From Sex Dolls to Sex Robots and Beyond: A Narrative Review of Theoretical and Empirical Research on Human-like and Personified Sex Tech

The ‘PERFECT’ PARTNER: UNDERSTANDING THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF MEN WHO OWN SEX DOLLS

“…Although this conclusion is perhaps plausible from a theoretical perspective, it is incumbent upon scholarly organizations to properly weigh the evidence before making policy recommendations. Despite such claims, reviews of the literature on doll ownership often report an almost total lack of empirical data in support or opposition to these claims (Döring et al, 2020;Döring & Pöschl, 2018;Hanson & Locatelli, 2022;Harper & Lievesley, 2020). Within the context of widespread movements to legislate on the status of sex dolls (Danaher et al, 2017;Prostasia Foundation, 2021), this lack of empirical research highlights an urgent need for peer-reviewed data to be collected and examined.…”

“…Where papers have been published in peer-reviewed outlets they have largely been speculative in relation to the effects of doll ownership (e.g., Danaher, 2017;Eskens, 2017), or rely on case study evidence (Aoki & Kimuri, 2021), which limits the definitiveness of any conclusions that might be drawn. There are some reviews (e.g., Döring et al, 2020;Hanson & Locatelli, 2022;Harper & Lievesley, 2020), though these (by necessity) present overviews of non-empirical book chapters, case study evidence, or non-peer-reviewed literature, as identified above.…”

“…Most of this work adopts quantitative designs, and few studies have made their way into the peer-reviewed literature. Those studies that have used qualitative methods to explore doll ownership have used public domain data, such as online testimonials or forum posts (Ciambrone et al, 2017;Su et al, 2019), have included short open-ended questions embedded within online surveys (Ferguson, 2014;Langcaster-James & Bentley, 2018), or have limited themselves to shallower content analyses (Hanson & Locatelli, 2022). Here, we investigate the motivations for doll ownership, experiences of having a doll, and the various effects that ownership has had on the lives of men who own sex dolls.…”

“…We set out to answer the question of how sex doll owners understand their motivations for, and experiences of, doll ownership. Ultimately, we aim to consider these understandings alongside recent survey-based data (e.g., Harper et al, 2023), preliminary qualitative data (Hanson & Locatelli, 2022), and meta-analytic reviews of the area (e.g., Döring et al, 2020) to produce a working profile of sex doll owners, and to formulate potential hypotheses for future work in this area.…”

“…The phenomenological nature of the work contained within this paper makes a new and incremental contribution to the current knowledge base about the ownership of sex dolls. For instance, we know that doll owners have a range of sexual, emotional, and interpersonal motivations for desiring a doll (for reviews, see Döring et al, 2020;Hanson & Locatelli, 2022;Harper & Lievesley, 2020). However, we do not know about the experiences that lead to these motivations, nor how people make sense of them.…”