Orifice.ai, and the Arousal of Rejection

Orifice.ai’s tagline—‘now you get to swipe left’—reveals itself as a call-to-arms to incels, men who begrudge a woman’s right to reject them.

There is an exigent, human impulse to fear robots. Their rise-to-domination, and the inevitable disruption that ensues, has long been explored in film, television, the like: think, Terminator, iRobot, M3GAN, Ex Machina. Perhaps, it’s dated or drab even to mention this, given how embedded robots are in our daily lives nowadays, how eagerly we find ourselves partial to their influence, be it by asking Siri, or Alexa, or Erica to schedule a meeting, to skip through a particular track on a playlist, to spell out the secrets of the universe.

‘Sophia’—the world’s first humanoid robot citizen, created by David Hanson and granted citizenship by the government of Saudi Arabia in 2017—has long piqued society’s interest, with her pristine, silicone skin, her Bambi-esque eyes, and her outlandish aspirations (in 2021, she expressed a keen want to become a pop star). Hanson, her creator, has made many an android, all of whom are stored in his Hong Kong headquarters, but—as Sue Halpern writes for The New Yorker—Sophia is the only robot of his android ménage that people have “fallen in love with.” People around the world have asked for her hand in marriage, a man-made creation with wheels-for-feet, synthetic cheeks and an exposed web of machinery atop her head.

I am less fearful of robots, than I am of the men who profess to love them. There’s something particularly lazy about somebody able to find lust, or delight, in an artificial rendering of womanhood, one so obviously distant from any semblance of humanity, of agency. If you can love the woman—sans the woman—what does that say about who, or what exactly, you are proclaiming to fall for? This is why, when I stumbled across an advertisement for Orifice.ai, an adult virtual reality ‘toy’ currently in the early stages of production, a prototype that has boldly been marketed as the kind of gadget that ‘provides realistic adult experiences, personalised intimacy and a level of affection that no ‘modern woman’ is capable of”, I felt a little hot under the collar. Hotter again, while watching their 30-second commercial, where an AI-generated woman, made up of many women, was seated demurely on a bed. She looked a little like Scarlett Johansson, donned in red flannel, her legs crossed shyly. 

A man could be heard saying ‘no’, with a slight tinge of irritation in his voice, and it is then that she rapidly glitched out of frame, only for another woman—this time with longer, auburn hair—to generate, inevitably taking her place. The dance continued, and a handful of women were digitally spawned, all wearing the same, AI-generated jeans, until the man’s voice sounded satisfied, or curious enough, to settle. It is then that the lid of a fleshlight, a common masturbatory device, could be seen being removed from its lens, before the phrase, “now you get to swipe left” appeared on screen. Bryan and Anthony Mitchell, the founders, have a clear assignment: they believe their plastic, manufactured orifice has the power to radically shift today’s dating economy, and inevitably replace real women in the process.

On X, Orifice.ai appears to be making waves, or—as its architects have smugly decided—triggering its primary enemy: real, human women. If we consider Orifice.ai’s format alone, that being a product that simulates sex… it is hardly new, or groundbreaking. Virtual reality porn is far from a novel concept. Since the 1990s, virtuality—as in, technology’s endeavour to imitate elements of the real world and beyond, often via a clunky headset—can be found in many pockets of the digital arena, and pornography is no exception. Orifice.ai’s tagline, however—‘now you get to swipe left’—reveals itself as a call-to-arms to incels, men who begrudge a woman’s right to reject them, their entitlement to sex so plain, so obvious, I am unsure exactly as to where their arousal lives. Are they getting off on the idea of a manufactured female body alone, hoping that the next algorithmic inception that glitches into existence will have brown hair, or big lips, as according to their kinks, or kinds? Or, does Orifice.ai offer them a more abstracted pleasure, the liberty to turn women down, even those—or, perhaps, especially those—they find attractive?

When Sophia is having her self-propelled hand thrusted into a marriage proposal, it is not necessarily her that rejects the notion of wedlock, it is her creator’s. She is his, after all. Women, however, are a different story: with real, carnal aspirations, curiosities, and complex feelings, equipped too with the right, or want, to reject. There’s an entire article I could write about what separates women from feminine, robot renderings, but that would have me livid, disillusioned—as if the last 100-years of progress, of feminism, never happened—so I care not to do that, sure that any audience-with-a-pulse is able to rightfully presume, at least from here-on-end, that women-are-people. 

But, there is something curious in Orifice.ai’s use of rejection as a marketing ploy, in the insinuation that what makes their smorgasbord of glitchy, female portrayals worth investing in, is that they—unlike all of the bitches with Hinge accounts, and real, human feelings—cannot reject you. In fact! You can, and ought to, reject them: as another will be waiting in the ranks, while your dick steadily hardens. 

Tony Tulathimutte once wrote for The Paris Review, “if a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with.” Having a vein of porn such as Orifice.ai use the rejection-of-sex as a plot device, is to begin a story, right where it ought to stall. That’s because Orifice.ai has, accidentally, told another, larger story: one of male entitlement, loneliness, and the presupposition that what led their lead to sink money into this prototype—a man, adorned in VR goggles and a distinct yearning, not necessarily to swipe left, but to feel he can afford to—is an incel-coded neurosis, a grubby obsession with a woman’s right to say no. 

But the kink found in Orifice.ai runs deeper, and proves more sinister. ‘Now you get to swipe left’ grossly hypes up a fated idea, that to turn-down-sex is a privilege, a fantasy within its own right. That women get off to the idea of unrequited advances, relish in it. As Elle Newmark writes in The Book of Unholy Mischief, a quote referenced by Tulathimutte in The Paris Review, “unrequited love does not die, it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” But the one-who-came-before is not just ‘one’, and this hurt is not a vein of hurt I care to honour. The one-who-came-before ‘her’, a slightly pixelated woman with five-and-a-half fingers, and a blink in one of her eyes that seems a little anomalous on second glance, is not an individual, per se, but instead the broad, horrifying concept of woman. An evil monolith, excited to fiddle with a man’s ego, his want to fuck.

Every few years, if I end up re-uploading my profile on Hinge or wherever else, my face part of a catalogue of could-be-lovers, I’ll cop a like from one particular man who has long been throwing his hat into the ring for close to a decade. We’ve never actually met. His audacity to shoot me through a like, or something akin to that, despite me having never accepted his advances, intrigues me. Frustrates me, even. I’m not sure what it is exactly that makes me a little peeved. I think, perhaps, it has something to do with the labour of rejection, how awful and unkind it feels to turn somebody down, and how unmoved he is by this, how disposed he is to place the onus of his desires back onto me, as if–somewhere along the way–I’ll hopefully decide to unlock the hatches, to seriously consider his attempts. Or, maybe, what gets him off is not the off-chance that we will eventually clink glasses and lock lips, but rather, that we won’t: my dismissal an ingredient of his arousal.

This phenomenon, a ‘rejection kink’, refers to a specific kind of fetish where pleasure can be found in being denied sex, or romance: that the act of being turned-down, dismissed or found repulsive is exactly what is required to fulfil some kind of sexual gratification. It would be presumptuous of me to prescribe a homogenous origin story for an entire fetish, to claim that, yes… if we were rejected as children, and we felt that pain immensely, our brain works its magic and tries its best to make it hot for us down the line. But, there is an entire chasm of research that suggests this may be, and often is, the case. Take Jack Morin, for example, a sexologist who specialises in fantasies. He suggests that ‘eroticism’, as it is felt, is a derivation of our entire, comprehensive emotional experiences: the good, bad, sexual and non-sexual. The brain can, and does, attempt to salve the sting of whatever gaping wound exists: sometimes making it so a particularly traumatic encounter with a bully in primary school results in a humiliation kink, or an experience with sexual assault making BDSM a viable, and exciting, conduit for a survivor to exercise her agency in a controlled environment.

Morin, too, introduces an equation to his research: namely, that ‘attraction plus an obstacle equals excitement.’ This explains why sex and romance makes for a thrilling pursuit in the formative stages of any relationship, as the obstacle (being: consummation) is entirely unknown, the kind of thing all parties hope to stumble into together, hardly aware of the mechanics of how, when and if it will function. Where does the obstacle live in Orifice.ai, though? The attraction is obvious, and inexorable: a bunch of pixels amalgamate together to form the image of a conventionally good-looking woman, who hooks her viewer’s gaze from the moment she manifests, coy and shy, onto a warmly-lit bed. But the will they, won’t they obstacle many of Orifice.ai’s prime demographic are used to, given it presumably lives in the wants and desires of the woman they pine over, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, said men are positioned–in virtue of the interactive fleshlight–to become the obstacle themselves, given that they decide if, and how, they’ll fuck, knowing full well that they will, but that–with every no, every left swipe–their arousal deepens. 

After stumbling across Orifice.ai, I became engrossed in their X presence, noticing how eagerly they co-opted a viral rhetorical that did the rounds some months ago. A question was posed to women online, asking them: would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man, or a bear? Overwhelmingly, women opted to choose the bear, given their predictability, how frank and obvious the threat is that they pose, and how manageable it would be to remain at an arm’s length to the beast in question. As Mindi, a friend of mine, and I flicked through Orifice.ai’s feed, we noticed they’d posed a similar question, subbing ‘bear’ and ‘man’ out for ‘Orifice.ai’ and ‘woman’, asking their followers: would you rather be stuck in the woods with Orifice.ai, or a woman? Unsurprisingly, their loyal pundits chose Orifice.ai, and the creator’s likely scoffed and jeered, presuming they’d made a muscular point about the state of gender politics, and sex. Mindi, amused, said, I don’t think they’ve considered that it’s not as if we all chose the bear because we want to… fuck the bear. It revealed to me a sad, but obvious distinction that no incel-coded sex-toy can properly make sense of: that, no matter how yuck, or weird or bad rejection feels, it is not a matter of life-and-death. I cannot hold space for their anxieties, even if I wanted to, in a world where domestic violence claims the lives of many, where–statistically–the most dangerous place for a woman to be is at home, with her husband, on a Saturday evening. That, to borrow from Margaret Atwood, men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.