Six in a Bed

Roanne van Voorst is a futures anthropologist, writer, columnist, and president of the Dutch Future Society. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam.

• Acknowledgements Preface1. Adventures with sex dolls2. Six in a bed3. From digital cupids to cheek cell samples in an envelope4. Quarrelling with your lover? Just take a relationship pill5. In love with an avatar6. On unhappy robots, programmers in attic rooms and artificial stupidity7. Rented friends, sologamists and co-living spaces8. The future of sex work: sex care, digitalization and inclusive pornography9. On sexless youngsters, elderly people in love and ethical pornography10. A gender revolution and the end of the heterosAfterword SourcesNotes

“A charming, insightful, and fearless guide to the new frontiers of sexuality.”Steven Pinker, Harvard University and author of How the Mind Works“Roanne van Voorst is one of the Dutch writers I admire most. She’s radical and nuanced, idealistic and open-minded. Whatever she writes about, each time she broadens your horizons and opens your world.”Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind: A Hopeful History“As an anthropologist, Roanne van Voorst has the ideal method for gaining insight into something as corporeal as the future of intimacy: she immerses herself in the worlds she wants to understand … Searching for practices that liberate love requires an open mind, which is precisely what she possesses. Empty moralising has no chance with her.”Marjan Slob, De Volkskrant“Van Voorst ultimately sounds a cautious note that none of these great technological or chemical inventions can really replace the surprising (and we might even say, endearingly annoying) aspects of human interaction…Without human interaction, or its replacement by images, disembodied voices and screens, we will not develop; we will get no feedback on our behaviour. If we outsource our decisions to machines, particularly about love, we will be reneging on a central feature of our humanity itself.”The Critic“excellent”Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement