“It’s self-care that we offer there. You can be with your own sexuality there and focus on your needs.” So raves the Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fussenegger, co-founder of Cybrothel in Berlin. Here, headless and naked bodies hang from hooks, waiting to be penetrated in those delightfully euphemistic “self-care” sessions. They are encased in hyper-realistic silicone skin, with cartoonish breasts and feet pointed downwards to slip into stripper heels. There’s Paris, the leggy blonde, and Liara, a blue-skinned “scientist”. Every month or so, a new character is dreamed up and added to the dead-eyed cohort. In time, Fussenegger wants to swap out the dolls for robots: these can “touch you, move around, have sucking vaginas, heat up — all those things”. You can also ask for more bespoke experiences in the name of “focusing on your needs” — such as a doll with slashed and torn clothes. As Fussenegger assures, “it’s a shame-free environment”. He wraps his venture in the mollycoddling language of self-care and sexual expression; this tactic, it turns out, can excuse a lot.
Sex-doll brothels sprang up around Europe in 2017 — including in London — as novelty establishments which could skirt regulation around human prostitution. Cybrothel is one of only two to have survived the initial wave of curiosity (the other is in Prague), with plastic dummies giving way once more to the appeal of a living, breathing woman to violate. At the same time, another rival reared its head: AI-generated pornography burst onto the scene a couple of years later and has developed at breakneck speed since. Part of Cybrothel’s survival can be explained by its willingness to integrate this new tech into the experience with the help of an “in-house sex-tech entrepreneur”. AI-powered sex dolls are part of a booming industry in China, with one of the leading manufacturers expected to make a 30% sales increase this year. Middle-aged men in Europe are the most common buyers of these £2,000 dolls.
But sex dolls alone are by no means old hat. For hardcore enthusiasts, the ultimate aim is to buy your own. The activist Caitlin Roper, author of Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating, has spent “many hours” on forums of men, numbering in their thousands, who own replica women. “I’ve seen photos of dolls bound, tied spread-eagled to a bed, strung up, penetrated with objects and in positions of sexualised torture,” she says. “One man said he wished his doll would ‘struggle’, and another expressed his disappointment that he couldn’t leave bruises on his doll after a beating.”
Selling or renting out silicone likenesses of women as literalised sexual objects is among the queasy horrors to which liberal feminism lacks an answer. After all, the arguments in favour of this industry are the same ones bleated in the case of that other caste of less-than-human women, the “sex workers” whom enlightened cultures expect to service the needs of undesirable, abusive, violent or awkward men. In both cases, the solution to antisocial male sexuality is never to simply compel men to pack it in: sex positivity is about advocating for erections, regardless of how they are achieved. Instead, entire industries — from “barely legal” OnlyFans accounts to “breath play” fetish clubs (for those variously interested in paedophilia and now-normalised strangulation respectively) have sprung up to square the circle of how dangerous paraphilias and ever more extreme porn-inflected demands can coexist with women’s safety; in the real world, they mostly cannot. But with a sex doll, one can be as depraved as he likes.
“With a sex doll, one can be as depraved as he likes.”
Accommodating the desires of porn-brained men is necessary to keep the failure of the liberal sex project hidden from women and children: allowing transactional rape and violence to flourish in dark corners means fourth-wave feminists can deny the consequences of having traded away all their power for acceptance by the porn lobby. Besides, the sacrificial losers in this trade deal — prostituted, trafficked women and children — rarely have the means to complain. Conveniently for many unscrupulous websites, catering for such men is also big business. Last week, Collective Shout, the feminist charity for which Roper is campaigns manager, found that Temu was selling “child sex abuse dolls” under the guise of makeup-practice models. The Chinese online marketplace which, along with Shein, offers cut-price products from fast fashion to junk plastic gadgets, banned the terms “child sex doll” and “girl sex doll” last year after the charity exposed the products being marketed as such. Now, the same products touted as “male masturbators” a year ago — disembodied heads with cherubic features, carmine lips, doe eyes and hair in bows — were being sold to the same men for precisely the same purpose, only with a conciliatory tweak in description. In a review of one child head, a customer wrote: “The tongue is cute. I can kiss it. It’s wonderful.” The charity found similar products on Shein.
“It’s hard to think about where we will be in five to ten years, as I feel like we’re already in hell,” says Roper, who has dedicated much of her recent work to the emerging world of AI porn, from “girlfriend generators” to apps which allow users to virtually “undress” real women in photographs. “Owning a replica woman sex doll is akin to owning a non-sentient female sex slave. The freedom to enact any act of violence or abuse on a replica woman facilitates the escalation of these acts of violence.” The dolls’ inanimate nature is not simply a design flaw: it is a feature of a broader mode of violent male sexuality which prefers that women be passive or unwilling. “A female-shaped object with penetrable orifices can be just as good, if not better, than an actual woman,” Roper adds.
Sex dolls have been written about and featured on lurid reality television programmes for years; the general response is revulsion, as though disgust in itself is justification for them not to exist. Clearly, sexual politics should not turn on what’s known in philosophy as the “wisdom of repugnance” alone, which is why “sex doll brothels” still exist at all. But there is a genuine dilemma to address, particularly when confronted with technology hurtling towards alarming new levels of sophistication with the help of AI. How can a sex-positive culture deal with the gruesome excrescences it has created? Are the only options available now grimy, woman-hating “kink communities” and men’s entitlement to access rape material, or re-enacting perverted desires on a doll? These antisocial obsessions have been allowed to mushroom under our culture’s nauseating mantra — “don’t yuck my yum”.
The bar at which we curtail free will in sexual desire, particularly the free will of men to abuse women, is set the highest of almost any question in Western culture. The right of a man (women mostly do not solicit prostitution of any kind) to override a prostitute’s enthusiastic consent with money is far more protected than his right to harm himself with, for example, Class A drugs, or to harm others with hate speech. This is not coincidental: the fact that most victims are women and girls is the reason for this high bar of social and political toleration. In the pretzel logic of liberalism in which obvious harms are justified by abstract ideals like open-mindedness, it is increasingly difficult to make the case for this demographic, as we saw in both the grooming gang scandal and the ongoing wrangling over men’s access to women’s bathrooms and changing rooms. In the case of sex dolls, the sanctification of the right to get a boner makes it particularly difficult: I’ll do it anyway.
The fundamental problem with sex dolls is that they endorse men’s right to abuse women and children. This isn’t just make-believe: it’s practice and encouragement to fuck whoever, whatever, whenever you like. If you do not believe that AI-generated child sexual abuse material should be created and circulated, you must also condemn sex dolls, children or not: they are, by definition and design, an object made to be raped.
This underlying truth is clearly not good for women; neither is the way individual dolls look — the ideal woman has freakish proportions which, in real conditions, would see her neck snap and her ankles buckle under the weight of improbable globes of wipe-clean flesh. A similar aesthetic stalks AI virtual girlfriend websites, which Roper has trawled in search of this new frontier of objectification. On them, she says, there are public galleries where users share their creations: “It’s just what you would imagine if men and boys raised on porn could create their own version of women with no limitations. Women who look like children, with giant porn-star breasts, in the most degrading poses and scenarios you can think of.”
The principle in which sex dolls are grounded — that we are disposable, penetrable objects — is becoming increasingly normalised by unfettered access to dehumanising pornography, AI or otherwise. But is this even good for the men themselves, their dopamine receptors rewired to light up at only imagined grotesques, never satisfied by a real body — or trained to believe a real body to be at his infinite disposal? The truth is that a culture which tacitly accepts the existence of rape objects, and which neglects to regulate the dissemination of generative (and other) hardcore pornography, must also accept a forever warped dynamic between the sexes. It must accept young women paralysed by their own sexualisation, and young men stunted by the socially and sexually disabling effects of porn addiction. These are unavoidable consequences of modern sex-positivity culture.
But it is important to remember that none of this is truly inevitable: Western societies have accepted the existence of socially noxious pornography just as they have wearily acceded to other perceived inevitabilities, like spiralling welfare states and untrammelled illegal immigration. But like those other cases, sex-doll brothels and dehumanising pornography are, at their heart, policy failures by systems which don’t care enough to intervene. We need to stop talking about regulation as pipe dreams on radical feminist wish lists and show some grit, if only for the small cause of salvaging sexual relations for future generations. After pressure from Collective Shout, Temu took down its child sex abuse doll heads on Monday. Headless child bodies remain up — but we know that shaming works. Temu and Shein can and should be held accountable, online forums where men share AI-generated rape porn should be shut down, and pimps to silicone women who tear their clothes and bind their limbs should be banned. Looking the other way is a choice, so pack it in.
