Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Real History of Sex Dolls

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

The origins of the modern sex doll are shrouded in myth.Some say they came from crafty sailors in the 18th century, a long way from home and in need of, ahem, company.In today's episode, Kate is joined by Bo Ruberg, author of Sex Dolls At Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies to uncover the truth.How were early sex dolls used to smuggle booze into Paris? What do the sex doll myths reveal about ourselves? And why is there such stigma around them compared to other sex toys?This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My loveliest of lovely betwixters, how are you doing? I'm doing all right, thank you for asking. But to make sure that everybody continues to be all right, I think you know what's happening. That's right, it's the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things,

covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Okay, feeling safer, but I know I am. Let's do this. I hope you got your sea legs on betwixters because today we are at sea in the 18th century. We've taken to the waves. We're off for adventures and exploring, but I'll tell you what, it does not get a bit boring because we can be out here for months, possibly years at a time. So how are you going to make the most of this? How are you going to pass your time? I spy doesn't quite cut it, especially with this, well, horny bunch.

Thankfully, I'm up in the crow's nest away from them. But looking at semen stains over there, and he has had his needle and thread out for days, he's sewing something together. It looks kind of like a crude, life-sized doll. Is that an orifice? Good Godman. It is, he's sewing a giant woman doll together. What in the silence of the lambs is this? I know that they say necessity is the mother of invention, but wow.

It is a long-held belief that, 18th century sailors created the first sex dolls at sea. Now, is that true, or is that historical nonsense? And if it is, where did the idea come from in the first place? Thankfully, my little voyage on the ship seems to be coming an end, because land ho. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kay Lister. History is really telling stories. We hope that we're telling stories that are true,

but it is telling stories. And whilst it's fascinating to unpack and challenge these stories, one of the most interesting things about them is asking the question where did the story come from in the first place? What does it mean to us as a culture? It is often more revealing than the truth itself. The history of sex dolls is no exception to that. It's a journey that starts on the high seas of the 18th century

and ends up with sex robots and AI possibly taken over the world with a slight detour on the back streets of Paris in the 19th century where they filled these dolls full of milk. Yeah, yeah, I thought that was weird too. Taking me on this journey is Bo Ruberg, author of Sex Dolls at Sea, imagined histories of sexual technologies. How have sex dolls evolved over time? Why does a sex doll carry more shame and stigma than a dildo does? And what does all of this say about us?

I am ready for this if you are betwixters. Hello and welcome to betwixters sheets. It's only Bo Robberg. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm talking to you from Southern California, where it is sunny and 70 degrees. Oh, I'm talking to you from Leeds where it is grey and drizzly. That's what we've got. I'm so sorry. It's properly grim out there. But it's very bright and shiny in here because I am talking to you and you are the author of Sex Dolls at Sea, a history of the Sex Doll, which it's so.

such a needed history. And I know that because I wrote a chapter on the history of sex dolls in my book. And your book came out just after it. And I was reading through your book and I was like, God damn it, Bo. Where were you? I needed this. What made you want to write this story? Yeah. I mean, it got started as just a little side project. I thought I would work on it for an afternoon and I ended up working on it for like three years of my life. I was teaching. I'm a a professor at UC Irvine, University of California, Irvine, which is just south of Los Angeles. And I was teaching a graduate seminar that involved this story that I had heard lots of times about the very first sex dolls being dolls made by sailors at sea, which is what this book

is really about this kind of origin story of sex dolls. And I thought, gosh, that's neat. I bet I could poke around the internet, do some archival stuff, just see, like, I wonder what they looked like. And then that became a rabbit hole for, you know, the whole project. of learning about that backstory and what was really going on. I heard that story. That's one of those, I'm not sure if it's an online origin story or what it is, but you see it cropping up all the time that the first sex dolls were these, what are they called Dame de Voyage, that sailors would have on their boats,

and that they were basically like giant woman figures made of rags sort of tied together with bits of rope and stuff. I've definitely heard that. did you find proof of this or is it just just one of those nonsances? Yeah, I feel like in some ways that's an unfair question because a lot of the book is like, no, no, no, it's good. It's good. You should totally ask. It's like a little bit of a mystery project because it took so long to figure it out. Yeah, no, ultimately that is not true. Ultimately, that is a story that has been, that particular version of it has really been invented in the last 20 years or so. And it turns out

it does have its origins kind of kicking around the internet in the early days of the internet and then comes up through all these people who cite each other, right? They're trying to do the right thing and cite sources but it's like the story just grows and grows. No, those did not, in that form did not exist. I wouldn't put it past a group of horny sailors

to hump a load of rags though. We're not going to let them off the book entirely. No, totally. But that's part of doing the research for this project was like, I am not giving up on these. Like, I wanted them to exist too. So I was just like cold calling every human I could think of who maybe had heard of them.

Like people who are specialists in sea shanties. It was like maybe sailors sung about them. Or like pornography made on scrimshaw, like whale bones. I was like, maybe there are pictures of them. But I've like scoured the world and I can't find them. And it's funny because it is one of those stories that it looks like there's sauces for it because there are pictures of these things that you reference in your book. But is this a case of like when you actually try and find, well, who did the picture,

then you find that the person who did it while they're actually citing someone else who's kind of maybe not just sort of making it up as well? Yeah, totally. So it's this whole like winding trail. So there's this picture that gets used a lot that I know you've seen that's supposed to be a picture of these dolls. But if you trace where it came from source after source, it's actually an illustration of a doll made by a prisoner in Germany.

So it's just an individual. And the German, actually, there's German text around it. It's really fuzzy. So if you go back to the original source, you can read it, and it says it's a prisoner's doll. So somebody picked it up and picked it up and picked it up. And then at some point, someone said it's these sailors dolls, and that's been the story ever since. Were the prisoners using it to have sex with? There's only evidence of this one prisoner.

and that photo comes from the collection of the kind of institute of sex research that was in Berlin during Weimar Germany that was burned, all the collections were burned by the Nazis. So we don't have a lot of it. We just have one image replicated in a book. So I don't know the full context, but the implication is it's just one guy in prison who made that. But like very elaborately. She's working really hard in his craft class just to meet this dog. Absolutely.

And it's got clothes. everything, it's very, and it's kind of sweet, actually. I can see where the story took hold. I mean, what kind of, like, time period are we talking about here? Because when we're talking about sailors going to sea and making sex dolls, it's got that kind of, like, of your thing about it, like an indiscriminate at some point, I don't know, maybe pirates were there. Like, what kind of time period are we talking about here?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think you're absolutely right that the story. has this very like folksy, like once upon a time. But I think that's actually how it's gotten to like replicate because then people don't really question it. So the real history of sex dolls of like commercial sex dolls starts in the 1850s, which is a separate story. But the contemporary myth that they start with these salared stalls, depending on the version

you read, it puts it at different historical moments. So some of them will say it was the 1500s. Some will say the 1700s. Some will say the 1700s. And we'll say the early 1900. So it's all over the place. And it's one of the cues that that story is a myth, right? Because there's no, like, consistency in the dates.

I'm going to get to what was happening in the 1850s. But the concept of a sex doll, that's quite fascinating in itself, is the idea that humans form a kind of a figure to have sex with. What's the oldest reference that we've got to that? I know that there's the pygmalium myth that gets referenced quite a lot of, you know, horny Greeks doing things to statues that they shouldn't be. Yeah, that tends to be the story that people point back to. So it's right this myth of Pygmalion, who's this amazing artist in the story that's told

it the version we have most often is told by Ovid, who was, you know, an author of antiquity. But the story is that Pygmalion is this amazing artist and sculptor who makes a beautiful sculpture so beautiful he falls in love with her and the gods bring her to life. she becomes his wife. That's obviously not a real history, right? It's a myth. And it's a kind of funny myth because when you actually read it in the original, it's almost like making fun of him. So Pygmalion isn't this kind of amazing figure. He is a little bit goofy. It's like he makes a statue and then he loves her. So he like dresses her up and puts clothes on. And the gods are kind of like, okay, fine, dude. If this is what you want. Here, have your weird porcelain wife. But so, yeah,

that actual history is kind of hard to track, right? Because before the mid-1800s, there isn't like a big commercial production of them. So it would have to be a one-off kind of thing. There are stories about them in Japan from an earlier period, but my best research, and I don't read Japanese, so my best attempts say that those stories are probably also false. And I suppose if we're being super critical here, the Pygmalian myth, It's not technically a sex doll. It's not what I would call. It's not something that has been designed just so he can have sex with it.

It's that he developed unhealthy feelings for a statue he really like. Not the same. Yeah, but I think the reason that people like to point back to it is in the contemporary moment, people who really are in support of like sex dolls and sex robots, it's a kind of like romantic story, right? It's not this just like silly thing we're doing in the present. It's something that has a like long history. with amazing artists.

So it kind of like legitimates that interest in the present. I hadn't thought about it like that. That's very true. When we're talking about sailors, maybe the story about the making dolls on board a ship is so easy to believe because it's sailors. And there's that whole, sorry to sailors listening. No, I think you're right.

You know, there is that kind of like, yo-ho-ho, ho, boys at sea, let's do free. Of course, they're all making dolls out of rags, apparently. why sailors? And yeah, what does that tell us about our estimation of people at sea? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think you're absolutely right that there's this like sexual implication of sailors, this idea that, you know, they're full of like straight masculine energy

and they're all shoved onto a ship and they're so much that they like have such strong desire that they're going to make these dolls. I think the ironic thing is that this story about the sailors dolls makes them seem super straight, right? like that there are all these men on board. They have no women. That's often the way the story is told. They have no women to have sex with,

so they have to make these dolls. But actually, there are a lot of cultural associations that are about queerness and homosexuality on ships, right? So if you think about, like, images by Tom of Finland, artist famous for doing these, like, very muscular images of gay men, there are lots of sailors ones. Pirates often have these very queer associations.

Yes, I think it comes partly from a kind of like sex. image of sailors in general, but it's kind of ironic because I think for me it makes that story more queer than I think a lot of people intended to be. That's interesting. I'd never thought about it like that is that the kind of the idea that the sailors, they're so straight that they, what they're going to do is they would rather sew a woman out of rags than have sex with each other or masturbate. It's a strange myth. But like a lot of the stories that you read in text from the last like 20 years. We'll literally say that. They'll be like, well, it would have been so vile to turn to their fellow men for pleasure that they had to invent the sex doll. And as a queer person and a

person who does a lot of queer studies work, I'm like, really? Was it really so vile? Okay. Really. It's completely glossing over the fact. Who would it have been that had the needle craft skills to have made a giant doll? Gay sailors, that's who I'm saying. There's no way straight men would have had patience for that at all. Right. See, this is what I actually like about this story, even though it's false, is like, I love that image of them like sitting with a needle and thread.

And like a lot of the stories will say like they use scraps of their own clothing. So like I love the image of this doll like in like old sailors uniforms that they pass around between them. It's somehow like very cozy. It is oddly sweet. It's like, yeah, because I mean a doll like that would take time to me. if you actually really sit down with this and break down what is supposed to have happened, to make a giant life-sized doll with presumably with orifices, that's some serious needlecraft and skills going into that.

I think that's right. I've never given it that much attention, but you're absolutely right? I'd have to do it for a long time at sea, and there are very real histories of sailors doing that kind of crafting with carving and things. Yeah, what I like about that is that even though that's not the real history, it kind of gives this myth, makes it queer, but it also makes it kind of feminized because we associate that sort of handcrafting with women. It like does all these things it's not supposed to do. Like I think that story is supposed to make the origin of sex dolls seem really like butch and

masculine. And instead it has all these other implications. So when do we start getting references to what you would be comfortable saying, this actually happened, first of all, this isn't just a strange sailor. fantasy and that this is definitely a sex doll. This isn't like a weird statue thing, that this is a doll that has been made for people to have sex with. When did you start finding solid evidence of that? Yeah. So again, roughly the 1850s. So I will give you the dorky answer and I will say like this is never what I thought I would care about, but now I'm like super excited about it. So the actual thing that sparks the birth of sex dolls as we think of them now is the invention of vulcanized rubber

Of course. So what that means is that if you think about like India rubber dildos, the kind of older form of dildo, they were like these hard, like if you ever had like an old school yard ball that's like a hard not stretchy rubber. Yeah. That's what dildos used to be like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like heavy too. It just makes me. I can only think about like thwacking them onto somebody.

They're heavy. But when they invent this way of treating rubber, what it does is it makes it stretchy. So all of a sudden, you can have inflatables. And there's this moment in the middle of the 19th century where there's like a craze of making all kinds of things out of rubber. It's like the hot new technology. And the documentation we have that's really useful is in Paris. There's a World's Fair.

And at World's Fares, historically, they showed off all kinds of new tech. And there is a booth that people write about in news articles from the time that's showing off all the amazing rubber inventions. And one of them is a rubber wife. And so at that point, they're not yet being like manufactured to scale, right? Like, you couldn't go and buy one from a catalog. But those are the first, like, physical items is they're on display at the World's Fair. And people make all these kinds of jokes.

Like, I went to see the rubber wife. Like, I wonder what she could possibly be for. Like, what use could she possibly have? And then in later years, you start to see them be actual products that you can buy. But that's the first moment. See, that always blows by mind when you find references to that. And it's always at these world fairs. I know.

Because I always thought of them as being quite like, you know, you take your family there and we'd go and see all of the nice inventions and the clever things that people are doing. And then you find references to stuff like this that there was some guy there with just like a rubber wife. And it doesn't seem to have been hidden away. I mean, presumably whoever was selling this wasn't advertising it as you can have sex with this doll. But the meaning does not seem to have been lost on people at all.

No, I don't think so. Yeah. And in future years, there are kind of four world's fairs in Paris over the course of about 50 years, and that's a way of tracing how these dolls evolve. In later ones, there are more of them on display. I think you're absolutely right. People know what they're for. But then there's this thing that happens. There's a political regime change in Paris and France, and the dolls become illegal later in the 1800s. So by the time, there's a world's fair in 1900. And there, instead of showing the doll, as like this exciting tech. Instead, people are being arrested outside the fair for giving out ads to purchase them. So all of a sudden, it goes from being like this amazing new thing. I mean, not all of a sudden. There's 50 years in between, but like it goes from being this amazing new thing to being a like very seedy underground thing, but still at the fair. What happened to have made that shift? I mean, it wouldn't have been that people worked out they could have sex with them. They seem to have known that. But what was... Right. Was it just that they were becoming too widely spoken about, that people weren't

very good at keeping this particular secret, so people had to act? What was the shift that suddenly these things were illegal? Yeah, so part of it is just a larger political shift, like Napoleon III comes to power. There's a kind of crackdown on other sexual material in Paris, too, like erotic photography and postcards. But it's like when they're new and shiny, and no one actually has them yet, they're just seeing them at the fair, then it's the... kind of this amazing spectacle. But once they start getting sold for real through these sex toy catalogs

that were popular in Paris, then all these seedier things start coming out. So, like, there are cases where wives divorced husbands because they were having sex with these dolls. So you get these, like, sensationalist court cases. There's this amazing story of someone purchasing two of the dolls, dressing them up like husband and wife,

like a groom and bride, just after they're married, filling them with liquor. because they're hollow and inflating them with liquor and putting them in a carriage and driving them back and forth through the gates of Paris as a way to circumvent like liquor taxes.

Right. And like those two dolls were confiscated and kept in a museum underneath the city hall of Paris as like look at the fun stuff that the police have confiscated. So it's things like that. It's like they got a wreck, they went from being exciting and new

to getting a reputation for being associated with problematic things. Have any of them survived? Or were there any pitches of them or anything? I have tried so hard. The book even includes in the opening part like a call, like literally, if you were anywhere in the world and you have one of these in your closet. Because I collect antique sex toys and that's often how I found them.

At estate sales, you know, someone's grandmother has like tucked it away in the bottom of the closet. To the best of what I can find, no. Because they're rubber, right? So they disintegrate over the course of time. And we're talking. They'd be like 140 years old now. That's true. So paint me a picture what these things would have looked like then because they, yeah, they'd have been soft rubber, right? Like a welly boot type of rubber? I think the best equivalent is like a bicycle inner tube. Oh, okay. Yeah. So a little bit thicker around the edges, but inflatable. So we know what they're like because we have images like renderings of other things made from the same material. And then we have people's descriptions of what they were like. So which I think is so fun like just envisioning them. So,

So they were sold in parts. So you wouldn't get a whole doll. You would get like a torso, arms, legs, and then you attach them. They were designed to be, like you could fill them with air, but the recommendation was to fill them with warm milk. No, it wasn't, Bo. Oh, my God. With the idea that, you know how we sell sex tech these days as like the most realistic, or even just toys, like the most realistic feeling? Like that was absolutely all over the advertising for these dolls was like,

she'll feel so realistic if you fill her with warm milk. It would be like touching a real woman. Why milk that? Which seems so messy. It's so messy. I know of the thing, the fluids that are going into this doll, milk's probably the least of their worries. But that would be so stinky as well.

I can't imagine. I can't imagine. So that was a recommendation. Who knows if people really did that? That would be a lot of milk, wouldn't it? That would be like to fill up a human-sized rubber thing of hot milk. Right. And so what I never even thought about like when you warm up milk, you do it like a pot at a time.

It's just that whole process would be very hard. So poor guy, six hours later going any minute now, any minute now. The instructions say to fill it with warm milk and I'm trying. I don't believe anybody did that. So were they inflatable then? Did you have to like... Yeah. Oh, right.

Okay. They're inflatable. And so then they could fold up. You got them in these pieces and then each of the pieces could fold up. And the way that you actually kind of took them home with you is in a suitcase. So if you look at some like older vibrators sold through like the Sears catalog in the U.S., they come in these like little leather suitcases so that you can carry them around and they just look like a little suitcase. So it came in something like that.

Wow. And then you'd open up your suitcase. case, take out all your inflatable folded bits. You know, like, I don't know, the way that when you get an inflatable thing for the pool, it comes all folded up, and put in air, put in milk, whatever you're going to put in, attach it, and you're ready to go. I'll be back with Bo after this short break. Grumpy would you be if you got like the arms first? Presumably, like, that's a good question. What if you just get to the torso and you're like, you know what I'm good? This is enough. I don't need, I really don't need the feet. It's a very strange idea that you

would keep buying the bits to assemble it? Oh, it comes all together. So you buy it once. Yeah, you'd buy the suitcase and the suitcase has all of her bits involved in it. Do you know if they had names? Because sex dolls today have names, don't they? Is there any record of that? There isn't. They just get called either, which translates to like rubber wife or sometimes they get called Dom de Voyage, which is the term that we now think is for these sailors dolls, but was actually used at the time for the rubber dolls. So that term, that Dom de Voyage, the French term, which means kind of like women of travel or traveling companion, that term is historical. It just didn't mean what anybody today seems to think it means. See, I was surprised when you said that they suddenly

became illegal and objects of great moral concern. But we're still doing that today. If you think of the modern equivalent with the sex robot, which has had a similar thing. In the beginning, people were like, oh my god, that's crazy tech. And now they're actually kind of come into fruition. There's a lot of pushback around them. Yeah. I mean, I think what I learned from this project again and again is that this moment we're in right now,

everything we're excited about or we're fretting about has happened before. Like there's absolutely like 140 years ago, they were having the same conversations. You know, we talk about sex robots like, will they destroy our relationships between people? People are concerned about that too. the kind of humor, if you think about representations of sex dolls in movies

and things sometimes they're humorous, there were all these jokes in newspapers at the time about men who use sex dolls. So like all these things are just repeating themselves. Wow. Is there anything in the records of the people who actually own the doll? Because I know that there are a very under-researched group of people

even to this day, there isn't a lot of data out there on people who own sex dolls or idolaters, as they call them. themselves, which I thought was quite sweet. Yeah. Is there anything to speak to who owns these dolls? Yeah.

So they would have been quite expensive. So if you think about the way that things like real dolls today are quite expensive, even though they seem so low tech to us, they would have also been a big investment then. So that kind of reduces who can use them. The stories that we hear are often people with spouses, so men who have wives. But I think that that may be because that's where there's friction that comes up. Like that's where it comes into the court cases. If you maybe didn't have someone you were living with, maybe that wouldn't come up as much.

There are kind of anecdotal stories about individual men who, you know, lost a loved one or something and they want to go have a doll to replace her. We hear that today too. But no, there's not a great record. And the thing that's really hard with that question and actually all of these questions is that these dolls at different times were illegal, but also they're just like way underground. It's a lot of our sex history, as I'm sure you absolutely know, is just like erased from the archives because people don't want to keep records of it. In the 19th century, there was this huge moral panic, not just about dolls, it would seem, but about sex work in general. Like in Britain, we were calling it the great social evil. I mean, we weren't pulling any punches there, were we? And in Paris, there was sort of similar concerns, but different systems of regulation.

how did the dolls fit into this? Was there anybody sort of arguing of like, oh, look, these dolls might actually help us cure the great social evil? Or were they linked him with this narrative somehow? Yeah, I mean, I really appreciate you bringing up the relationship to sex work because that's very much in the background of this whole history. So that term, Dom de Voyage, before it comes to mean these dolls, was a euphemism for sex workers.

Wow. And it kind of still is, if you think about like traveling companion, still got a little bit of that. Yes, escort, I suppose. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you'd see ads for sex workers operating in places like Montmartre, which, you know, is like a historically kind of sex work focused part of Paris, saying like, I'm a traveling companion looking for a nice gentleman to, like, escort me at 2 a.m. to my apartment in Montrere. So like, not even too euphemistic. So that's, that's where the term comes from. But yeah, historically and in the present, when people, talk about these dolls, it's often as a way of saying it would be better to have sex with the dolls

than with sex workers. So there is a kind of sex worker panic. The story that gets told today about these sailors' dolls is often told as it would be better for these European men on journeys to have sex with the dolls than with sex workers at their various ports of coal. So there's like panic around sex work, especially racialized sex work because they're kind of going on these colonial voyages. But we have that today too, right? People, like, dolls and sex workers are closely aligned, but there are all these these super problematic arguments about how it's better to have sex with dolls and sex workers that implies this real bias against sex work. It's, yeah, that was there all along. Is that a colonial aspect to these dolls in the 19th century? It was interesting just to hear you

say that there, that one of the narratives was not only that you shouldn't have sex with sex work, but you shouldn't have sex with a sex worker from another country. Oh my God, doubly bad. Yeah, totally. I mean, we definitely have that in the present. And then also historically, yeah, so you'll see people write stories in the newspaper that are either supposed to be real accounts or kind of fictional accounts of using the dolls. And they'll describe them as things that, quote unquote, colonial explorers, like, you know, white French men in this case would take with them, for example, to Africa, to like French colonial holdings in Africa in order to have sex with, quote unquote, white women because the dolls were, in some cases, bleached white, in order to avoid having sex. with women who were, you know, local sex workers. So there's definitely a racialized and colonial part of it. My God.

Do we know if any of these, because now you can get a whole plethora of different types of sex dolls, can't you? Were there any of them that were sort of like themed? I'm thinking like blonde dolls or brunette dolls or Asian dolls or black dolls or anything like that? I think they were mostly rudimentary enough that they looked similar, but you could definitely sometimes you could get like blonde or brunette so they sometimes came with like additional hair hair like things stuck on to them and so the ads you will sometimes see advertised as blonde

or brunette so you could make that choice and then there are rumors of some shops around the time that would make really elaborate wax dolls for you that you could go and get them to look specifically the way you wanted i'm not 100% sure if those are real but that was certainly something people were interested in i bet they looked awful not that i want to you know oh they did throw shade at 19th century rubber skills. But I just can't imagine these things looked amazing. No. And there's so one of my favorite like bits of this research trajectory is there are all these stories of this like really amazing early doll that was supposed to be so realistic that it excreted fluids and it was just like touching a real woman. And I dug and dug and dug for any

evidence of this. And I ultimately found an ad for it that had an image, a picture with it. And it's just like a cushion. It's like a little like lima bean shaped cushion with a hole in it. Brilliant. And the promise of the advertising is so different. The reality to us does not look good. My God. Why do you think that dolls, sex dolls in particular, they're capable of creating that real ick feeling?

I'm going to guess that while these dolls were being filled with hot milk apparently and freaking everyone out, The same tech was being applied to making dildos, basically, but we seem to be a lot less, at least freaked out by dildos than we, the doll in particular really gives people that shivery-l feeling. The answer we usually go to, right, is that uncanny valley thing, where they are kind of... Uncanny valley. This idea that when something looks different enough from us,

we're not so freaked out by it, whether it's cute or it's just part of the body, But when something starts to look more like us, there's like this dip where if it's not quite realistic enough, it starts to freak us out. So I imagine that that is part of it. But it's something, I mean, like you're saying, it's something we still see today, even as dolls do get more and more realistic. I think there's something about it as like a companion that kind of freaks people out because it's just so close to being human. That's true because the users of dolls are stigmatized in a way that users of dull doors are absolutely not. Now, admit. I haven't named my dildos

and I don't dress them up in little costumes and claim to be in love with them. I imagine some of the dog costumes you get for Halloween, I bet that would. Like for really little dogs and a big dildo, I bet you can make it work. But the people who use sex dolls, they are very stigmatized.

We do think of them as being, oh God, you sad, lonely, desperate. When, you know, I've got sex toys in my dress. Or what, like, actually, what is the difference? Yeah, I think, gosh, it's so hard to untangle because, like, I don't, personally, I have a lot of problems with the, like, contemporary conversations around things like sex robots, but I have no problem with people using dolls or using robots. Like, I don't, I don't think we should stigmatize people who use these various types of toys. I think the problem maybe comes in and in how they're made or how they're advertised or how they're represented in film because that gives us a sense that they're only designed. for a certain type of person, usually, you know, a straight cis male consumer, or that they're

made for people who are lonely and that, you know, eventually you have to overcome being connected to a doll in order to connect with quote unquote real people. So it's like a cultural narrative more than anything. What are the issues that you've got with the narratives around sex robots? I'd love to love to be. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm of this really mixed mind because I am interested in tech. I believe in tech in a lot of ways. I used to be a tech journalist, which is how I got kind of involved in the sex tech scene a while ago. But a lot of the tech that we're using to like make sex robots or sex-related AI is just so biased. We are making these technologies that are designed for a certain kind of consumer, but they often, you know, only represent white women or Asian women. They're often

framed as like, they'll give you, you know, the best sex, the most amazing, you know, you know, connection that you couldn't have with real women because of all these kind of sexist representations of real women. And, you know, they've got all of these cultural biases coded into them in a way that it doesn't have to be that way, right? Like tech could be different than that. And as an academic, I get especially irked when I see it in fellow academics who are writing papers on, you know, they're supposed to be writing on the like technical components of computing. And instead it's these papers that are like, sex robots will give us the best sex because they'll be more beautiful than real women.

And you're like, is that really the scientific study of something? Or is that just your own fantasy and desire? I don't see. I mean, you know, speaking from a place of ignorance, but I don't see how it could be the best sex ever when it is effectively, it's a machine. You know, they haven't got it to the point yet, can they? Whether the sex robots can respond and reciprocate and all of those things.

And even if they do, Would that really be better than an actual person? I think it depends what you want, not in what I would want from a sexual partner. True, true. But yeah, like, I think that's a good point. When they get advertised as, or like kind of hyped up as being an opportunity to have the best possible sex, like, we all have lots of different kinds of sex. Yeah. Whose best sex is that, you know?

It's a very specific part of the population and it's being assumed as if it's universal. We never talk really about women having sex dolls. Talk about them having dildos or people with vaginas in general. Is there evidence ever that there was sex dolls made for women or have we always just kind of gone, now you're all right, thanks. Yeah, Hallie Lieberman has done some reporting on this specifically. So a couple years ago, she was looking, you know, where are the dolls made for women? And I think even more specifically, like, where are the dolls shaped like men, like cis men? That's what I was looking for. Yeah, so she has some great reporting on that. And historically, we don't see them. I think for the same reason that people would argue today,

like they don't sell as well. It doesn't make sense to produce them at scale. Although there are like stories that are meant to be humorous. Imagine that there were dolls shaped like men, how would women use them and cheat on their husbands? But I think the other thing that when we don't see dolls shaped like men, that we're not seeing is queer sex, right? Is sex between men, for example?

Yeah. That we have whole segments of the sex toy industry that are designed for men and for gay men. And, you know, the dolls, there are some, but they're really, the way that they represent gay men can be really troubling. Like, it's a very stereotypical representation. That is so true.

I'd never thought of that before, but they are pretty, it's a very heteronomotive, very strong. straight market, isn't it? But that goes right back to the idea of the damned of voyage themselves, doesn't it? What you started saying right in the beginning. Yeah. Maybe it's always been this way. I think yes and no, right? I think it's true that the early dolls were designed for and oriented towards straight men. But I think also the reason the story of the Sailor's doll has so much purchase, like why people keep telling it, is that it does make that history seem really straight. So if somebody were to say today, somebody were to come in like me and be

like, your sex tech, your sex dolls don't just have to be designed for straight men. They can be so different. It's a way of saying, well, across the centuries, we have always had dolls shaped like women for straight men. It gives, you know, it gives a little bit of an excuse for this idea that it's always been this way across history, which it hasn't. What do you think is the future of sex dolls? I wonder if we'll ever get to a point where they're mainstream and, you know, you're comfortable with it and you can go down and get one at Aldi in that middle aisle bit and it would all be fine. Yeah, I mean, there are, there are moments in the 60s and 70s in the US where you can absolutely order them from, you know, catalogs, but they're that kind of blow

up. We now think of kind of like comedic, like blow up doll with a big open mouth. Like on the staggedies. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm super interested in the people who are doing work on, for example, like the use of dolls in sex worker spaces. So Chloe Locatelli, who is based in the UK and is a recent PhD working on this intersection of sex work and sex tech, has done some really cool work on sex doll brothels in Germany specifically. And just looking at how like the dolls are becoming kind of tied up with work often done by women or by femme folks. So I think that's one area. Gosh, I have like a vision of the future I want. and a vision of the future I think is going to happen.

I can't help but think of them as I think that it's going to be like the self-service checkout machines that in the beginning it's a novelty and everyone thought it was great but they don't work properly and you'll start up your robot and then she'll say unidentified item in the bagging area and you'll have to get somebody to come in and scan something to let you keep going and then it'll happen again and then in the UK now we're kind of going, oh, no, this is rubbish. We need to get the actual humans back in. That's how I see, not in the brothels, in the actual self-service term. That's a weird conflation. I've gone to a very strange. No, I like it. I like it. I think that's a good comparison. I'm not about that.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's one thing to be seen is whether this is just a bubble, especially around AI and sex robots specifically, because I'm sure you've seen this, like, the way that people describe what these things can do is actually far more impressive than what they can actually do right now, like the real things that are on the market really just don't live up to that. And so either we're going to keep like pushing technological advancement until they're a big part of our lives or people, it's going to be like early bubbles for virtual reality or something where it's big hype and then people are like, you know what, this was not what I thought it was going to be.

I'm not sure which one I'm rooting for, you know. I'm rooting for the thing which is probably not going to happen, but I wish it would, which is like queer and trans people and feminist folks like take. over sex tech and make just weird things. Like I want like dolls with like a ton of limbs or like orifice we don't even have. I just want the like creative tech that is for like sex that other people have, you know? It's probably not going to happen. But I want to.

Yeah, absolutely. I've thought about it a lot of like, well, what would my sex doll look like? What would my sex robot be? What would be a good sex stuff? Because if you're just presenting me with just a doll that was just a male form with an erection and possibly, you know, a child. charging point. That's crap. Right? I agree. I don't want that. I don't know what I want. I'd like it to make me a cup of tea afterwards, perhaps, or bring me snacks or, you know, ask me how my day was,

that kind of thing. But I guess the future will tell us, won't it, Bo? You have been so much fun to talk to you today. And your book is amazing. And if people want to know more about you, where can they find you? Yes. So I have a personal website, which is called Our Glass Lake. I, again, teach at University of California, Irvine, so you can find me there on the university website. And you can also find the book, which is published through MIT Press, came out in 22, and is free to read online, actually. So you can buy a print copy, but also the full book is available to read entirely for free online. Thank you so much, Bo. You have been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much for your questions. It's great to talk with you.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Bo for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the sex life of William Wallace of Braveheart fame to the history of sex work in America. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long.

Join me again betwixt the sheets of the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.