Sex dolls have advanced significantly.
Beginning as cloth-stitched, rubber-formed, or simply inflated figurines, they have developed into flexible, human-like silicone characters with recognized features and hair. With the rapid advancement of robots and artificial intelligence, these dolls will only become more like humans in the future and may even become more commonplace.
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In light of the growing popularity of sex dolls, psychologists at Nottingham Trent University in the UK set out to understand more about the individuals who use them.
In a recent research that was submitted to the Journal of Sex Research, they stated, “We present the first analysis of the personality, sexual interest, and risk-related characteristics of sex doll owners.”
Dr. Craig Harper, together with Drs. Rebecca Lievesley and Katie Wanless, recruited 158 male owners of sex dolls for their study by posting ads on well-known doll owners’ internet discussion boards. Then, using a crowdsourcing platform, they gathered 135 male control volunteers and had them complete a survey task examining psychological determinants of sexuality and sexual activity. A series of anonymous questionnaires examining the sexual desires, personalities, emotional functioning, relationship patterns, and sexual aggressiveness of both groups were then administered.
What were the answers to these questions?
“Sex doll owners were significantly more likely to see women as sex objects, to report greater sexual entitlement, and to see women as unknowable than non-owners,” according to the study. They also expressed a reduced sense of sexual self-worth, but they did not exhibit any increased propensity for sexual aggressiveness, fantasies of forceful sex, or emotional or attachment problems.
The results have political implications since some have called for the outlawing of lifelike sex dolls, especially those that mimic children, on the grounds that they encourage pedophilia and escalate sexual offenses.
On the other hand, the researchers claim that their findings suggest that using sex dolls may reduce the likelihood that users would commit sexual offenses. Dolls might be a harmless way to deal with relationship and sexual issues.
“In general, our data suggest that men who own sex dolls are not notably different to non-owner comparators in many important ways,” the investigators stated.
Because the study’s conclusions are based on self-reported data, they should be interpreted with caution. Even though the researchers took great care to protect the privacy of their subjects, they cannot guarantee that survey respondents were being truthful while answering some extremely private questions on a contentious topic.
“This first psychological investigation of sex doll owners appears to support the view that doll ownership is a functional response to a history of poor quality or broken relationships, which in turn are possibly attributable to various beliefs about the unknowability of potential sex partners, less secure attachment styles, and poorer than average levels of sexual self-esteem,” the investigators said.
