‘Whitney Cummings: Can I Touch It?’ on Netflix: Embracing Our Sex Robot Future On Netflix

Whitney Cummings jokes that generalizes the differences between men and women bought her a house, but it did so much more than that.

Over the course of this decade, Cummings recorded three stand-up specials (two for Comedy Central, and one for HBO), created and starred in her own sitcom (NBC’s Whitney), co-created a hit sitcom (CBS’s 2 Broke Girls), and brought back a classic hit sitcom as a writer and executive producer (ABC’s Roseanne).

And yet, since she released I’m Your Girlfriend for HBO in January 2016, so much has changed about gender dynamics and sexual politics that Cummings not only addresses the new abnormal, but sees into our collective future, making her case for your next girlfriend to be a sex robot.

But first, about that new abnormal. Cummings opens her first Netflix special, Can I Touch It?, by addressing the elephant-sized question in the room that she finds so many men wondering in the wake of #MeToo. And she answers it with an empathic no. If Cummings can resist petting a service dog at the airport, then certainly men can figure out how not to hug their female co-workers. Right?

We get some personal revelations from Cummings to go with her social observations now.

For instance, she recalled a gig she took at 19 as an extra on a TV show, not understanding what it meant at the time when the show’s elderly male director invited her into his trailer for a meeting. Now she knows how to deal with it, and offers advice to any other women grappling with an unexpected sexual assault.

She also has discovered usefully humorous ways of handling and disabling men, whether they’re cat-calling a woman, portraying women as gold-diggers, or trying to trap them into false choices.

At the same time, she realizes that women, despite and perhaps because of enduring thousands of years of mistreatment, might not have prepared for the moment.

It took Cummings a while to figure herself out, too.

“It’s hard to talk about this stuff without sounding self-righteous. That’s my nightmare,” she says, fearing that passion about an issue turns people into assholes.

She manages to avoid that potential pitfall in this hour by coming to terms with her own body. Cummings discloses how feeling shame about herself led to eating disorders in her youth and multiple corrective surgeries in adulthood. Learning about the existence of sex robots, and what goes into making one of them, allowed Cummings to feel better about herself.

That process also leads her down a rabbit-hole. By embedding herself on a message board for men who own sex robots, she learned what they want out of their robots, and in turn, what they perhaps want out of actual women, too.

So Cummings makes the case for the sex robot: “We have to remember, any time there was real progress for women in history, there was some kind of technological advance that took over the chores that women did in the home, so women could move outside the home.” The robot is merely another appliance, not one that’s taking jobs away from women, but one that’s removing chores. Robots aren’t replacing women, she argues. They aren’t taking care of men, but rather, making men take care of them.

And after doing the research, Cummings realized she not only could overcome her own fears, but help a generation of human women do the same, by building and testing her own “Robot Whitney” (which she decides she has to rename).

This raises the stakes in both her real-life relationship with her fiance, as well as her comedy special, sharing the stage with the sex robot she designed in her own image. And the hour closes with a mini-documentary about the making of her robot, just in case you’re still in disbelief about the whole thing.

But don’t worry, the robots are not taking over comedy anytime soon. The household, though? That’s another story.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Whitney Cummings: Can I Touch It? on Netflix