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Six in a Bed: The Future of Love - from Sex Dolls and Avatars to Polyamory
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 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.
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.
- GenresSexuality
344 pages, Hardcover
Published June 26, 2024
3 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
About the author
Roanne van Voorst
18 books49 followersRoanne van Voorst is a social scientist, author and public speaker. She has been doing research on the themes of risk, fear and courage for over a decade. Her fiction and non-fiction books have been internationally published.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 25, 2025
This is the 10th nonfiction book about robots I've read this year and it was by far the worst (which is saying something because I wasn't particularly a fan of Eve Herold's Robots and the People Who Love Them either).
Both books have a deep paranoia throughout them that our current use of technology will bring about the end of human connection as we know it. And to be fair, I do think it's worth considering what we lose each time we choose self-checkout over a cashier and what we gain: both socially, economically, and accessibility wise. But I believe these considerations ought to be thoughtful and include real evidence over gut reactions. Unfortunately, this book appears to be failing on both fronts.
van Voorst announces in her preface that she's going to be using her personal experience throughout much of the book. Now, I am an autotheoretical fanatic (please, more Maggie Nelson, more Christina Sharpe!). What van Voorst is doing is ... not that. She offers a semi-measured introduction to various technologies and then, when she has a poor personal experience with them, she extrapolates that to be indicative of humanity as a whole. For example, she talks about participating in virtual worlds with an avatar- a practice she argues can never lead to authentic connections because people are wearing masks, and thus aren't being genuine. She never once talks about a) how trans people often find spaces where they can adopt different genders that feel more authentic than their 'real' selves, b) how disabled folks might find these virtual worlds more accessible than physical spaces, and c) that those connections might be authentic even when mediated through different bodies. She performs other similar dismissals for sex dolls and online sex work (like Only Fans). To be clear, I think some of these technologies are worth dismissing (DNA Matchmaking Tests? You mean EUGENICS???), but that has nothing to do with personal experience and everything to do with political underpinnings.
All this to say that by the time I got to the final two chapters, I was already feeling kind of meh about this book. Then things really went off the deep end. The first half of Chapter 9 is focused on "sexless youngsters." Like many folks, van Voorst has a strange anxiety about the fact that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations. She posits that this could be due to the availability of pornography (maybe???), the fact that sex education has made kids more comfortable asserting themselves (one can hope?), and the fact that strict consent policies are destroying young men (WTF???). Her source for the last piece of information is a PODCAST EPISODE BY SAM HARRIS (save me now!). Not once does she examine whether or not it's even a concern to have kids have sex later and she doesn't mention asexuality AT ALL in this chapter (despite claiming she spoke to multiple asexual people for this book).
Then, Chapter 10, A Gender Revolution, she explores the rise of trans and nonbinary people. It becomes immediately clear that she should not be talking about this and has not done nearly enough research. In an early section (titled "Accused") she frets about the fact that so many people are being accused of being TERFs for "just asking questions." She then repeatedly misgenders Judith Butler (this book is not old enough for that to be a harmless mistake), claims that microlabels are the cause of both gender and sexuality essentialism, and ends the chapter with a hope that if her daughter feels boyish she won't do something as drastic as transitioning. SO BAD.
The only good thing I really have to say about this book is it has convinced me to read Carrie Jenkins' What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Otherwise, I'm burning it? Not even worth inflicting on someone else via a Little Free Library.
Both books have a deep paranoia throughout them that our current use of technology will bring about the end of human connection as we know it. And to be fair, I do think it's worth considering what we lose each time we choose self-checkout over a cashier and what we gain: both socially, economically, and accessibility wise. But I believe these considerations ought to be thoughtful and include real evidence over gut reactions. Unfortunately, this book appears to be failing on both fronts.
van Voorst announces in her preface that she's going to be using her personal experience throughout much of the book. Now, I am an autotheoretical fanatic (please, more Maggie Nelson, more Christina Sharpe!). What van Voorst is doing is ... not that. She offers a semi-measured introduction to various technologies and then, when she has a poor personal experience with them, she extrapolates that to be indicative of humanity as a whole. For example, she talks about participating in virtual worlds with an avatar- a practice she argues can never lead to authentic connections because people are wearing masks, and thus aren't being genuine. She never once talks about a) how trans people often find spaces where they can adopt different genders that feel more authentic than their 'real' selves, b) how disabled folks might find these virtual worlds more accessible than physical spaces, and c) that those connections might be authentic even when mediated through different bodies. She performs other similar dismissals for sex dolls and online sex work (like Only Fans). To be clear, I think some of these technologies are worth dismissing (DNA Matchmaking Tests? You mean EUGENICS???), but that has nothing to do with personal experience and everything to do with political underpinnings.
All this to say that by the time I got to the final two chapters, I was already feeling kind of meh about this book. Then things really went off the deep end. The first half of Chapter 9 is focused on "sexless youngsters." Like many folks, van Voorst has a strange anxiety about the fact that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations. She posits that this could be due to the availability of pornography (maybe???), the fact that sex education has made kids more comfortable asserting themselves (one can hope?), and the fact that strict consent policies are destroying young men (WTF???). Her source for the last piece of information is a PODCAST EPISODE BY SAM HARRIS (save me now!). Not once does she examine whether or not it's even a concern to have kids have sex later and she doesn't mention asexuality AT ALL in this chapter (despite claiming she spoke to multiple asexual people for this book).
Then, Chapter 10, A Gender Revolution, she explores the rise of trans and nonbinary people. It becomes immediately clear that she should not be talking about this and has not done nearly enough research. In an early section (titled "Accused") she frets about the fact that so many people are being accused of being TERFs for "just asking questions." She then repeatedly misgenders Judith Butler (this book is not old enough for that to be a harmless mistake), claims that microlabels are the cause of both gender and sexuality essentialism, and ends the chapter with a hope that if her daughter feels boyish she won't do something as drastic as transitioning. SO BAD.
The only good thing I really have to say about this book is it has convinced me to read Carrie Jenkins' What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Otherwise, I'm burning it? Not even worth inflicting on someone else via a Little Free Library.
October 24, 2025
a series of interesting topics!
i think the flow could be improved between chapters but there is a decent amount of citations and references throughout showing how decently researched the book is. i would’ve appreciated the book being slightly longer with more counter arguments to match some of these bold claims.
overall, it was a good train read but im glad i paid £14 not the £25RRP
i think the flow could be improved between chapters but there is a decent amount of citations and references throughout showing how decently researched the book is. i would’ve appreciated the book being slightly longer with more counter arguments to match some of these bold claims.
overall, it was a good train read but im glad i paid £14 not the £25RRP
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews