LOVE IN THE TIME OF ROBOTS:

Female robots offer a particularly provocative window into the current cultural mood. And they’re everywhere, including sprawling alongside naked men in a huge orgy on Sunday’s episode of “Westworld.” Margaret Atwood, whose 2015 book “The Heart Goes Last” features sexbots of both genders, calls female machines emblems of the discomfort that women stir in some men. “They’d rather have a simulacrum that doesn’t talk back, resist, or despise them,” Ms. Atwood observed in an email.

This is rich. Women have been using robots — a vibrator is a primitive sex robot, after all — and calling them instruments of sexual liberation (and even calling it “sex with machines”) precisely because they free them from having to deal sexually with men, who bring complications and an upsetting tendency toward having their own needs and desires. But when men do it, even in fiction, it’s problematic.

Self-awareness fail: The word “vibrator” doesn’t even appear in this article.