politics by which we unevenly attribute agency, life, and, ultimately, subjecthood (Ngai 2005; Chen 2012). For Mel Y. Chen, animacy is central to the social construction of humanness and its others (2012, 3). From stones, dolls, and animals to various categories of the “human,” how we animate and recognize the animation of entities in the world is tied to how we hierarchize and value them.

Significantly, animacy hierarchies are historically and culturally specific, often shifting to reinforce dominant positions of power. Chen explains that while “animacy hierarchies slip and give, ... they slip in particular privileged terms of sexuality, race, and ability, perhaps in part because these are the fragile grounds upon which they have been built in popular ontologies and political cultures in the United States” (2012, 234). In the US, dominant animacy hierarchies operate to construct the white able-bodied adult human man as the most privileged animate subject through distinctions made from purportedly “lesser” others (Jackson 2020). This has been accomplished through the cultural work of surrogacy under white liberal humanism. Toni Morrison and Hartman identify that fundamental to the treatment of Black humans as property under chattel slavery is the cultural process of surrogacy—wherein an often gendered and racialized surrogate entity defines the borders of recognized human autonomy and subjectivity through their exclusion (Morrison 1992, 37; Hartman 1997, 5). Black slaves were conceived as surrogate beings that in their political exclusion from humanity would reinforce the dominance of a white humanism. Extending this work, Atanasoski and Vora (2019) examine how contemporary design imaginaries of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous machines also operate through a form of surrogacy, and, thus, inherit conceptions of subjectivity born from histories of enslavement. The significance of technological surrogates for our understanding of human subjectivity, they argue, lies in the fact that “precisely because such technologies can never be human, they allow for an exploration of the aspirations for humanity” (5).

The Roxxxy invoked both dolls and robots as constructed surrogates with human-like appearances and behaviors to communicate the human as social category. The interest in adding robotic functionality to commercial sex dolls manifests through the shifting development and marketing of sex dolls from masturbatory technologies to technologies of personal interaction and attachment as developers increasingly animate them to appear more responsive and lifelike (Levy 2007, 249). Sex robots, including the Roxxxy, animate sex dolls and participate in a Western cultural history of robots as mechanical workers (Rhee 2018, 17-24). The term “robot” itself originates from the Czech word for “slave” (Atanasoski and Vora 2019, 33). Because robots are imagined as laboring machines under human direction, Safiya Umoja Noble emphasizes that robotics are “inscribed with troublesome ideas about race and gender” (2021, 200) inherited from histories of labor and mechanization. In examining the racialization of sex robots, for instance, Mitali Thakor (2018) explores the cultural logics shaping the eroticization of skin in sex robot design and manufacturing and the historic and ongoing violences of such eroticization. Recognizing how particular entities and technologies function as surrogates highlights how categories such as slave and property and artifacts such as doll and robot function to define, negotiate, and communicate the boundaries marking inclusion in and exclusion from the privileged recognition of human subjecthood, autonomy, and consent.

My approach to sex technologies like the Roxxxy as surrogates also recognizes such technologies as proxies. According to Dylan Mulvin, proxies are things that operate through substitution and representation (2021, 6). As representations that stand in for something else, proxies delegate; they bear particular social relations, actions, and responsibilities displaced from others (6-7). For example, the capacities of representation and delegation ascribed to sex technologies like the Roxxxy as proxies for women's bodies derive from what is constructed and marketed as desirable in women's bodies under patriarchal capitalism.

The Roxxxy's design imaginary centered a humanoid robot in the likeness of a woman whose labor is to provide sexual pleasure to men through performances of various personalities. This design imaginary reinforced existing cultural attitudes regarding gender and its relation to work, which inform the scripts that shape use of the technology (Robertson 2018, 98-102). For instance, the default feminized gendering of digital conversational assistants—interactive computing technologies programmed to assist users via presenting themselves as sentient—by their engineers and marketers rehearses existing associations that subservient labor is the domain of women and feminized subjects (Rhee 2018; Lingel and Crawford 2020; Toncic 2021). Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Microsoft), as examples of digital conversational assistants, present as feminized subjects through coded software scripts that script user interactions with the technology as if commanding and receiving assistance or care from a woman. This gendering of digital conversational assistants and the software scripting of assistive function as feminized labor perpetuates the underlying metaphor of “computer as woman” that has been prominent in the field of human-computer interaction since the 1960s (Brahnam, Karanikas, and Weaver 2011, 405), which, itself, results from the history of women as the original computers—workers who operated computing technologies on behalf of others—during World War II in the US (Light 1999). As such, technologies that proxy as women to perform care and service labor historically assigned to women, whether digital conversational assistants like Siri or sex robots like the Roxxxy, extend the history of feminized and devalued labor under patriarchy (Atanasoski and Vora 2020).

Designers, marketers, and users of commercial sex technologies that proxy for women's bodies delegate the labor of generating sexual pleasure primarily for men from women. This delegation of sexual labor from women's bodies to these sex technologies relies on promoting predominantly to men as implied users the desire for sexual gratification that is more convenient, affordable, reliable, or preferable than sexual gratification from prospective encounters with human women. While there exists diverse reasons for actual users to purchase and use such technologies, that such sex technologies are primarily marketed to function as proxies is vital to their preferred meanings of use, consumption, and pleasure. As Mulvin emphasizes regarding the worldbuilding capacity of proxies, proxies are “always memories of a world gone by and forecasts of a world to come” (2021, 201).

TrueCompanion promoted the Roxxxy as a sex robot modeled as a woman and animated to perform different scripted personalities, granting men as the primary implied users the ability not only to interact with a proxy of a woman's body but also to be in control of that proxy. Within their design imaginaries, users desiring and having access to sex robots—if we recognize them as proxies—amounts to users also having access to the fantasies and desires that motivate and shape their development and marketed alongside them. Consequently, these sex technologies proxy not only for women and women's bodies but also particular desired relations with women and women subjects under patriarchy. Regarding various trends in the design imaginaries among commercial sex robots, Atanasoski and Vora outline how such designs offer particular recurring scripts to men as intended users, including treating women as property and interacting with fully customizable women (2019, 189-91). The Roxxxy offered a particular fantasy drawing on the Pygmalion myth, where men fabricate women animated to their personal desires rather than interacting with women as independent and autonomous subjects (Ruberg 2022, 204-09). To use the Roxxxy as imagined was to access a worldbuilding fantasy showcasing what Thomas Foster describes as the “the mechanical [woman, which] represents a femininity safely under male control and therefore the possibility of dispensing with actual women, in a classically fetishistic operation” (2005, 98).

Central to the imagined use of the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” setting was the incorporation into the technology's design and promotion the semblance of conditional access through the animation of fictional autonomy to the technology itself, though a scripted fiction of consent to violate. The technology was not simply meant to index the physical body of a woman but also to provide interaction with a proxy for an imagined personhood of a woman—specifically of a woman refusing consent—fully under the user's choice to either recognize or subjugate. This “desire for the simulation of consent from a site where subjectivity is structurally made to be impossible,” as Atanasoski and Vora suggest, reveals the desire for the assertion of one's autonomy through the active and perpetual denial of a surrogate other as an equivalently legitimate subject (2019, 192).

The imaginary of the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” setting scripted uses rooted in pleasure derived from perpetrating rape against women. To use the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” as potentially scripted was to violate the imagined consent of the technology as if it were an autonomous person—a fiction of a consenting subject—as a proxy for the consent of a woman without repercussions for doing so. That is, consent and the presumed subjectivity underlying it are imagined but, ultimately, fictitious: a consenting fiction that matters so long as it cannot actually be enforced, denied, or withdrawn. It is a desire for the denial of consent not to be an obstacle to sexual gratification but rather a source of sexual gratification through the violence of transgressing consent's denial.

In treating explicit consent as the line between what counts as consensual sex and what counts as rape, consent-recording applications like Good2Go and LegalFling as potential technologies for documenting consent frame consent as an obstacle to sex through what Jetta Rae criticizes as the “consent as conquest” (2015) approach. Rather than scripting consent as an obstacle to conquer—or pleasurably transgress in the case of the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” setting—the design of sex technologies aiming to facilitate communication among partners should move beyond mediating sexual contracts and recording consent. Existing critical work in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has explored alternative approaches to designing—or scripting—consent, into technological devices (Luger and Rodden 2014; Lee and Toliver 2017; Nguyen and Ruberg 2020). Ewa Luger and Tom Rodden (2014), for example, argue for shifting from a logic of “securing consent” before interaction to one of “sustaining user agency” throughout interaction, suggesting that technologies should not simply record consent from users in advance but rather support user self-determination for the duration of use. Similarly, Una Lee and Dann Toliver (2017) propose their design approach called “consentful technology”—a critical framework centering user agency and consent in digital interaction.

In urging a move beyond a “consent as conquest” approach, Rae (2015) argues for attending to the contexts that shape the conditions of consent itself. According to Rae, “When we talk about consent, we're not just talking about you agreeing to something. We're talking about the framework within which you can agree to something and the tools you have access to in order to agree.” This argument to critically interrogate what we make of consent as we might or might not give it suggests that we “screw consent” (Fischel 2019) by attending to the uneven political grounds of present and historic conditions that shape how we understand consent itself, what consent signifies, and how consent is put into practice and power (Hartman 1997, 53-55; Atanasoski and Vora 2019, 192-94).

To explore such a possible design approach to consent, one that recognizes consent not as a stable and contractual precondition for sexual encounters but as a constitutive element throughout the situated and unfolding sexual encounter, I draw on Paul Dourish's arguments regarding context-aware computing as a model. Dourish's critique of early work in context-aware or context-sensitive computing describes how attempts for computing systems to respond to social context treated context as a form of stable information measurable out in the world that technology could sense (2004, 4-5). Contrasting this assumed representational ontology of context, however, Dourish argues for an interactional understanding of context as the dynamic and situated effect of activity, as context emerges out of rather than existing as a precondition for activity. Subsequently, he suggests that computing should not aim to sense and represent context but instead could contribute to its production. For Dourish, the representational approach to context involves asking “what is context and how can it be encoded?” (5). Instead, we should understand context as interactional: “how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of the context of their actions?” (6).

Extending Dourish's discussion in order to treat consent as context, we might re-script consent in technological design through an interactional instead of a representational approach. Rather than a representational framework that asks “what is consent and how can it be encoded?,” we should ask “how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of consent for their actions?” This shift suggests that we approach consent as a collaboration maintained by those involved and not a prerequisite check box, an obstacle to overcome, or a burdensome chore to complete in order to protect oneself from potential accusations of sexual assault.

By re-scripting consent as interactional, we might design technology to contribute to the ongoing collaborative work and maintenance of consent instead of attempting to use digital technologies to solve (and thus treat) consent as a problem. Rather than seeking to record consent, sex technology designers interested in mediating communication could ask users to think deliberately about the framework of consent itself as integral to their interactions. Designers might encourage users to recognize that one does not give consent and then later retract it, but, rather, one maintains consent, including a shared understanding of what consent is, through the duration of the activity. Thus, designers might create emerging technologies to support users not in securing consent but in better attending to their wants and needs, and the wants and needs of others, so that they can share an understanding of consent to determine most appropriately their interest and disinterest in consenting to their shared experience. In so doing, such technologies rather than scripting consent as a frustrating or obstructive precondition for sexual gratification that technology can record could instead foster the work of negotiating consent as a valued interactional collaboration among sex partners, one that strives to attend to the contexts, conditions, and particularities of participating subjects.

The imaginaries promoted through the design and marketing of commercial sex technologies—whether they exist or are widely adopted—communicate, legitimate, and attempt to sell specific conceptions of sexual users, practices, and pleasures. Analyzing how designers script sexual consent in and through contemporary technological design imaginaries reveals much about how dominant cultural understandings of and attitudes toward consent—as contractual bodily access, as awkward conversational topic, as protection from future accusations, as burdensome obstacle to pleasure, and so forth—reproduce particular fictions about consent under liberal humanism and patriarchy in the US and much of the West. The imaginary of a sex technology like the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” personality, in animating a proxy for a woman's subjecthood through a sex robot programmed to deny consent, encouraged users to violate a woman's non-consent and enact fantasies of sexual assault without the expected consequences of doing so. Consequently, the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” setting scripted users to derive pleasure through the disregard of what is framed otherwise as an obstacle to individual gratification: the autonomy and consent of women as subjects. In offering a fictional consenting subject, a sex robot scripted to perform a fiction of consent that functionally does not matter, the Roxxxy's “Frigid Farrah” personality proxied for a woman whose consent is inconsequential and for a world populated by such women.

Furthermore, sex technologies like consent-recording applications offer imaginaries that predominantly attempt to script the negotiation of consent as behavioral action through scripted code seeking to document consent into a binary logic as defense against potential allegations of sexual assault and rape. The development and marketing of consent-recording applications such as LoveSync, Good2Go, and LegalFling offer not only particular consenting fictions of what consent is, through how they seek to record it as merely a precondition for sexual activity. In asking users to record their consent as dictated through the application as a solution to consent seen as an obstacle, consent-recording applications also reveal another consenting fiction—that users consented to this specific fiction of consent in the first place. Consent-recording applications, as emerging technologies that do not ask us to rethink dominant cultural understandings of sexual consent, aim instead to provide simplified proxies for nuanced conversations about sexual desire that are often treated as awkward, shameful, and tedious. Rather than approaching consent as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification that needs solving through technological design, we might proliferate design imaginaries for sex technologies that encourage communication among partners who recognize consent as constitutive of sex itself. Instead of trying to simplify how to talk about consent, turning it into a checkbox to mark off as quickly as possible, we might imagine scripting sexual consent in ways that encourage shared processes of opening up and complexifying what we mean by consent, how consent can operate in practice, and what we make of consent in our collaborative relations with others.

¹ For each major sex technology example, I will footnote information about its current state of development and release as of November 2022.

² For sex technologies, see Maines 2001; Bardzell and Bardzell 2011; Smith 2013; Ferguson 2014; Comella 2017; Lieberman 2017; Devlin 2018; Ruberg 2022.

³ As of November 2022, LoveSync remains available for purchase online, though the official website has not been modified since July 2020.

⁴ For the limits of sexual consent, see Dworkin 1987; Pateman 1988; MacKinnon 1989; Gill 2015; Greenblatt and Valens 2018b; Fischel 2019; Jaleel 2021.

⁵ In 2014 Good2Go was no longer available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and the company website shut down in 2016.

⁶ LegalFling was available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in 2018 before removal in March 2019.

⁷ The TrueCompanion website is no longer functional as of November 2019.

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Josef Nguyen is an associate professor of critical media studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and is currently working on a new book examining digital technological design and the cultural politics of consent.