Gentlemen Prefer Porn/Dolls: A Spinifex Double Feature

By aurora linnea

Pornography debases sexuality. Even when it does not eroticize violence and even when no woman or girl is wounded in its production, pornography degrades sexuality by diminishing sex from a meeting of persons to an encounter between a man – for men make up the larger part of porn’s audience – and an image. An image is not alive. It is an object. It exists to serve a purpose and the pornographic image’s purpose is to provoke (male) sexual excitement, thereby to facilitate (male) sexual pleasure. In the pornosexual mating of man and object, an object takes the place of a partner. As a partner, an object demands nothing of the man who uses it, so he can be wholly selfish in his pleasures. An object resists nothing, so the man can do whatever he wants to it. His power is absolute. Sex with an object is so simple: there is no call for care or empathy or tenderness, no expectation of mutuality, no need for emotional connection or intimacy. These complications cast aside, the man retreats to his room to be alone with his porn, enwrapped within its fantasies of “pure sex,” which is purely one-sided sex, unsullied by the presence of a self-willed, sensitive other. Pornosex is sex without interaction. Only the man acts, as he uses porn to induce arousal and then manipulates his own body to obtain ejaculation, which he calls “pleasure,” or “release.” Sex desiccates for him into a question of mechanical stimulus-and-response. Hydraulics. He is alone, he is in control, and this is the sex pornography breeds, and this is the pleasure it yields: the man is the only person in the room. 

Two books released in 2022 by Spinifex Press shine light on pornography’s morbid sway over men and culture, and how its ever-expanding range of desecrations brutalize women and girls. 

Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance

A man leaves his wife and family to sleep at night with a headless rubber torso. Chatting with other men online, a man brags that he would never go back to “realgirls.” In the time he’d squander trying to talk a “realgirl” into sex, he could fuck his doll a dozen times. He says, “The only thing my doll would ever say is Yes Master.” A discarded sex doll is found in the bushes, decapitated, its belly slit open. 

The rise of sex dolls and robots is a direct outgrowth of pornosexuality. Indeed, Caitlin Roper argues that these objects can be understood as a form of “three-dimensional pornography.” Modeled on the pornified T&A female ideal, and in some cases designed to mimic the bodies of specific porn performers, sex dolls translate porn imagery into porn objects, lifting male fantasy from the screen and materializing it in lifelike premium silicone. This makes it possible for men to enjoy embodied immersion in pornosex, physically acting upon rather than just visually consuming the object. The link between sex dolls/bots and pornography is so strong that Dr. Kathleen Richardson, who also campaigns against these products,  was prompted to officially change her organization’s name from the Campaign Against Sex Robots to the Campaign Against Porn Robots. 

In Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance, Caitlin Roper urges a serious feminist reckoning with the porn-fueled grotesquerie of hyperrealistic female effigies marketed for men’s sexual (ab)use. Roper, who serves as Campaigns Manager for the Australian anti-sexploitation organization Collective Shout and is co-founder of the Feminist Academy of Technology and Ethics (the FATES), conducts readers along a downward spiral into the deepest darkest trenches of technophallic awfulness. We visit doll factories, where disembodied synthetic limbs swing from hooks, and peer into online forums where men adopt their dolls’ personas to compliment one another on their doll-in-lingerie boudoir photography. Descending further, Roper takes us into doll brothels, their blood-crimson dungeon rooms equipped with all the whips and nipple clamps a man could desire to inflict torture on a bloodless replica woman, before pausing to peruse the wares of an Etsy boutique that peddles “Black Sex Slave Dolls.” And yet even this is not the nadir, for under male dominion bad always goes to worse, and Roper ultimately drops us to a nauseating new low: doll “orphanages,” where men pay to become “Daddies” by adopting child-sized dolls, “complete with penetrable orifices.” 

It is an unfortunate fact that these things exist. Since we cannot ignore them out of existence, however, Roper deserves our thanks for doing the dirty work of documenting them. Though sex dolls/bots at this point remain a fringe phenomenon, still orbiting the outer limits of pornsickness rather than fully incorporated into the mainstream, the industry is growing, and the campaign to secure cultural acceptance for men’s doll fuckery is gathering speed.

Industry reps, doll users and their tech-smitten academic apologists are eager to assure the public that there is no harm in this. They would have us believe that sex dolls/bots promise only benefits, for men and women and children alike. To briefly summarize their claims: dolls will serve the sexual “needs” of the elderly/disabled/introverted/unattractive, thus bringing joy into the world; dolls could be programmed to educate men in the nuances of consent, thus reducing rape; for those men whose yen to violate cannot be cured by sex doll consent training, dolls could be used as safe stand-in victims; similarly, distributing child-sized dolls to child sex abusers would spare real children the lifelong traumas of molestation. Proponents crow that dolls will save marriages (through curbing infidelity by ensuring that men’s sexual “needs” are met), rectify the plight of sexually unfulfilled astronauts, and decrease sexual violence by replacing live victims with silicone ones. World peace is practically a guarantee. 

This is the theory, and Roper puts it out of its misery with aplomb. She points out that the proposed beneficiaries, be they elderly or socially inept, are not merely “people,” as doll advocates are wont to term them, but men. Manufacturers readily admit that about 95% of their customers are male. And neither are the dolls sex-neutral, for the majority emulate pornified versions of the female body. Because doll users are almost uniformly male and the dolls pseudo-female, the user-doll relation recreates the dynamic of male-supremacist sexuality. The man is a person with needs; the woman is a thing he uses. By framing men’s sexual gratification as an inborn “need” that must be fulfilled by silicone effigies when other means prove elusive, doll advocates enshrine male sexual entitlement; while equating those effigies to actual living female sex partners enacts what Roper calls the “literal objectification” of women and girls. If a live woman can be exchanged for an inanimate object, then women and objects are interchangeable. 

Since male sexual entitlement and female objectification are primary engines of sexual violence and exploitation, and since sex dolls/bots reinforce both, it is bizarre to imagine that these products could remedy the rape epidemic. More logical is to presume that the proliferation of dolls would cement men’s view of women as objects and whet their appetite for violence against live victims. As Roper concludes, “[t]he production of sex dolls and robots…is not a solution to men’s abuse of women. On the contrary: it is an extension of it.” 

Yet the most damning evidence against proponents’ panegyrics to sex dolls as a social good comes from doll users themselves, those poor guys who, we’re told, would otherwise have by now virtually drowned in their own unejaculated semen. Roper seeks out these men in their online hidey-holes and finds them outspoken about discerning no meaningful difference between female humans and female-shaped hunks of polymer with holes drilled in. “There really isn’t much difference in terms of what they offer,” a man writes. “The act of ‘fucking it’ gives you the same feeling as if you were having sex with a live person,” declares another. When differences are noted, the sex doll proves preferable, providing, in the words of David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots (2008), “all the benefits of a human female partner without any of the complications.” The sex doll is the perfect woman-thing. It doesn’t complain or nag or make demands of any kind; since there’s no need to woo it with outings or gifts, it is cheaper than a “meatbag hoe.” Dolls don’t age or gain weight or menstruate. They are silent, perpetually sexually available and at men’s service. “With sex-bots…we’re on the cusp of developing a better life support system for cunts,” a man boasts. 

Let us note, however, that sentient females do seem to retain the advantage in at least one arena: we feel pain. Men express regret that they cannot wound their dolls and watch them suffer, that their dolls do not bruise or bleed. “If [my doll] would just struggle a little bit I’d be in heaven.” 

“He Chose Porn Over Me”: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn

Left home alone a man watches pornography for five to nine hours each day, injuring his shoulder from “excessive masturbation.” In bedrooms everywhere men are watching gangbangs, lactation porn, rape videos, “crying women passed out with mascara on their faces,” Japanese schoolgirls, the sexual abuse of children. A man masturbates to pornography 15 or more times a day. A woman whose partner watches “violent porn, domination-type porn” wakes in the night to the man forcing his fingers or penis inside her. 

Melinda Tankard Reist’s “He Chose Porn Over Me” compiles the personal accounts of 25 women whose lives have been marred by the pornsickness of male partners. Like Caitlin Roper, Tankard Reist is a campaigner against sexploitation with Collective Shout, which she co-founded. The stories she features in her new book feel like contraband, smuggled out from under the wall of unspeakability that sustains the malestream myth of porn’s harmlessness. The culturally accepted view is that porn is problem-free and rarely does anyone ask women to tell them otherwise. When women do try to articulate the harms, they are shut down, dismissed as “conservative” or otherwise too lame to listen to. But Tankard Reist asked, she is listening, and the women’s answers make for painful reading. Each individual account is heartrending; taken together, the effect is chilling. For a clear pattern emerges in the progression of men’s pornsickness. 

Often they began consuming porn as boys. By the time they are adults, pornographic stimulation is integral to their sexuality; it forms the foundation of their fantasies and fetishes. Early in their relationships with these men, women sense that their partners seem unusually sexually demanding, or they feel pressured to submit to sexual activity they don’t want, but they doubt their feelings. They assume the problem lies within themselves and not with the men. In time the women notice a fading out of intimacy and emotional connection, as distance seeps into sex and spreads outward through the fabric of their relationship. The women tell us their partners won’t look them in the eyes anymore. They say sex becomes mechanical, impersonal, that they are used like “blow-up dolls.” “I felt like a hole in the wall or an inanimate object,” a woman recalls. Then the men become more sexually aggressive and violent. They demand that women comply with their pornfed desires, which are as sadistic as they are consistent: anal sex and choking. When the women won’t consent to these acts, the men force them. Many rapes are described in these stories. A man rapes his wife as a birthday gift to himself. “Just let me, it’s my birthday,” he pleads. Meanwhile the men’s personalities alter: they become hostile, secretive, manipulative, callous. Woman after woman relates how the man she loved turned into an uncaring narcissist. The men lie when they say they will quit porn. One compulsive behavior gives way to others as the men throw themselves into gambling, alcoholism. They begin chasing after pornosex with other women, sinking their families in debt by spending their savings on the exploitation of women in brothels, strip clubs, massage parlours. The pornsick men might beat their wives and girlfriends, or try to kill them. 

And the women’s experiences also follow a standard pattern: 

Her male partner’s porn use hurts her like a betrayal. She feels sexually inadequate and unattractive. If she voices her distress about the man’s porn use to friends/family/therapists, she is told that “all men use porn,” it’s a normal thing, not a big deal, she’s overreacting. If there’s a problem the problem is with her; if only she would loosen up and get over her hang-ups. Naturally the boyfriends and husbands agree with this assessment. A lot of gaslighting is described in these stories. One man says: “This is your problem, not mine. You’re so jealous. It’s your insecurities, your lack of self-esteem.” As the relationship deteriorates, women mourn the loss of intimacy, both sexual and emotional. They’re humiliated by the degrading, objectifying pornosex their partners now inflict upon them. But because they blame themselves and because they want to be “good women” – selflessly giving, caring – they keep trying to help the men. They find men therapists who specialize in “porn addiction” and arrange men’s stays in rehab. They exhaust themselves caretaking for men who long ago sacrificed human connection for porn consumption.

The stories in “He Chose Porn Over Me” end with the authors’ advice for other women, and here again we see a pattern. The women are blunt: Run for your life! And the second most common piece of advice they offer is to trust your instincts. Trust your intuition. A chorus of women’s voices repeats, “Listen to your gut.” They knew something was wrong with their partners’ porn use because they felt the wrongness in their bodies, as discomfort. Yet everyone around them and the culture in which they lived told the women to distrust and deny their own body-knowledge. And the wrongness they felt, which they were told to ignore, got worse. 

Men do not want women listening to our guts. Domination proceeds more smoothly if we’re numb to the flares our bodies send up, so we are socialized to doubt our feelings, to believe what men and their culture tells us is true over our own instincts. This denial of instinct that drives us out of our bodies is mirrored by the deadening of women into objects by pornosexuality. When women’s bodies become men’s things, we are evicted from our bodies as unwelcome tenants. In “He Chose Porn Over Me,” multiple women report that their relationships with pornsick men left them feeling like “shells” of their former selves—what is a shell but a body with no one inside it? Evacuated, hollowed out, emptiness where a self once was. And the men come in through the holes, to colonize the ceded territory. They possess the object and make it play out their scripts: “Just give us puppet dirty talk mode already.” When women sense the pain of this occupation, men’s culture coerces us into accepting what feels unacceptable. And this, too, is an emptying, and an exile from the body. “I’m hoping we can essentially purge her of her preconceived attitudes and opinions once we have more control.” 

Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating and “He Chose Porn Over Me” reveal the varied ways that pornosexuality enlists men in the patriarchal crusade to possess female bodies and thus deprive us of ourselves, leaving us hollow shells, with no ground from which to defend ourselves against male dominion. But when we listen to our guts, we return to our embodied selves. We know in our guts that there is something wrong with men who crave misogynist humiliation and torture as sexual stimulation, just like we know there’s something wrong with distributing baby dolls to pedophiles as a harm-reduction strategy for curbing child sex abuse. There’s something horribly wrong with a man indifferent to the difference between a penetrable, poseable doll and a human woman, and we know it. We know through our bodies that we are alive, not inanimate objects, and to be treated like things by pornsick men feels like murder. Roper and Tankard Reist know these things as well as we do, and their books call on us to act on what we know. We need accept the unacceptable no longer. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing copies of Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating and “He Chose Porn Over Me” for this review. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.