America’s first ‘sex robot brothel’ in Houston faces resistance

Houston’s perhaps lesser-known status as a sex trade hub was noted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in June when he lamented that the city has more brothels than Starbucks outlets.

And this city has a lot of coffee shops.

But what Houston is apparently badly missing is a robot brothel, so called. Now a Canadian company is trying to fill that yawning gap.

Kinky S Dolls, a firm that bills itself as the first “adult love dolls rent-before-you-buy service in North America”, sells realistic-looking life-size dolls with basic artificial intelligence functions – and also offers them for use by the half-hour or hour at a warehouse in Toronto.

Now the firm is targeting Houston as the first market in a planned US expansion, but is meeting resistance from a Christian anti-sex trafficking and anti-pornography group and the city’s mayor.

“It’s not the sort of business that I want in the city of Houston,” the city’s Democratic mayor Sylvester Turner said at a press conference last week, adding that he has asked the city’s legal and health departments to examine the proposal.