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Adventures with Sex Dolls

It wasn’t his bald head that occasioned my doubts, although it was a rather unexpected contrast to the full head of hair I’d seen in his profile photo. Nick was a handsome man with a firm jawline, hard stomach muscles and bright blue eyes, a man with whom, according to the brief biography on the website where I hired him, I shared not only my age but a hobby: we both like rock climbing.

Nor was my sudden hesitation caused by the fact that Nick was already lying stark naked on the bed in a starfish pose when I walked into the dimly lit room, his arms and legs spread out to the sides, his steady gaze fixed on the ceiling. Admittedly, I was slightly taken aback by the fact that Nick had an erection that must have been as long as my lower arm and at least as thick, a prospect I attempted to greet with enthusiasm, not so much for Nick’s sake as to avoid disappointing his owner, who had just opened the door to me and was now placing the room key next to a tube of lubricant on the bedside table, beaming as he pointed to the bed and rolling his ‘r’s. ‘Nick has a verrry big cock!’

Indeed.

The real reason I began to question my plan almost immediately after arriving in the Austrian sex-doll brothel was Nick’s lack of a soul. Before leaving I’d regarded that aspect of Nick as an advantage. I wasn’t about to commit adultery with a real person but with a lifeless sex worker, a character made of plastic, in fact nothing more than a ridiculously elaborate sex toy. That would make this part of my fieldwork as easy as it was absurd, I thought. It would be a witty theatrical performance, with myself in the main role and the doll in no more than a bit part, a mere implement.

But when I met him, I froze. My doubts only increased when I bent down over him to take a closer look and saw his eyes stare right past mine towards the low, damp-stained ceiling. My uncertainty increased further when I tried to make Nick sit up straight but failed. The doll was as heavy as lead. I tugged at his torso in vain, before finally nestling dejectedly against his silicon chest, which was smooth and cold, like the rest of my bedfellow’s body. I no longer knew whether I was capable of being intimate with something so dead. Was I really up to experiencing first hand what the future of sex and love might look like?

Ideal partners

According to an increasing number of futurists and sociologists, sex dolls and their animated counterparts, sex robots, are our future bedfellows. They’ll become sex workers, and according to some scientists they’ll even function as partners in life. Artificial intelligence expert David Levy claims that by about 2050 it will be both possible and socially acceptable for us to have robot partners, even to marry them. Within that same period, he is convinced, one in ten young people will have had sex with a robot or sex doll. An increasing number of people agree with him, whether they be scientists or the manufacturers of sex-tech products.

Their predictions may seem bizarre, but it’s a development already under way.

In 2018 there were some forty sex-doll manufacturers, based in countries including Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States.1 The last two are out in the lead when it comes to both the development and the purchase of sex dolls. Take a look at websites such as ‘Silicon Wives’, ‘True Companions’ or ‘Lumidolls’ and you’ll see you can choose between a whole range of sex dolls, from full-breasted to flat-chested, from muscular to plump and soft. They are almost always female; male dolls are in a small minority, transgender dolls and ‘shemales’ a rising trend.

If you can’t find your ideal doll among the prototypes on offer, then most companies will let you put one together yourself. Choose your ideal legs, the perfect face, the optimal arse, the sexual organs the way you like them to be, then tick the specific clothing you want to receive along with your doll, possibly a wig or a removable vagina (easier to clean), and tell the manufacturer whether you want to have your doll speak pre-programmed sentences, adopt different facial expressions or make gestures. Male sex robot Rocky, for example, can perform penetrative thrusts, and there are female dolls that move their hips back and forth in order to take an ‘active role’ in sex with their owner. Great efforts are currently being made to put lifelike dolls on the market that will feel warmer than my Nick, and whose chests will rise and fall as if they are breathing. The manufacturers are attempting to make dolls that not only sound more intelligent than mobile virtual assistants Alexa or Siri but have your preferences stored in their algorithmic brains, so that they know which sexual positions you prefer, or which words you like to hear to make you feel loved and desired.

This future generation of sex dolls represents a further step in the evolution of intimacy because, although technological innovation has had an impact on our experiences of love and sex before – think of the pill, or sex toys such as vibrators – these new toys bring something else into play. A sex robot needs to look as human as possible. The technology is concealed, the idea being that the more human it seems, the more real, the better. The intention is that users will forget their experience is facilitated by technology and lose themselves in what seems to them like human contact.

For a growing number of people, the current generation of sex dolls already look human enough. They experience their dolls as partners, announce (unrecognized) marriages with their silicon lovers and claim they no longer want anyone of flesh and blood in their bed. Dolls are always eager, never get headaches and stay in shape indefinitely. The fact that they never display spontaneity, never recall a shared memory and cannot have children with their partners does not deter buyers. Anyhow, why should a desire for children be an argument against sex dolls? We often fall in love with people who have been sterilized or simply don’t want children.

In Japan especially, more and more young men have a sex doll at home, it would seem, although it’s hard to find precise figures and impossible to verify them. The manufacturers I spoke to talked about ‘thousands’ of dolls sold, but the identities of the buyers are kept secret – supposedly for reasons of privacy, although it’s possible they’re exaggerating their sales to encourage acceptance of the phenomenon. They are equally unforthcoming with regard to the places where their dolls are delivered, which makes it hard to estimate how popular they really are. Another complicating factor is that some owners buy more than one doll. It seems you can quickly get bored even with the ideal bedfellow.

Sexy Sandy

What is clear is that more of these dolls are being sold worldwide than ever before. There are now magazines for sex-doll enthusiasts, doll-swapping parties and doll photo clubs. There are digital sex-doll forums, too. I joined one, and for a few weeks I looked with growing amazement at photos of ‘Kiky’, ‘Sandy’ and Roxanne’, who had been dressed by their owners in hotpants or bikinis and who leaned into the camera to display their buttocks or breasts. The captions under the photos were if anything even more fascinating than the pictures themselves. ‘Here’s my girl in the brand-new jeans I bought for her today,’ writes Sandy’s owner, for example. To which other doll owners react with cries of ‘She looks fantastic in them!’ or ‘Wow, they really show off her arse to perfection.’

If you like the idea of such a doll but are deterred by the price (they cost several thousand euros each and get more expensive the more they can do), then you can rent one, as I did.2 In early 2017, sex worker Evelyn Schwarz opened Bordoll, the first sex-doll brothel in Germany. Since then, similar brothels have opened in at least twelve countries, from Canada to France, from Russia to the US, from Italy to China, from Spain to the United Kingdom. Dozens more entrepreneurs are waiting for licences. KinkySDolls, the company behind a brothel in Toronto and a possible future offshoot in Houston, is planning to establish ten American doll brothels over the next ten years, in cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles. There is no certainty they’ll actually open, let alone that they’ll stay open. Doll brothels regularly close their doors not long after opening. Websites where you can rent dolls one month are taken offline the next month; some of my emails requesting a booking were never answered, and occasionally the brothel turned out to have closed by the time I arrived.

Sometimes a brothel shuts because there aren’t enough customers for the dolls. That was the case in Amsterdam, where the sex worker who bought them remarked that ‘you just can’t work with the bloody things’. She had noticed, as I had, that sex dolls are fairly heavy and difficult to move. ‘After every client we had to wash them and completely disinfect them,’ she told me over the phone. ‘It was simply impossible.’ The dolls were sold to another European brothel and their place taken by human sex workers.

Sometimes a sex-doll brothel will close down because business becomes too brisk and the neighbours worried about the type of...