By Everhard, CITP, IEng, BSc (Hons)
Abstract: The type of an individual's attachment—sexual or emotional—to a realistic life-size doll of the opposite sex seems likely to determine the degree of distress caused by that relationship to the person's sexual partner and/or to potential partners. Further, the degree to which the doll is perceived as being within affected individuals' circle of relatives and friends, contrary to what might be expected from parental investment theory, seems likely to amplify that distress.
Keywords: love doll, jealousy, sex differences, infidelity
This article is concerned solely with the reaction of human females to males' relationships with female dolls. Manufacturers of such dolls universally report that most of their output consists of dolls that represent the human female and that most of those dolls are bought by men.
It is assumed that, because of the realism of these dolls, people react to them much as they react to real women, at least in terms of sexual jealousy and related emotions. That such emotions arise from the assumed fertility of a sexually attractive female—while a doll is infertile—is no contradiction because the dolls are made specifically to appear fertile and to arouse associated instincts.
According to parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972) women are always certain that their offspring are really theirs—they carry the mother's genes—while men can never be as certain that those same offspring carry their genes. However, investigations have consistently found that men are more concerned about sexual infidelity and women about emotional infidelity (Buss and colleagues, 1992). Therefore, we would expect women to be most jealous of a doll where it is the object of emotional attachment to the male concerned, rather than it being regarded as merely an aid to masturbation. Emotional attachment entails an elevated risk that at least some of that male's resources will be diverted from the effort of raising his human partner's offspring to that of raising the offspring of another woman. Of course the doll is infertile, but people's instinctive reactions to the presence of such a doll are likely to be largely the same as to the presence of a fertile woman. (Even so, owners of such dolls usually dress them attractively, which can certainly be regarded as a real diversion of resources.) In contrast, where a doll is perceived by the woman in the relationship to be merely a 'sex object', we would expect the degree of that woman's objection to the relationship to be less.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that many—perhaps most—owners of such dolls are males not in a permanent relationship with a woman. Such owners usually keep the existence of their doll(s) secret from those to whom they are personally known. Could it be that the high degree of realism of these dolls, at least when compared to the inexpensive inflatable sex dolls of the 1970s and '80s, engenders a high likelihood that the male owner will form an emotional attachment to the doll? If so, that could reduce his attractiveness to potential partners (as well as to actual partners, if any).
The extent to which a doll appears to be part of the social circle of the people involved, rather than being perceived as a stranger, is likely to greatly affect the perception of such a relationship. This contrasts with the simple ‘inclusive fitness' model of reproductive instincts (Hamilton, 1964) in that people are more concerned with the costs engendered by friction with close relatives and friends than that simple genetic model suggests.
To date, there is no published study in which researchers have investigated the effect of realistic life-size dolls on human relationships. The psychological simplicity of a lifeless but lifelike doll lends itself to use as a tool for investigating the psychology of human reproduction.
An indicator of the possibility that a doll could be viewed as extra threatening when it is perceived as being within one's circle of friends and/or family is raised by the result of an experiment described by Fisher and associates (2009). Participants were more distressed by the idea of their partners cheating by receiving oral sex with a disease-free friend than they were by the idea of their partners having vaginal intercourse with a disease-laden stranger!