Since the 1970s, feminisms have stressed the intersection between gender and technology. Yet, while being mainly focused on the female access to technology, reproductive technologies and a cyborg future, no feminist narrative has ever addressed the ongoing robotic revolution and its relating challenges to the notion of gender, as in the case of sex robots. Shaped as humans and endowed with basic AI capabilities, sex robots are machines programmed to provide sexual performances; their stereotypical shape and behaviour, though, raise questions on their potential to perpetuate gender inequality. Therefore, this paper seeks to assess female sex robots through feminist lens and to repurpose them as a feminist technology.

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique Wessel Reijers and Bert Gordijn’s paper moving from value sensitive design to virtuous practice design. In doing so, it draws on recent literature on developing value sensitive design (VSD) to show how the authors’ virtuous practice design (VPD), at minimum, is not mutually exclusive to VSD. This paper argues that virtuous practice is not exclusive to the basic methodological underpinnings of VSD. This can therefore strengthen, rather than exclude the VSD approach. Likewise, this paper presents not only a critique of what was offered as a “potentially fruitful alternative to VSD” but further clarifies and contributes to the VSD scholarship in extending its potential methodological practices and scope. It is concluded that VPD does not appear to offer any original contribution that more recent instantiations of VSD have not already proposed and implemented.