Courtesy of Radar.com the photograph below is excerpted from Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry by Michael Grecco. He tries to photograph porn stars and show who they are without shooting porn. Isn't porn theater?

Michael Grecco, Control Box, from Naked Ambition, 2007

Grecco says that it is a photo of a Control Box to the Tender Lover, which is a sex machine designed by two Taiwanese engineers from the military. I've always been puzzled by mechanical sex and people building sex machines. Why bother?

Maybe its sex and innovation?

An active community of sex toy hobbyists----a kind of folk art sculpted from the Home Depot palette--in which some inventors have expanded their hobby into thriving cottage industries, selling their creations on eBay and adult stores online.

Or is it about having sex with robots---sex-bots. The argument here is that robot-human sex is the next step in a sexual “evolution” that began with vibrators and inflatable datables. Robot love will have special appeal to those who find it difficult to locate a sex partner – because they are disabled, say, or profoundly married. In presupposing that the robots of the future will, at least in some sense, be alive we have left the world of porn culture for that of artificial intelligence.

David Levy, author of Robots Unlimited (Life In A Virtual Age), says in this interview that:

robot sex will become the only sexual outlet for a few sectors of the population: the misfits, the very shy, the sexually inadequate and uneducable, . . .; and that for different sectors of the population robot sex will vary between something to be indulged in occasionally, and only when one's partner is away from home on a long trip, to an activity that supplements one's regular sex life, perhaps when one's partner is not feeling well, or not feeling like sex for some other reason.