Over the past five to ten years, the ownership of surreal sex dolls has become an increasingly controversial social issue. Many in society are offended by these dolls, which largely resemble openly gendered versions of the female form. Lawmakers have called for the banning of certain types of dolls (e.g., those that look like children), while others in academia have equated sexualization with the sexualization of living women by dolls.
These calls are rooted in the implicit (and often explicit) assumption that owning sex dolls contributes to increased negative societal attitudes toward women and increases the risk of sexual assault for doll owners. However, there has not yet been any empirical testing of these claims. So far, that's it.
According to a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research, you might be surprised at just how average the average guy with a sex doll is. Our research team spent months surveying 158 men who owned sex dolls and compared them to 135 men who did not. The men were compared on a range of measures, including personality traits, emotional functioning, attachment style, and sexual aggression tendencies. Our goal was to provide a direct examination of the accuracy of societal beliefs and perceptions about sex doll ownership.
The results were interesting. Contrary to societal stereotypes and beliefs about doll ownership, those who owned dolls scored lower than controls on sexual aggression tendencies. This means that, on average, they were less likely to show sexual arousal or anticipatory pleasure when reading hypothetical sex offense scenarios.
However, sex doll owners are more likely to perceive women as agnostic, the world as dangerous, and have lower sexual self-esteem. They also have more obsessive-compulsive and emotionally stable personality styles. It may be that these clusters of traits interact in some functional way, and that obsessively controlling one's environment helps to maintain emotional stability.
A similar interaction may be at play because of the perception that women are agnostic and the world is dangerous, especially in the context of the history of these two low-quality relationships. That is, a history of broken relationships may lead to a lack of understanding of the female psyche on the part of the doll's owner, leading to the perception that women are fundamentally unknowable and perhaps even threatening.
Overall, our data suggest that men who own sex dolls are not significantly different in many important ways from men who do not own dolls. Although we are beginning to specialize in providing preliminary data on personality traits and risks, it isn't interesting to note such differences, especially when we might expect some of these variables to differ between groups. For example, some theorists have suggested that problems with attachment styles may cause some men to withdraw from dating real women and instead focus on getting sexual and relational pleasure from dolls (Ciambrone et al., 2017). Our failure to find an effect of attachment challenges this conclusion.
