What Does the Personification of Love and Sex Dolls Explain about Doll Owners?

ABSTRACT

Scholarly debates on sex dolls tend to view them in one of two ways. Either the purchase and use of sex dolls reflects and exacerbates misogyny, or that dolls are themselves a technological marvel meeting an array of sexual and emotional needs in sex negative cultures. I complicate these views by analyzing how and why heterosexual men personify their hyperreal sex toys in conventionally feminine, albeit hypersexualized, ways. Drawing on digital ethnographic observations and interviews with 41 love and sex doll owners who use digital media to personify their dolls, I suggest that the creation of hyper-gendered doll personas tends to reproduce culturally specific gender norms due to social dynamics within the community. Specifically, I show how doll community norms privilege heterosexual masculinity and thus limit the doll personas that are imagined and created. By focusing on the social practices of this community rather than how sex dolls are designed, this research suggests a way for scholars to be critical of taboos against technologically assisted sexual pleasure while acknowledging the tendency of futuristic sex practices to reproduce social inequalities. Implications for how future sexual technologies could someday challenge status-quo inequalities are discussed.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank CJ Pascoe, Ryan Light, Kemi Balogun, and Colin Koopman for their careful thoughts and insights as I worked on this project. I would also like to thank the numerous audiences who let me present this work and provided feedback on my ideas and approach to studying this topic. Finally, I would like to thank the editors and reviewers of Deviant Behavior for their suggestions. Each of these people have greatly improved my thinking on this subject matter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The terminology I use to refer to what are typically called “sex dolls” varies. When talking about a specific doll, I use the term its owner prefers. When speaking in general terms, I mainly use “doll” to avoid negatively conflating them with their sexual function as per the request of many doll owners I interviewed.

² TPE is an abbreviation for “thermoplastic elastomer” which is a common material used in the manufacturing of, among other things, sex toys.

³ I also edited quotations for readability (e.g., removing pausers and repeated words).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth R. Hanson

Kenneth R. Hanson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the University of Wyoming Department of Criminal Justice and Sociology. He is primarily interested in how social norms influence people’s use of new technologies in pursuit of their sexual desires.