by Kate Lister
English sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) also refers to Pygmalionism in volume four of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1905):
Pygmalionism, or falling love with statues, is a rare form of erotomania founded on the sense of vision and closely related to the allurement of beauty. (I here use ‘pygmalionism’ as a general term for the sexual love of statues; it is sometimes restricted to cases in which a man requires of a prostitute that she shall assume the part of a statue which gradually comes to life, and finds sexual gratification in this performance alone.)7
Pioneering psychiatrist and sexologist Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) also briefly explored sexual attraction to dolls in his work The Sexual Life of Our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization (1905). He argued that the Pygmalion fantasy, or ‘Venus statuaria’, was closely linked to fantasies of necrophilia, and describes a how the ‘Pygmalionists’ flocked to brothels to masturbate over young women posed as statues, or even just statues of young women.8 Indeed, in his exposé of Parisian brothels, Les Maisons De Tolerance (1892), Louis Fiaux described how one elderly man visited a brothel ‘every week to worship, dressed in the costume of Pygmalion’ to masturbate over statues of Greek goddesses at a cost of 100 francs.9
As well as some gentlemen seeking out some light granite relief, Bloch describes rubber and plastic ‘fornicatory dolls’ being sold in various catalogues as ‘Parisian rubber articles’. Though none survive today, Bloch describes these early sex dolls as being complete with extremely lifelike genitals: ‘Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a pneumatic tube filled with oil.’10 Bloch refers to two ‘erotic romances’ about rubber dolls to further illustrate how widespread this particular kink was at the turn of the twentieth century: Madame B’s La Femme Endormie (1899), and René Schwaeblé’s Les Détraquées de Paris (1904).11 Both texts fetishise the passive pliability of a doll when compared to the complexity of human women, offering some support for Bloch’s theories around necrophilia.
In La Femme Endormie, Paul Molaus is a middle-aged man who has sworn off romance, but still wants to have sex with women. Paul reasons that a doll will ‘always be compliant and silent, no matter how lewd the act he chose to perform’.12 The story has a very clever twist as even when Paul gets his doll (named Mea), he cannot control his jealousy and rages at the knowledge that the male creator of Mea was there before him. Paul feels humiliated by his own desire for the doll and angrily abuses her after he has orgasmed.
‘Slut,’ he shouted, ‘you didn’t want me to spend my time looking at you, studying your postures, feasting upon your various poses, revelling in your cunt, your asshole, your tits, your calves; you didn’t want me to cram my cock between your lips, between your breasts; you didn’t want me to sprawl over the curves of your buttocks, or rest my head there. Wretched whore, you acted like a bitch, taking advantage of your body, and you drove me to spear you straight off so as to get rid of me quicker. Here, you harlot, come here. I’m going to whack your bottom to punish you for my stupid behaviour.’13
The moral of the story seems to be that Paul’s misogyny is not a response to being treated poorly by real women, but is a result of his own sense of inadequacy.
René Schwaeblé’s short story ‘Homunculus’ in Les Détraquées de Paris is less sophisticated but also eroticises the lifelessness of the dolls. ‘Homunculus’ tells the story of Doctor P., who builds artificial women for ‘those who do not like women’. The good doctor explains: ‘with my dolls there is never any blackmail, or jealousy, argument or illness … They are always ready, always compliant, no blackmail, no scenes of jealousy, no arguments, no discomfort! They are always ready, always docile.’14
Despite sex dolls having a long history, there have been hardly any scientific studies into sex dolls and their owners. A quick keyword search through the leading scientific literature databases for ‘sex/love doll’ results in only one paper, and that one is about how little scientific research there is on sex dolls.15 Sex robots have garnered slightly more attention, but it remains a very under-researched subject.16 Most research on sex dolls and sex robots comes from the humanities, and is concerned with the moral, legal and social implications.17 There is next to no primary research data with which to try and understand the use of sex dolls.
The early sexologists were convinced having sex with dolls was a type of necrophilia, but the limited research we have suggests otherwise. In her (as yet) unpublished Masters thesis, Sarah Valverde interviewed sixty-one sex-doll users, recruited via various online forums.18 This piece of research revealed that the majority of doll owners were white, educated, middle-aged males, who did not experience sexual dysfunction with human partners. ‘The majority of doll-owners report above average to excellent satisfaction levels for sexual stimulation when using their dolls, which indicates sex doll use is an enjoyable experience.’19 Obviously, more research is needed, but it seems sex-doll use is not a paraphilia, like necrophilia – it’s just a bit of fun.* But, speaking of necrophilia. There have been some unsettling examples of people turning human women into dolls after they had died, which is a whole other level of uncanny.
Martin van Butchell (1735–1814) was an English dentist who decided the best way to mourn his wife’s death in 1775 was to embalm her and set up a pay-per-view enterprise. Dr William Hunter and Dr William Cruikshank injected the body with various preservatives and dyes to give colour to her dead cheeks. Her eyes were replaced with glass ones and she was dressed in a very expensive gown. The poor woman was then propped up in the window of Butchell’s dental practice to be gawked over by the paying public, where she remained until his second wife objected.20
One of the most famous courtesans of the nineteenth century was La Païva (1819–1884). At the height of her powers she held influence over some of the most powerful men in Europe. Her final and richest husband, Count Henckel von Donnersmarck, was so devastated by her death that he had La Païva’s body embalmed and kept it in his attic, much to the surprise of his second wife, who had been unaware of her husband’s little memento stashed upstairs.21 All of which makes having sex with a rubber doll look rather tame.
About the same time as Freud was thrashing out his essay on uncanny dolls, Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) put the theory into practice. When Alma Mahler ended her relationship with Kokoschka, he did what any stable, well-adjusted adult would do, and commissioned doll-maker Hermine Moos to make a life-sized replica of his ex-lover. Kokoschka gave very detailed instructions for Moos to follow.
Yesterday I sent a life-size drawing of my beloved and I ask you to copy this most carefully and to transform it into reality. Pay special attention to the dimensions of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. And take to heart the contours of body, e.g., the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace!22
Sadly, Kokoschka did not get his Pygmalion ending, as the resulting doll more closely resembled the Gruffalo than it did Alma Mahler. Moos deviated from the instructions and covered the doll’s body in fur and feathers. Devastated, Kokoschka took several photographs, immortalised his doll in a painting, and then decapitated her in the garden.
One urban legend you may have heard is that the Nazis manufactured sex dolls to try and staunch the epidemic of syphilis that was decimating their troops, the so-called ‘Model Borghild’ project. As much fun as this story is, there is very little corroborating evidence to support it. In fact, the only evidence we have for this story is an enthusiastic exposé by a journalist calling himself Norbert Lenz.23 Sadly, none of his claims can be verified and no one has hear
d anything from Norbert since he posted his extraordinary claims. The Nazi sex doll is a historical hoax. But the Germans did give us one enduring super-sexualised dolly: Barbie.
Oskar Kokoschka’s ‘Alma Doll’, 1919.
I know that Barbie isn’t a sex doll, per se. But with her enormous boobs, kissy face, tiny waist and feet bent to take a stiletto heel, there can be little doubt that she is a sexual doll. What’s more, Barbie is based on a German cartoon character called Bild Lilli, created in the late 1940s by Reinhard Beuthien for the Hamburg-based tabloid Bild-Zeitung. If you were feeling euphemistic, you could describe Lilli as a ‘good-time girl’, but it’s pretty clear she is a high-class call girl. Lilli is a woman on the make and determined to use her considerable charms to relieve rich men of their assets. Lilli became so popular that she was immortalised as a saucy, novelty doll. As Barbie historian Robin Gerber wrote, ‘Men got Lilli dolls as gag gifts at bachelor parties, put them on their car dashboard, dangled them from the rearview mirror, or gave them to girlfriends as a suggestive keepsake.’24
Although marketed to adults, the Lilli dolls were very popular with children as well. When Ruth Handler, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, was on holiday in Switzerland in 1956, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Barbie, fell in love with the Lilli doll and bought three. Three years later Handler unveiled the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York. Since her debut, Barbie has had over 150 careers, but sadly she has never returned to her roots, and ‘Sex Work Barbie’ has yet to hit the shops.
According to Anthony Ferguson there are three types of contemporary sex doll: vinyl, latex and silicon.25 Your bog-standard, blow-up vinyl doll, beloved by stag parties around the world, started being mass-produced and advertised in American pornographic magazines in the 1960s.26 Until 1987, it was illegal to import obscene or indecent items into the UK. But when Conegate Ltd attempted to import blow-up dolls from Germany in 1984, they found themselves caught up in a lengthy legal battle that went all the way to the European Court of Justice. Finally, the Treaty of Rome was evoked, and the British courts had to relent and allow the sex dolls in.
Latex dolls are more expensive than the inflatable vinyl, though arguably not as portable. Latex dolls are more realistic, with glass eyes, wigs, and moulded faces, genitals and extremities. These dolls will set you back a couple of hundred pounds.
The top-of-the-range sex dolls are made from silicon and will set you back anywhere between £5,000 and £20,000, depending on which accessories you opt for. They have flexible joints, very detailed faces, breasts, pubic hair, etc., and detachable genitals to make washing them easier. Many of them are built around a metal skeleton that gives the doll a weight of a ‘real woman’.
Simple inflatable vinyl sex doll, beloved of stag parties.
Silicon-covered sex robots are currently being manufactured by a range of companies in the US and Japan, including California-based Realbotix, who are leading the race with their Harmony 3.0. Harmony is still in development, but at the time of writing, she can talk, move and answer basic questions. She can’t yet respond to touch, but that is the long-term goal of Harmony’s creator and Realbotix founder Matt McMullen – that and a self-lubricating vagina.27
Sex robots like Harmony have certainly caught the public imagination, and have inspired a host of debate around the ethics, practicalities and feasibility of humans having sex with robots. But these are not new debates. Humans have been having sex with machinery for some time now – the only difference is that vibrators don’t ask how your day was, or require their own wardrobe. Sex robots will not replace real people. They are a novelty and no doubt an interesting experience, but sex toys are as old as sex itself, and haven’t yet replaced human touch, connection and intimacy. Toys are fun, but they are no substitute for the real deal – for a one thing, no human woman has ever started buffering during a blow-job.
* * *
** The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V diagnosis of paraphilia states that the sufferer must ‘feel personal distress about their interest, not merely distress resulting from society’s disapproval; or have a sexual desire or behaviour that involves another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death, or a desire for sexual behaviours involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent’. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
1 Chantal Cox-George and Susan Bewley, ‘I, Sex Robot: The Health Implications of the Sex Robot Industry’, BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health, 44, 2018, 161–4. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsrh-2017-200012.
2 S. J. De Laet, History of Humanity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 234.
3 Jonathan Amos, ‘Ancient Phallus Unearthed in Cave’, BBC News, 2005
4 Ovid, trans. by A. D. Melville and E. J. Kenney, Metamorphoses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 233.
5 ‘Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book XXXVI. The Natural History Of Stones’, Perseus.Tufts.Edu, 2018
6 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 220.
7 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), p. 188.
8 Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization, trans. by M. Eden Paul (London: Rebman, 1908), p. 648.
9 Louis Fiaux, Les Maisons De Tolerance (Paris: G. Carré, 1892), p. 176.
10 Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, pp. 648–9.
11 Ibid.
12 Madame B, La Femme Endormie (Melbourne, 1899), pp. 11–12.
13 Ibid.
14 René Schwaeblé, ‘Homunculus’, Les détraquées de Paris (Paris: Daragon libraire-éditeur, 1910), pp. 247–53.
15 N. Döring and S. Pöschl, ‘Sex Toys, Sex Dolls, Sex Robots: Our Under-Researched Bed-Fellows’, Sexologies, 27, (2018), 133–8
16 See Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
17 Vic Grout, ‘Robot Sex: Ethics And Morality’, Lovotics, 03.01 (2015)
18 Sarah Valverde, ‘The Modern Sex Doll-Owner: A Descriptive Analysis’ (unpublished Masters thesis, California State Polytechnic University, 2012).
19 Ibid., p. 34.
20 Lucy Orne Bowditch and Charles Pickering Bowditch, The Lives and Portraits of Curious and Odd Characters (Worcester: Thomas Drew, 1853), pp. 11–17.
21 Janine Alexandre-Debray, La Païva, 1819–1884 (Paris: Perrin, 1986); Melissa Hope Ditmore, Encyclopaedia of Prostitution and Sex Work Vol I (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 244.
22 Quoted in Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century – A Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton University, 2013), p. 227.
23 Norbert Lenz, Borghild.de
24 Robin Gerber, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Made Her (New York: Harper, 2010).
25 Anthony Ferguson, The Sex Doll (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2010), p. 31.
26 Ibid., p. 30.
27 Christopher Trout, ‘There’s a New Sex Robot in Town: Say Hello To Solana’, Engadget, 2018
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Don’t Hold Your Breath
Sex and Smells in the Middle Ages
Although sight is our primary sense, when it comes to sex, it’s all about smell. Obviously, looks are important in attracting a mate, but even the hottest of the hot can be undone if they also have ripe BO, bad breath, or cheesy feet. Not being attracted to someone’s physical appearance won’t make you gag like the sour stink of unwashed genitals. But smelling pleasant goes way beyond improving your chances of getting laid. Our sense of smell motivates human behaviour in truly profound ways. Research has identified a ‘behavioural immune system’ in humans, meaning we are hardwired to identify and then strongly resist anything that triggers our disgust response. Bad smells trigger an avoidant reaction as a defence mechanism to protect us from health hazards.1 This may sound obvious, but the behavioural immune system is incredibly powerful and can easily override other instincts, such as sexual attraction or hunger. Research published in Neuroscience and Behavioural Review in 2017 revealed that physical disgust, commonly triggered by smell and taste, and moral disgust are inextricably linked in our brains, meaning that if someone smells bad, on one level we are also morally offended by them.2 So powerful is this response, scientists have actually linked the 2016 election of Donald Trump to our ‘body odour disgust sensitivity’. It sounds incredible, but a paper published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in 2018 found that right-wing political authoritarians (in this case, Donald Trump), often promote an avoidance of ethnic and sexual minorities by triggering their audience’s primitive disgust reaction. The same primitive reaction to foul odours is triggered by racist rants that present various social groups as a threat to the well-being of others.
Prejudice can be seen as a social discriminatory behaviour partly motivated by the fact that pathogens represent an invisible threat and individuals with high levels of disgust sensitivity might be more likely to avoid foreign people, and to promote policies that avoid contact with them, because they are perceived as potentially spreading unfamiliar pathogens, or different hygienic or food habits.3