The History of Sex Dolls

Modern men who are into synthetic life partners are called idollators and their orientation is called digisexuality. But this fetish did not appear yesterday or even in the last century. His invention goes back centuries. 

Greeks and Dutch

The first literary work on this subject was created around VI century BC by the Greeks – it is a myth about the sculptor Pygmalion and his beautiful statue Galatea, which was revived by the goddess Aphrodite, who took pity on the loving sculptor. What Pygmalion had done with the sculpture up to that point, history is silent, but then he married the reanimated beauty. 

Pygmalion’s example was followed by the medieval inhabitants of Britain. There, images of stone “deities” called shiila-na-gigs are still preserved today. Usually the internet says it was “women with large genitalia”. The stone image of an anthropomorphic head and the hollow vulva located immediately below it can hardly be called a “statue of a woman”. Scholars suggest that the sculptures installed in monasteries supposedly symbolized the sin of lust. Such an assumption, especially since there is still a belief among the Irish: who “caresses” Shiela-na-gigs, he will be cured of many diseases. 

Lusty Dutch sailors and greedy Frenchmen

The next mention of a sex toy comes from the age of great geographical discoveries. Already in the XV century, European sailors made such long voyages that they invented a “girlfriend” for themselves. She was sewn from rags, stuffed with straw and dressed in women’s clothing for authenticity. The doll was named the “traveling lady,” though it remains unknown if it was a collective girlfriend or if everyone sewed their own. But the fact remains that the Dutch, Spanish and Germans had sex dolls even back then. 

Incidentally, the Japanese were introduced to the “traveling lady” thanks to Dutch sailors. They adopted the custom, perfected the dolls and called them “Dutch wives” for a long time to come. 

The French have taken a commercial approach to the case. The German sexologist Ivan Bloch, in his work “The Sexual Life of Our Time” in the chapter “On Perversions”, in addition to bestiality and incest, described Parisian sex dolls. “Here we may also mention the obscenities with artificial imitations of the human body and individual organs,” he wrote in 1908. – In this part of the pornographic machinery there are the true Vaucansons, skillful mechanics who make whole men and women, Hommes and Dames de voyage for purposes of debauchery, out of rubber and other elastic materials. 

Especially similar to natural ones are the sexual parts in them. There is even a semblance of bartholin glands in the form of oil-filled “pneumatic sacs”. Similarly, there is a special device for ejaculating semen-like fluid. Such dolls are indeed offered in the catalogs of the Paris Rubber Products fabricators. By Vaucansons, the medic meant the continuators of the work of Jacques de Vaucanson, the eighteenth-century master of mechanical toys. 

Million Dollar Baby

In the US. for a long time products were sold only in adult stores, but in 1968 sex toys were allowed to be sent by mail, and American firms raced to supply the goods to ravenous men. However, up until the 1990s, the dolls did not differ much from the 15th century products. 

The first Trudy sex robot was created in 1993 by Douglas Hines. The robot didn’t become popular, but nearly a million dollars were poured into the project, and in 2017, TrueCompanion unveiled “full-size interactive sex dolls” of both genders at a Las Vegas trade show. The “girl’s” name was Roxy, and the “boy’s” was Rocky. The success has been phenomenal. The robot dolls weighed 54 kilograms each, were 170 centimeters tall, could imitate movements during sex, orgasm, and the “girl” could even snore during “sleep”. 

In addition to Hines, California artist Matt McMullen, who once decided to make a realistic synthetic woman, has also been doing it. As he posted the entire process of making the girlfriend on the Internet, he began to be flooded with offers to sell the doll. The artist realized that he had a Klondike in front of him and opened RealDoll, a life-size sex doll company. The firm’s products cost from four to 50 thousand dollars, and McMullen is swamped with orders for years to come. In 2015, McMullen decided to robotize the products, equipping the dolls with artificial intelligence that would allow them to follow commands, carry on a conversation, and even argue with the owner. The settings were supposed to be created individually for the customer. Synthetic girls have pleasant skin to the touch and can be bathed or showered with.