The difference between a real-life adult film star and a simulated one tells us much about the kind of sex dolls many users prefer: ones with tightly controlled conversations.
Recently, rapt readers could find out about the testimony presented by adult film star Stormy Daniels at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. Her language was amusing and startling, and she didn’t mince words: At one point, she acknowledged she had once called him an “orange turd.”
Daniels’ language was a far cry from the kind of words uttered by today’s talking sex dolls, like the ones produced by California’s RealDoll, a subsidiary of Abyss Creations. These are sexy, custom-made AI-enabled dolls that are programmed to never say anything mean or insulting. They are designed to flatter the user and always be compliant. They never say, “No, don’t do that,” or “Get lost!” Daniels herself gave RealDoll the license to produce Stormy Daniels sex dolls—but these dolls were silent and couldn’t talk.
The difference between a real-life adult film star and a simulated one tells us much about the kind of sex dolls many users apparently prefer: ones that have tightly controlled conversations. And the difference tells us much about users social attitudes towards women themselves.
The Implications of Talking Sex Dolls
Sex dolls—adult-size dolls with silicone skin—have come in many different configurations over the years. The California-based Realdolls gives users a choice of eye color, hair style, skin tones, height, breast and nipple size and labia formation with varying vaginal inserts. The dolls don’t move, but their bodies—arms, legs, torsos—can be manipulated. Initially the dolls couldn’t talk but starting in 2018, RealDoll introduced dolls with robotic heads that could be attached to a RealDoll body with magnets and could talk.
The two-way conversations were based on the type of personality the user chose for the doll. There were 16 traits to choose from and the user could pick 10.
- Some of the personality traits presumably represented a version of the “perfect woman”—at least in some men’s eyes. (RealDoll’s CEO Matt McMullen has said the users are 80 percent men.) The traits include sexy, affectionate, sensual, cheerful—much like the beautiful and sexy female robots in Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives and its two film adaptations.
- Some RealDoll traits gave a woman more leeway: intellectual, imaginative, talkative.
- Some were edgy: annoying, jealous, insecure, moody, unpredictable.
There is a long-standing cultural stereotype of the annoying talkative woman—a chatter box, a gossip and nonstop talker that men would like to control. In the 1970s television series All in the Family, Archie Bunker liked to tell his talkative wife Edith, “Stifle yourself!” Matt McMullen has said the “talkative” trait on a RealDoll could be “dialed down to zero.”
Unlike real women, the talking sex dolls have no voice of their own. Their conversations are tightly controlled and programmed to never say anything assertive, combative, hostile, complaining, arguing, disagreeing, debating or unpleasing to the user.
In one of my conversations with Matt McMullen, he said about the company’s sex dolls, “The worst thing she can possibly do is to insult you.”
One of RealDoll’s AI engineers said, “We want to have full control of what Harmony knows and says to the user,” when considering the software for their talking Harmony doll. The AI engineer noted that there is a need for filters and “protections.”
And this highlights one of the more problematic aspects of talking sex dolls. They represent women as totally compliant creatures who, like the robot Stepford Wives, will do whatever is asked. Resistance is out of the question. Certainly, in our post #MeToo era, this is not an acceptable paradigm for real women. Putting controls on the talking robotic sex dolls is equally problematic a model in the way a woman’s speech and thoughts are controlled.
Unlike real women, talking sex dolls have no voice of their own. Their conversations are tightly controlled and programmed to never say anything assertive, combative, hostile, complaining, arguing, disagreeing, debating or unpleasing to the user.
In a Vanity Fair interview in 2015, McMullen sounded ambivalent about endowing his RealDoll sex dolls with artificial intelligence and conversational abilities in a few years. He fretted that while today’s realistic sex dolls promote men’s love of fantasizing, sex dolls with scripted conversations might undercut the fun of fantasies. Talking sexbots, he said, “will take away from the reality of what real relationships are with the doll where it’s mostly imagination. ”
He added, “You program the doll to agree with everything you say, do everything you say, always be nice to you and go along with what you want, it’s boring.”
But by 2018, apparently, the fretting about imagination went out the window—boring was good!
Sex Dolls in Popular Culture
Vocal critics of sex dolls—such as Kathleen Richardson, professor of ethics and the culture of robots and AI in the U.K.—are incensed at the way the use of inherently submissive and compliant sex dolls can lead to the objectification and further victimization of women. This begs nagging fear that sex dolls will seem preferable to real women and maybe, as in the satirical 2014 movie with Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, The One I Love, couples will prefer to be with the talking robotic double of their real-life spouses because the robots are oh so agreeable, sexy and uncomplicated. As David Levy in his book Love and Sex With Robots provocatively and unsatirically predicted that in the year 2050, Massachusetts would be the first state to legalize marriage to robots.
Are all talking female sex dolls just vapid creations that simply serve as soothing substitutes for real women?
Cody Heller’s witty 2020 television series Dummy presented a tart-talking feminist sex doll who comes to life. She wears a T-shirt with Ruth Bader Ginsburg printed on it and impishly wears a sex doll vaginal insert around her neck.
Last-year’s award-winning film Poor Things gave us a wonderfully comic counterpoint to the perfectly controlled talking sex doll model. Bella (played by Emma Stone) is a composite being created from dead body parts and a live brain, and quickly develops a mind of her own. Ever resourceful, this totally articulate simulated woman goes to Paris and cheerfully makes money as a sex worker. In the film, she has a voracious sexual appetite and takes on johns while always celebrating her own individuality and independence.
The manufacturers of today’s talking robotic sex dolls are a long way from marketing dolls that have a mind of their own and can resist, rebel, challenge or voice their own needs. The manufacturers seem to assume that most users wouldn’t even want that type of conversation with their sex dolls. Stepford Wives-type sex doll models win out every time.
Still, given the artificiality of these sex doll conversations, real women probably won’t have to worry about being permanently supplanted by a talking sex doll. At least not yet!
In 2015, Matt McMullen had said, “I’ll tell you in a heartbeat: Dolls could never replace a real woman. I mean, half the challenge and half the battle of a relationship is that constant tension between men and women that we all know is there.”
But right now, Donald Trump is probably wishing he had had an encounter with a Stormy Daniels sex doll in 2006 rather than feeling the tension he faced from a real-life Stormy Daniels in 2024.
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