Sex Toys, Robots, and Cheating

The topic of cheating and robots came up earlier this week in class. This was a topic which I found to be extremely interesting because no one could agree on what cheating was when  masturbation and sex toys were introduced into the discussion. The act of sex, like another student mentioned in class, is an act that should be reserved for one's significant other. Sex is sex whether it be with another human individual or a sex robot. In class, we were asked if masturbation could be considered cheating. Personally speaking, masturbation is not something I would personally consider infidelity in a relationship. Masturbation is an act that is performed with a sex toy (vibrator, dildo, etc) as opposed to a robot that has been modeled after a human. With a human-like robot that speaks to you, that is practically sex. If robots are going to be modeled after humans and have the ability to talk or express themselves in a human-like fashion, which will happen in the very near future, the act of sex with them would be closer to cheating than it would be with something like a dildo or a vibrator. If robots will have the ability to express or mimic human emotions, I feel it would be easier to construct a relationship with them when compared to sex toys. For example, a sex toy cannot talk to you or hold a conversation with you like a sex robot would be able to.If I were in a marriage, I feel that my husband would be cheating if he were to pursue sex with someone else, even if that "someone else" was a sex robot. If he were to watch pornographic material or masturbate, I would not consider that cheating because it is a sexual act he is doing by himself. It is not something he is doing with some machine that is talking or holding a conversation with him. He is not sexually engaging with a machine that has a human face and or a machine modeled anatomically like a human female. Even if he were to use some type of sexual device normally used by men, it wouldn't be on the same level of complexity as an actual sex robot.  With a sex robot, I feel that it would be just entirely too close to humans in the way that it looks and acts so therefore, in my opinion, it could be considered cheating.