The Strange History of Sex Dolls
Tracing the lineage of synthetic love, from ancient myths to modern romance
Hi friends! I just returned from what was supposed to be a vacation, but somehow turned into two weeks of me running around Europe doing on-the-ground sex reporting. I attended sex parties, sat in on a sapphic porn shoot, partied in Parisian BDSM clubs, and even tried out a kinky speed dating event—which is to say I’ve witnessed A LOT of sexual culture lately, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.
You can expect lots of fun exclusive content in the next two weeks, but I am currently extremely jetlagged (and somehow sick for the second time this month.) So while I recover, I’m sharing something a little different: a piece on the history of sex dolls that I wrote for a print issue of CR Fashion Book.
Thanks for sticking with me; I’ll be back later this week with fresh writing (and something special for my paid subscribers, who make this all possible!)
The Perennial Fantasy of Synthetic Love
Behind every statue of a beautiful woman is a man eager to fuck her—at least, if the history books are to be believed. From copulating with statues of Cupid in Ancient Greece to the gardener who was allegedly found attempting to get it on with a replica of Venus de Milo in 1877, history is littered with examples of men using inanimate objects to enact their fantasies. The Dutch created hand-sewn masturbation puppets; Spanish sailors constructed fornicatory sex dolls made of cloth, known as the dama de viaje; in the late nineteenth century, life-size “rubber women” were sold in France.
Made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, these rubber wives—which were painted and modeled off of real women, and sold for high prices—were a precursor to modern-day counterparts like the RealDoll, which were introduced in the late 90s and skyrocketed into the public eye following the release of Lars and the Real Girl in 2007. The romantic comedy depicts a lonely, isolated young man (Ryan Gosling) who copes with his unprocessed grief by developing a romantic relationship with Bianca, an anatomically correct RealDoll that he introduces to the local community as his wheelchair-bound girlfriend. With her steel joints and silicone flesh, Bianca is hyper-realistic yet fully inanimate: a blank slate onto which Lars projects a rich inner world, imbuing his inanimate lover with desires, interests, and a mind of her own.
This is not an uncommon practice for sex doll owners. Take a scroll through Reddit, and you will encounter an active community of iDollators: people who see their dolls not as sex toys, but life partners. “There was never a moment when Shi-chan—or any Doll, for that matter—was merely an object to me,” Davecat, a high-profile advocate of “synthetic love,” told The Atlantic in 2013, pushing back on the idea that sex dolls encourage objectification of women and arguing that, in contrast, “it’s more a case of personifying an object.”
The human tendency to anthropomorphize even the simplest technology is well-documented. In computer science, this is called The ELIZA Effect, and dates back to the world’s first chatbot: a simple computer program named after a character from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, a play fittingly based on a Greek myth about a man who fell in love with his own creation. Designed to simulate natural dialogue using pattern-matching methodology, the chatbot possessed only rudimentary conversational ability. But despite these limitations, her creator Joseph Weizenbaum was startled to find that users confessed their deepest secrets to ELIZA, attributing humanlike empathy and intelligence to the program, though it essentially reflected their own statements back to them.
If male iDollators are Pygmalion’s modern-day heir, ELIZA finds her contemporary counterpart in Replika, an AI-powered chatbot designed to mirror the personality and conversational style of whoever it’s talking to. Though the app was originally intended as a platonic companion, its creators were surprised to find that these conversations often elicited romantic and sexual advances from users and soon rolled out NSFW options for paid subscribers, many of whom considered themselves in relationships with or even married to their chatbots—a future predicted in the prescient 2013 romantic drama Her, in which a socially isolated divorcee falls in love with his AI-powered virtual assistant.
Amid simultaneous advances in AI and a boom in the global sex doll market, companies are now racing to create next-generation dolls that can simulate realistic human interaction and even perform housework. These innovations promise a future in which dolls are all but indistinguishable from the real thing—meaning your synthetic paramour may not just pass the Turing test, but convincingly fake an orgasm, too. But while the prospect of hyper-intelligent sex dolls stokes age-old cultural anxieties about replacement by robot, history shows that centuries before state-of-the-art production techniques gave rise to the RealDoll, men have suspended their disbelief to indulge their desires, just as people have been seduced by chatbots long before they possessed advanced conversational ability.
Like many female sex symbols, the love doll is a blank slate onto which to project your fantasies—so to focus on imbuing these synthetic women with minds and personalities of their own is, in a sense, missing the point. Many men turn to sex dolls not despite their lack of personhood, but because of it: According to a 2022 study in the Journal of Sex Research, male sex doll owners tend to have insecure attachment styles, low levels of social trust, poor sexual self-esteem, and view real women as “fundamentally unknowable.” It’s true that many iDollators instill their paramours with personalities and backstories, insisting that their connection is more than just skin deep—but isn’t the idea of falling in love with your own creation essentially just a form of psychological masturbation?
Like Narcissus catching sight of himself in the pond, the man who falls in love with a sex doll is enamored with his own reflection. Perhaps the fantasy of the male sex doll owner derives from a desire to subjugate women, as the narrative around sex dolls so often goes. Or maybe he’s just doing what men have been socialized to do all along, avoiding emotional vulnerability. After all, to choose a sex doll is to choose what is knowable: the self, absent the surprise and danger of another.
This piece originally appeared in CR Fashion Book’s 25th print issue with a photoshoot featuring sex dolls; check out the full editorial here on their website!
Love the conclusion and how it all comes back around!
An interesting conclusion! Of course, the power of fantasy may be very strong. I must confess that I have fallen in love (and in lust!) with the heroine of my three-novel series.