Of all the ridiculous trends in the world of science, the furious debates and stern warnings about the dangers of sex dolls reminds me that sexual hysteria is alive and well among even the most erudite scholars.
The amount of coverage that robot-negative stories get is astonishing. Here’s a very short snapshot of recent news stories, via Google.
I read a longer article today which first implies, and then states, that since there is no evidence robots are good for you, they are therefore bad for you — even though there is no body of evidence that they are bad for you. In other words, the anti-robot movement has finally found a leg to stand on — all those people who said it can be beneficial are wrong! Because a scholarly study said so. I am not as quick to put faith in the results of a study which notes right up front that, “What characterises all discussions of this issue is the paucity of an evidence base,” and whose research mission was to open a dialogue, not leap to conclusions, on what the future might or might not bring.
A sexological study of doll users would be more telling. If I was running a sexological study of robot-doll users, I’d have three critical questions: do you have satisfying sex with your doll? Do you have enjoyable orgasms and feel bonded to your doll during or after the experience? Do you feel a need to hurt someone in real life after sex with a doll?
If people indeed do (as I believe most of them do or they would quickly lose interest in synthetic playmates) have a fun sexual experience with them, that is the biggest benefit we can and should hope for. A satisfying sex life is a great thing, no matter how you express your desires. As long as it harms none (i.e., occurs with a consenting partner of legal age and does not motivate you to be violent), what’s the difference between people who need flesh, people who need a shoe, people who need stockings, people who prefer a diaper, or the Berlin Wall, or a hi-tech robot? Only moral judgment. That’s about it. Moral judgment and fear of unconventional sex acts dictate which types of consensual adult sex acts are permissible and which are not.
You’ve heard the expression, “the heart wants what the heart wants.” It’s not literally true. It’s the brain that does the wanting. That brain sends signals to the rest of the body and waits to hear back. When you’re attracted to someone or something, it’s your brain that jumps on every piece of information available — the look of them, the smell of them, the feel of them, the sound of them, even the taste of them For some of us, particularly fetishists, that powerful law of sensory attraction resides in objects. A charming shoe with a lovely foot in it elicits a brain signal that goes straight to the groin of a foot fetishist. A soft leather jacket with the heady, musty smell of leather can make another person swoon.
All good sex is good for you, no matter the specifics of the experience, no matter what shape your fantasies and desires take. Again, as long as everyone involved is old enough (and mentally competent) to give informed consent, how you do it and who you do it with is a matter of personal choice. The only ones who want to dictate how sex should look are conformists who believe there is only one true way for all humans to experience sexual pleasure. That concept is magical thinking. It’s like saying there’s only one true way for all humans to experience the taste of cucumbers. It’s nonsense based on nonsense.
If more people had more satisfying sex more of the time, the whole world would be a much happier place. If women around the world, for example, were not constantly harassed, assaulted, raped, violated, objectified, demeaned and abused in relationships, but instead often experienced the thrilling heights of orgasmic pleasure, felt loved and wanted in the bodies they have, and could expect respect and kindness in bed, that would be awfully nice. If men weren’t continually shamed for patronizing sex workers, demonized for having high libidos, taught their genitals were “junk,” treated like banks instead of humans, lumped together as beasts and potential rapists, and compelled to live as secret victims of domestic violence, but instead could be allowed to indulge in professional sex services that eased their cravings without shame or penalty, felt loved and wanted in the bodies they have, felt appreciated for the genitals they were born with, and could expect respect and kindness in bed, that would be awfully nice too. If all adults knew only the joy of happy, intensely pleasureful sex instead of the shame, guilt, and resentment they so often do experience around sex, it could change the world. Because all of the outward acts of sexual hate seem mainly to spring from people in some form of psychosexual pain, whether it’s sexual jealousy, sexual shame, sexual insecurity, or sexual loneliness.
The brain and the body require sexual satisfaction to feel whole. The brain has lined up a wide array of mechanisms to encourage the human body to have sex, including a Big Bang of Brain Chemicals to reward you when you climax. If you look at sex from the brain down, it’s obvious that orgasm is part of the health plan for the human body, relieving tension, improving morale, reducing the risks of heart disease, stroke, and reproductive cancers, and improving cardiovascular function in general. People who never get the relief of sex, or who feel ashamed or upset about sex even when they have orgasms, are the most likely to feel unhappy within themselves.
The brain wants us to have joy through sex. If we don’t, we suffer, physically and psychologically. So why not use dolls to relieve suffering?
SEX DOLLS OF YORE
The documented use of sex dolls goes back to the 1600s, when lonely Dutch sailors stuck at sea for long periods, sewed some up to serve as jerk-off toys. From there, it quickly spread through naval culture in other countries. You can read more on the history of synthetic companions in Wikipedia – Sex Doll.
While Dutch sailors get historical credit, chances are people have devised simulacrums for their private pleasures since the beginning of human history. But from at least the 1600s on, the concept of sex dolls seeped into popular culture, reaching new pinnacles of design possibilities with the Industrial Age. By the early 19th century, inventors were working on creating manufactured (rather than tailored) dolls for a growing consumer demand.
In 1918, artist Oskar Kokoschka became notorious in Bohemian circles for a custom sex-doll of his former girlfriend, Alma Mahler, who brutally ditched him and broke his heart. In an act that we’d describe as Revenge Porn, he hired a seamstress to craft a doll in her likeness and though it was a total fail, and the doll was hideous, he nonetheless carried her with him in public, even dining with her in restaurants, and introducing her around as Alma. Ultimately, he destroyed the doll during one exceptionally raucous party with drinking buddies and they ended up cutting off her head, setting her on fire and throwing her out a window during a drunken rage. He ended up getting into huge trouble (alarmed neighbors who saw the doll fall out the window reported to police that the group had murdered a prostitute) but after a few years, things calmed down and Kokoschka went back to making the art that now hangs on museum walls around the world.
That madcap escapade notwithstanding, sex dolls started seeping more and more into mainstream culture. By the 1970s, inflatable party dolls became best-sellers in sex toy stores. They started out basic but by the 1980s, you could find all kinds of specialty inflatables at truck stops on some of America’s most traveled highways. I stumbled into one of those places on I-70, somewhere in Indiana, with an impressive selection of dominatrix dolls (holding limp whips made of the same cheap plastic as the body), stripper dolls (super big bosom areas), and so on. Like 17th century Dutch sailors, many truckers spend long stretches on the road that made them seek out some alternative to using their hands for relief. Where were all the prudes to decry inflatable dolls? They were out there, trust me, they just didn’t have the Internet to screech on.
Dolls have had a long and sprightly history of filling in when a real person was not available. Along with inflatable party dolls, by the way, I need to include mannequins and statues. First documented in 1877, Agalmatophilia is a sexual interest in lifelike forms, including statues, dolls, mannequins, and other inanimate human forms. (For erotic insight into it, MannequinFetish.com serves this fetish.)
So, first, let’s all acknowledge that this a thing. It’s a fetish. A psychiatrically known kinky fetish for about 140 years. Maybe people can’t deal with this fetish, but that’s their problem. Maybe some of them say “oh no, that person will never have normal sex,” to which someone like me says, “what’s normal?” If the mere existence of dolls or a fetish for them depraves our culture, then the damage began in the 17th century, when those horny Dutchmen found a way to diminish isolation and feel as if they were holding a person in their arms. Who knows, perhaps some of them, discovered, in the process, that they had more fun with a doll than a cold, ungiving partner at home. It’s possible. Maybe some of them developed a fetish for the dolls or connected with some authentic need they never knew they had until their first congress with the doll. Anything is possible in human sexuality. No one can know for sure without extensive research into the personal lives and motivations of our ancestors which, of course, is impossible.
SEX DOLLS TODAY
With technological progress come technologically progressive sex toys. Enter the world of dolls who are vastly improved over their earlier prototypes. Today’s dolls look more lifelike and have more functions. Some are so beautiful, you can’t tell they’re dolls until you get close. With AI now beginning to further animate them and make them simulate responsiveness, dolls are becoming an increasingly attractive choice to millions of male consumers around the globe.
Given that I see sex as a primary and important biological function, a fundamental life force that should be treated with understanding and earnest study as opposed to judgment, moralizing, and anti-sex rhetoric, I don’t see more harm in sex with super-nifty technologically advanced dolls any more than women who love using vibrators. I mainly see the benefit ofusing adult toys to enhance your erotic pleasures.
- Sex dolls could be a game-changer for people who simply do not have access to sex partners, whether because of disability, advanced age, social/geographic isolation, or mental health issues. For those who were willing or interested, the dolls could provide comfort. There is nothing wrong with having “an imaginary-friend-with-sex-benefits” at any age, particularly if your daily life is hard.
- Some sex doll users are fetishists. This is what works for them. I’m glad they have better toys to play with. Don’t judge them. They don’t owe it to society to “settle down and get married.” They owe it to themselves to live their own truths and find their own happiness.
- Some people can’t form solid sex relationships. Reasons can vary from insecurity about their bodies to lack of available partners to a painful romantic history that makes them shy from intimacy. One might say that in a perfect world we can fix them. But would that be a perfect world, to fix people who are perhaps are not broken at all, except from a judgmental, one-true-way-to-have-sex type of model? What seems to bother robot hysterics most of all is that doll-users don’t form relationships around procreation. If you think having children is the primary purpose of sex, and that all sex should be heteronormative, then it makes sense you’d fear robots because they enable autonomy from the binary heteronormative ideal. From my vantage, I see them as helping to lower the rate of accidental and unwanted pregnancies and potentially to reduce interpersonal violence. So, if you think the primary purpose of sex is to have sex (as I do), and that whatever gets you through the night (and harms none) is perfectly acceptable, the benefits of dolls outweigh the perils.
- Would you rather have a pedophile attack children or work off their problems with a synthetic creature? This is a tough question, granted. Most of us just wish that pedophiles STOPPED wanting what they want. But what are the real-world chances of that happening? Some countries are now preventing the sale of child-size dolls based on the belief that a child-size doll is a gateway to predation. Yes, those dolls are creepy AF to non-pedophiles, or at least to this one. But herein lies a big logical inconsistency in the robot hysteria movement. On one hand, they don’t want adults to have sex with adult-looking robot dolls because they believe it will prevent them from having relationships with real people. On the other hand, they don’t want adults to have sex with child-size robot dolls because they believe it will encourage them to seek out relationships with children. Well, which is it? Do dolls drive adults away from real-world sex or inflame them to seek out real-world sex? Do dolls help us sublimate negative urges or feed them? We don’t know yet. There is some anecdotal evidence that adult-doll users sometimes relate to their dolls like real people and withdraw from dating. We don’t know how many of them ultimately abandon their dolls to get married and have conventional sex lives, much less whether the way they treated dolls correlates to how they treat people in real life. It would be a technological triumph if robotic dolls could lower the rate of sex crimes against children and women. But all such questions are open to debate, and all the debate is purely speculative at this stage of research.
- A fear of future sex ripples through each and every negative article I’ve seen on robot dolls. People fear change in general and changes in sex and gender attitudes in specific. Every generation issue alarms about the depravity of its youth, going back to Roman history at least. Every generation demonizes changes in sexual habits, whether it’s having less sex or showing more nudity. We’re not even over people characterizing Internet hook-ups and hot-chats as dangerous and perverted, right? TV shows like “Web of Lies” perpetuate the myth that the Internet’s more dangerous than real life with more unsavory people on the prowl than on your average city street. Statistically, though, people are equally at risk in shopping malls, parking lots, churches, and their own homes. Terrible things happen everywhere terrible people live and terrible people live everywhere, not just online.
- In addition to sex dolls, we also now have astonishingly lifelike dummies that people can beat up at the gym or in their homes. I’m sure that Century Bob has some #MeToo tales to tell, some of them disturbingly violent and degrading. Yet, no one has called for Bob to be insured. We are completely accepting of people pounding the bejeezus out of dolls, without worrying about whether this will make them take that violence into the world and treat others like punching bags. So, sure, kick Bob in the groin and punch him in the head, that’s good clean fun. Make love to rubber Barbara, though, and you’re a potential rapist.
Let adults enjoy their sex toys. Let them get joy out of life, even if it’s not something you’d do, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Let the future reveal itself. You can’t control it anyway. Leave the dolls alone until there is proof that they hurt people. From this vantage, it seems to me that the only ones getting hurt are the adults who are being ridiculed and demeaned for finding something that helps them feel better and causes zero harm to others.
Worry instead about today’s sex problems — like sexual assault, gender discrimination, misogyny, homophobia, male-bashing and transphobia, and issue manifestos on how to curtail those sinister events in today’s world instead of painting harmless consensual sex as a grievous threat to civilized society.
