HOUSTON — Houston’s City Council today put the kibosh on a proposed sex robot brothel after it approved several updates to the city's ordinance regulating sexually oriented businesses.
The council amended Chapter 28, Article II, of its Sexually Oriented Business ordinance, to specifically ban individuals from having sex with an "anthropomorphic device," a device that resembles a human being, at a sexually oriented business.
In another amendment, the council also banned the sale of sex robots near churches, schools, parks or residential areas. The amendment, however, wouldn't ban KinkySDolls from selling the dolls elsewhere.
In recent months, KinkySDolls operator Yuval Graviel proposed to build the first robot brothel in the U.S. in Houston. He already has opened one up in Toronto.
Both male and female sex dolls would have been available for Houston patrons at $120 an hour, or they could have purchased them outright (on the KinkySDolls.com website, models are priced from $2,199 to $3,500).
It wasn’t clear at post time if Graviel would consider another U.S. city to open up his sex robot brothel. He didn’t immediately reply to an XBIZ email query.
Just recently, a group of sex workers spoke out against the emerging business of sex robot brothels, specifically pointing to KinkySDolls, which has operated one brothel in Toronto for about a year.
Allissa, a sex worker at Sheri’s Ranch in Pahrump, Nev., said that she became concerned about hearing that Graviel was considering opening a sex robot brothel up in Houston.
“Offering sex dolls as a substitute for human sex workers is not only an insult to sex workers, but it’s also an insult to the millions of clients that seek genuine sexual and emotional connections with professional women like me every day,” Allissa said.
Roxanne Price, another sex worker at Sheri’s Ranch, said that sex robots are “rape-fantasy” objects that men can mistreat and abuse without consequences.
“Men should not be using sex dolls as training wheels for seeing a human sex worker,” Price said.
