this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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[–] BeUnique@lemmy.zip 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

I read a review about a full body sex doll that completely changed my perspective on them. I have always been curious, just not curious enough to spend some serious cash on one and it's not the type of thing I'd ever get used (there are supposedly rentals you can get.. gross). Sure, it's great "in the moment" but it's the times that isn't sexy time that get a bit creepy. Like you are moving around a dead-weight human shaped doll that you occasionally take out and fuck. There was a guy that talked about wrapping one up in a blanket and stuffing it in the back of his closet that couldn't get over the visual that it's like storing a dead body and it was a huge turn-off. I can totally see that.

Edit: If anyone's interested, this is the post

[–] SerLava@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah I don't like to moralize about someone's extremely elaborate sex toy, but I really can't imagine being excited by something like that. Very alienating and creepy.

I remember people were semi-ironically horny posting about that video game with the Russian robot ballet dancers a few years ago, and that gave me even worse vibes. Like you could get past metallic skin or something, but they didn't have faces!! The faces were just a flat piece of metal. It's highly uncanny

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's the robots of Atomic Hearts, I think the appeal is just the body shape of toned slender woman body not the robot part itself.

[–] SerLava@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah that was the one. No yeah they had really toned bodies but like, an empty void of a face. Super unsettling

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago

If you google Atomic Hearts Twins some of the first results is a mod/edit putting faces on them so yeah a lot of people is unsettle by it(but horny enough to change it)

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There was a brief time where I almost got into the sexdoll sales business. Shits real weird.

[–] corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Ok, now this sounds like a hell of a story. Mind telling it?

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So I used to do handiwork for this weird boomer libertarian guy who lived in an RV, owned a ton of guns and was in failing health.

He'd buy us beers while we worked and was generally an alright guy, paid me well and I think just liked the company I afforded him.

One day while we were driving to pick up some shit from home depot, he tells me about how he had a wholesaler license and showed me the backend of Temu that only retailers usually get access to, and how he was thinking about getting into being a sex doll broker and wanted a younger attractive face for the sales side of it.

It was all just a little too weird for me and then I ended up getting another regular job and never heard from him again.

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[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

People are yelling at me but I still think they are cool as a masturbation aid. I'd absolutely love to work in the real doll business. WITH THAT SAID, yes it is strange to have a doll in your home and especially if you grow to love it.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think people are generally yelling at you, they are just saying that having a simulated sex slave (yes, that is generally what it would be) is probably not helpful to the project of making people more pro-social.

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 4 points 1 month ago

Yeah I know, I was trying to be funny bleh

[–] hello_hello@hexbear.net 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

(there are supposedly rentals you can get.. gross)

I get uncomfortable using a toilet after someone went in right before me how tf do people do rentals.

Gooning unlocks strange and dangerous powers.

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The fuck did I just read lmao

Near the end of my marriage my now ex got a sex doll. He spent nearly 2k and ended up messing up his back while maneuvering her. He did not end up keeping the doll when he moved out. However, she apparently came wrapped in a very cozy blanket. I've been using this blanket for years and it has somehow maintained its softness better than any blanket I have ever had. The blanket is nice to wrap up in during the winter, but light enough for summer. So, if your doll came with a blanket, I'd hold onto it.

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 33 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I'm all for incels getting sexbots if it stops them from doing rampage shootings and harassing women online, is this a hot take?

[–] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 43 points 1 month ago

It'll make them even more anti-social, because now they have a human simulacra they can mistreat at will and still never get the validation of human companionship.

Having slaves is not good for the slaver's psyche. It makes you a bad person. Even if the robot is not human, if its made in our image, if its meant to replace a human, then treating it like a slave makes you accustomed to treating other humans like slaves.

[–] CutieBootieTootie@hexbear.net 36 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I don't really feel comfortable with the idea of men owning simulacra of women intended to be use as objects only for sex. I think it's pretty obvious that it would make them have worse ideas about women.

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[–] Grownbravy@hexbear.net 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

well, we have no proof that could happen, cause then they want us to stop making fun of them for fucking the dolls, then they want us to recognized it's rights or marriage, then we have to get them counseling when their sexbots prefer to be with each other

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

then they want us to recognized it's rights

doubt

[–] SoyViking@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago

Only as a "gotcha" to derail discourse on queer rights, women's rights etc.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

i'm going to go slightly against the grain and say that i don't think buying a sexbot would change things in either direction. i think if you're radicalized to violence there is nothing that will divert you away from that (apart from the usual: having stable enough material conditions that you never make your violent impulse reality), if you're already a misogynist having a sex bot won't make it worse, and I'm also sure that there are also people who are able to view them as just sex toys and not be weird about it.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Is that true? Do you not believe there's a negative psychological element from getting to physically, literally act out fantasies of sexually abusing a somewhat lifelike slave on maybe a daily basis that would have any impact on someone? I feel like people already get their worst traits aggressively cultivated by much more mild forms of facilitation.

Obviously some people would not be (that) seriously affected, but it doesn't seem realistic to me to say that there would be no negative impact overall on the, uh, userbase of sex slave simulacra.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the core premise of that is a bit off. People already consume products that are like the human equivalent of a cat toy, a simulacra of a victim that they get some joy out of doing whatever to, but the unreality of it keeps it as something detached and distinct, and where those people are antisocial it's sourced from their socialization and material conditions rather than reinforced by something safe and unreal.

Robot bang-maids would just have a serious risk of making their consumers more broken and pathetic, becoming dependent on the chatbot powering them and probably developing chatbot psychosis from it as they retreat further and further from society. The crime in slavery is in harming a human, in reducing an actual, thinking, feeling person to the level of an object and enacting further violence and cruelty on them to control them, not in becoming emotionally dependent on a fancy roomba/fleshlight combo that gives you chatgpt psychosis.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

While there are points of comparisons we can draw if you like, I don't think think a little wicker doll or existing sex dolls or anything else are so similar to a life-sized, self-moving, reactive fake person who speaks to you that we can just say if one is fine then so is the other, though I already think existing sex dolls are probably not that good for some of their owners (people who are already particular varieties of psychologically vulnerable but clearly not being helped by this).

For the record, I also think something similar about other slave simulacra, though this is surely worse because for many just doing daily simulated sexual abuse is literally the one and only point of having it, and for many of the rest there's someone more in line with traditional ideas of AI psychosis, of a fake partner who always agrees with you and if they don't then you change their settings so they do.

But if we can acknowledge that the flattery robots can hurt your mental health, surely we can acknowledge that robots designed to receive sexual abuse with the same regularity and psychological untethering (of being able to dictate their responses) while being behaviorally grounded in a physical, lifelike simulacra of a victim presents cause for concern.

I'm not talking about any crime, that should be overtly obvious, I am talking about psychological impact from being constantly conditioned via this elaborate simulated "relationship" that you get to enact with great frequency.

Edit: as I said before, it's just observably, blatantly true that things on the internet that have much less experiential reality or concrete, behavioral reinforcement than this can, at minimum, cause unwell people to be more unwell. This is just a worse version of it that it seems much more easily could produce, among other things, even more actual physical violence than the other things already do.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My main problem with this line of reasoning is that it's largely just transposing the same logic that's used against things like BDSM or kink in general, of positioning it as something uniquely or at least especially harmful when the reality is that where it's abusive, it's abusive in the same ways and with the same or lower frequency than the equivalent vanilla relationships or scenes, that the fundamentally most harmful thing is just vanilla cishet patriarchy and even the tame and "safe" things that reinforce and feed into that.

Like the starting point is that it's "icky" and so must be something uniquely or exceptionally harmful and then imagining how all the ways it's different must make it especially bad, when we know from other comparable examples whether this is violent or sexualized media or kink scenes or whatnot that that's not how it works.

That's why I think the way to evaluate the potential harm is to start from the ground up and try to see materially what it's most likely to do, which is where I'm getting "it would cause addiction/dependence and probably increased isolation, while having all the hazards of extant chatbots dialed up a few more notches", and if it's going to reinforce toxic norms that's going to be more in it mimicking the dynamics of a traditional patriarchal heterosexual relationship (or a homosexual mimicry of the same, because I can 100% imagine gay men buying a femboy robot bang-maid too) rather than it coming from some more "salacious" kink place. Especially since so many people are just intensely, unwaveringly boring, and would think a robot blowjob while they eat some microwaved breakfast treat is the literal peak of their imagination and desires. They're not gonna be playing out The Story of O or the like, just some pathetic existence where their fancy roomba tells them they're a special good boy before sucking them off.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You're just talking past me. You are alleging that what I am saying is connected to reinforcing the logic of the cishet patriarchy and the stigmatizing of sexual orientations that I guess you say I at least implicitly find "icky," but you make no effort to connect what I said to this, you just described people with shitty positions that I do not have. You have not established a basis for my argument being a "transpositon".

Edit: I want to add that I generally think BDSM practices are generally exactly the opposite here of any problem I am mentioning, because they are intensely intersubjective and require attention to consent and the perspective of your partner. The opposite is true with the sort of robots we are talking about, where one is going to some truly extreme lengths to engineer solipsistic sex and/or sexual abuse. I don't know how relevant this is to the overall point, I just want to affirm a conceptual difference rather than leave it open-ended as I did.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What? Your argument is the same as what the UK press releases about the criminalization of BDSM media say, where they paint it as something especially harmful because of it mimicking violence or slavery or whatnot and just state this as an accepted natural truth despite all evidence being to the contrary. Meanwhile, as we all know the real harm of pornography (abuse and exploitation in the industry aside) comes from the mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men, which is perfectly accepted and legal even though that industry really should not be tolerated the way it is (if nothing else because of the rampant abuse and exploitation in the industry we skipped over earlier).

Like the entire "this is a safe, accessible simulacra of [violence/slavery] which is why it's bad" premise just doesn't hold water, nor does this salacious idea of chuds practicing abusing and tormenting their robot bang-maids. Like I can tell you 99% of them would just end up crying on their emotional support roomba until it cheers them up by microwaving a poptart and telling them how smart and right they are about everything. Which is bad, obviously, but it's bad in a really boring way and in way more pathetic ways than this vision of unusual and deviant cruelty people are painting in this thread.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What? Your argument is the same as what the UK press releases about the criminalization of BDSM media say,

I apologize, I edited in a part to explain the difference but was late in doing so

the mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men,

Which is very easy to apply to the present subject

doesn't hold water, nor does this salacious idea of chuds practicing abusing and tormenting their robot bang-maids.

I didn't mean some elaborate BDSM thing, I just mean straightforward eroticized r___, which is also a very prevalent aspect of the "mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men" that you correctly cite earlier. I can go into more detail of you really want me to, but I've been trying to spare us both that.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

I apologize, I edited in a part to explain the difference but was late in doing so

I think I was also unusually fast in opening the inbox there - the inbox indicator changed in front of me right as I was tabbing through so I saw the post less than a minute after it was posted and missed any edits.

I didn't mean some elaborate BDSM thing, I just mean straightforward eroticized r___, which is also a very prevalent aspect of the "mass market vanilla cishet slop as a commodification of women's bodies aimed at incredibly boring chauvinist straight men" that you correctly cite earlier.

You're still focusing on the supposed imitation of violence as the issue, while I'm arguing that the problem is principally that it's a pathetic recreation of like the most milquetoast basic straight guy fantasy except in the form of a roomba that gives them chatbot psychosis.

I'll grant that we may just be using different rhetoric to describe fundamentally the same thing, although I'm still sticking with my prediction that this would be way more harmful to the person trying to do it than it would make them more dangerous towards others, except in the context of them becoming addicted to it and attacking someone who tries to get them to stop using it for some reason or another.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Playing the video game Hatred doesn't make somebody more likely to commit mass violence, and I don't think talking to Siri makes somebody more misogynistic either.

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[–] dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I have no evidence, but I've heard that, a lot of dolls that are sent back, or dumped or whatever are absolutely destroyed. Like, limbs torn off, obvious knife cuts and burns and whatnot.

On the one hand: Great, do it to a robot, and not a person. IDC.

On the other hand: I can see how that might encourage those proclivities to happen to real people.

Nobody should take my opinion seriously, as I don't know any stats, and I'm not a psychologist, but I'd guess that it can be helpful for some people, bad for others.

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

I've heard similar things about these sorts of robots shown off at expos. Some guys will just straight up mutilate them even if they're only left alone with them for a few minutes.

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[–] Robert_Kennedy_Jr@hexbear.net 28 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] Yuritopiaposadism@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] Robert_Kennedy_Jr@hexbear.net 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

panting It's fully functional and programmed in multiple techniques.

[–] Hestia@hexbear.net 24 points 1 month ago

I'm just thinking of all the gooners who fail to do basic maintenance and cleaning of their sex toys.

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago

Make all of them into dog girls and dog guys. Uncanny valley will disappear.

doggirl-thumbsup

Stop trying to make them realistic. It will be 20-30 years of shit before reaching something that isn't. We've been through this with videogames already, just make something that looks good that doesn't try to be real.

[–] WokePalpatine@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[–] WokePalpatine@hexbear.net 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thomas Ligotti:

Uncharacters
In many horror stories there is an assortment of figures that appear as walk- ons or extras whose purpose is to lend their spooky presence to a narrative for atmosphere alone, while the real bogey is something else altogether. Puppets, dolls, and other caricatures of the human often make cameo appearances as shapes sagging in the corner of a child’s bedroom or lolling on the shelves of a toy store. There are also dismembered limbs and decapitated heads of manikins that have been relegated to spare parts strewn about an old warehouse where such things are stored or sent to die. As backdrops or bit-players, imitations of the human form have a symbolic value because they seem connected to another world, one that is all harm and disorder— the kind of place we sometimes fear is the model for our own home ground, which we must believe is passably sound and secure, or at least not an environment where we might mistake a counterfeit person for the real thing. But in fiction, as in life, mistakes are sometimes made. When they are, one of those humanoid replicas may advance to the center of a story’s action.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” for instance, the protagonist Nathanael discovers that the too perfect girl to whom he has proposed marriage is really just an automaton. This shakes him up so greatly that he is committed to an asylum until he recovers his senses. The incident with Nathanael’s mechanical fiancée, a thing of parts who is the creation of two mysterious characters in the story, also shakes up others who are in love with dream girls. As Hoffmann’s story goes, “Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamored of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and dance a little out of time, to embroider and knit, and play with their lapdogs, while listening to reading, etc., and, above all, not merely to listen, but also sometimes to talk in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling.” Toward the end of “The Sandman,” Nathanael’s madness returns, and he leaps to his death from a steeple after screaming “Turn and turn about, little doll.”

There are many abominable fates in horror stories, and among them is that of Nathanael. Worse still is when a human being becomes objectified as a puppet, a doll, or some other caricature of our species and enters a world that he or she thought was just a creepy little place inside of ours. What a jolt to find oneself a prisoner in this sinister sphere, reduced to a composite mechanism looking out on the land of the human, or one which we believe to be human by any definition of the word, and to be exiled from it. Just as we know that dreams are merely reflections of what happens in our lives, we are also quite sure that puppets, dolls, and other caricatures of our species are only reflections of ourselves. In a sane world, no correspondence could exist between those artificial anatomies and our natural flesh. That would be too strange and awful, for things to become confused in such a way. More strange and awful, of course, would be to find this a living confusion—life as the dream of a puppet.

[–] Johnny_Arson@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago
[–] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

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