I suppose I can see how this is a solution to a problem, just not the one in play.
I just can’t see this being anything other than boring. Partners are supposed to be predictable to a certain point – it’s nice to cuddle up without worrying about being murdered – but that’s not what I’m looking for with coding.
That said, this:
Asked about the company’s responsibilities or processes if a doll was asked to be modelled on a real person without their knowledge, a spokesperson at Coeros told the Guardian: “The fact that a custom design can be created from reference images should not be interpreted as permission to use another person’s likeness without their consent. We do not encourage or support the use of our customisation service for harassment, impersonation, or other non-consensual purposes.” Details for prospective buyers on the website include specific services from eyebrow hair implantation to shipping, but do not appear to include any directions as to obtaining the permission of women in any photographs uploaded. One member of the Doll Forum wrote of Coeros’s invention: “The most obvious candidates are the ones who turned you down, the ones that got away, the ones you had no hope of winning.”
That last quote is pretty damning. The one who I had no chance of winning turned me down in 2004, and she was in my bed last week. Oh, and we’ve been divorced for a decade, so she also falls under “the one who got away.”
But Jesus Christ, the last thing I’d want is something modeled after her. I have a propensity for adopting Korats because they’re going to have a consistent baseline of characteristics, but recreating my ex-wife is beyond dystopian.
Bluntly, I know how her body works holistically, so an AI vagina isn’t going to provide the package deal. Also, if I’m going to be impaled by cone spikes, they’d better be on a real person.
Worthwhile relationships include friction and, well, skin contact.
Anyway, now that I’ve shot my load, here’s the opening:
Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.
But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.
The sex doll trade is flourishing. A 2026 market analysis estimates that the global market was valued at US$6.6bn in 2025, with a projection that it will more than double, to US$13.4bn, by 2033. As the market booms, and involves increasingly lifelike facsimiles of women, does how these dolls get treated matter?
And when a sex doll with “bruises” and rain-matted hair is tucked into a suitcase and left on a roadside, should we be concerned?
I’d argue the answer is yes.
I really don’t care. A lot of people have “weird” sexual behaviors. Essentially playing with dolls in private is not harming real people. It’s not harassment until someone else is actually involved.
Hilarious how Coeros say they don’t encourage the use of their doll customization service for harassment, impersonation, or other non-consensual things as if they’re gonna be paying the staff running things to make sure concent has been approved of. Let alone anything beyond a contingency plan for after a lawsuit comes their way.
Also, why is it always women dolls? As if we don’t already know that answer.
And I also agree it’s an absolute yes to the question of being worried about how modern sex dolls are treated. If a person ends up with a bruised up doll ( I presume most people, myself included, will assume it was beat up and battered by the original owner ) and then decides to ditch it on the side of a road in a suitcase, just imagine what would happen if that person was in an actual relationship. Imagine their partner says no to sex when they ask or end up doing something they dislike. How are they gonna react to a real person if they clearly didn’t treat the doll well at all?
Part of what concerns me here is another trend, which is those rooms where you pay for an hour and get to smash dishes and such with a baseball bat. And now there’s a surplus of cheap, used sex dolls. It doesn’t take much to see a business plan here.
Yes, concerned (if not deeply concerned, or even appalled) would be a good initial stance until we have more information.
I don’t care about the robot, it doesn’t have feelings, it can’t, and it would take something profound to change in the technology that I’ve seen before I’m willing to even consider that they would ever be worth considering as candidates for my sympathy. I don’t grant the trait of consciousness lightly, and neither should anyone else.
I do care about the people using such robots for such purposes, and I think there are reasonable concerns about the safety of other real people that may come into contact with these individuals. And those other people do have both feelings and all the protections that consciousness and human rights entitle them to. I believe extreme caution is warranted about allowing the proliferation of such technologies at least until more supervision and psychological research can be conducted to understand the possible scope of benefits and harms to individuals and to society. There is no legitimate urgency driving these technologies to be allowed and adopted so quickly besides profit, and our failure to approach them with anything resembling caution is probably something we are eventually going to regret. I just hope it’s not an existential failure. It might be something close to it. Time will tell.
I could see a market for this existing for dolls that meet very specific tastes rather than dolls modeled to look like real people. Aside from any general concerns one might have about a sex doll, I don’t think something like that would be very controversial (as long as they stay away from certain domains like bestiality of course). I’d hope they’d be more open to customization beyond just women though, with the option to “mix-and-match” parts even.
Where I think it becomes questionable is when:
- You allow the dolls to be modeled after real people without their consent. Does it harm that person? Maybe not if they don’t know, but it’s hard to say that excuses it when we know that can make someone uncomfortable or feel violated.
- You only allow female dolls. I can understand specialization, but without an established clearly diverse market, it’s really not a good look.
- You try to include some kind of artificial companionship with it. This is just exploitation of vulnerable people who should seek therapy, not a sex doll.
Roper actively campaigns for adult sex dolls to be prohibited as well as childlike sex dolls. “There’s an understanding, in the case of child sex abuse dolls, that their use extends to the harm of actual children. This same recognition of harm does not extend to adult women dolls. Women are being reduced to a set of penetrable orifices,” she says
This feels like a stretch. Not allowing childlike sex dolls is a matter of discouraging pedophilia, which is socially unacceptable and best treated through mental health services. Adults having sex is only considered “unacceptable” by the religiously oppressive.
However, I also believe that focusing solely on women and not reaching into other markets (like male sex dolls) isn’t a good look. This isn’t even just about making sex dolls for women, but also for the enormous market of both open and closeted gay men throughout the world.
