Loneliness Guaranteed
The world rushes to meet the ever-expanding sexual appetites of men - and then we collectively call it “men’s needs” and agree that “men’s needs” must be met.
All forms of prostitution and pornography, online and in real life, offer a bottomless menu of sexual experiences, fetishes, and boundary-crossing pursuits. Technology works overtime to invent novel ways to achieve male orgasm and indulge men in what they might fancy next.
And nowhere is this busy business of realizing men’s sexual fantasies more obvious than in the sex doll business.
Guest on this episode, Caitlin Roper, is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout, a global grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising and popular culture. Caitlin’s writing has been featured in The Guardian, Huffington Post, and many other publications and in 2022 she came out with her book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating.
In this hour we talk about all of what Caitlin discovered when researching the whole world of sex dolls - the manufacturing, the marketing, the men who buy and use the sex dolls, and the many real-life impacts on women, girls and boys.
On the sympathy-inducing ways in which sex dolls are marketed, how they are offered as a cure for lonely men, suggesting that a silicone replica of a woman provides the human connection that these men lack, Caitlin says, “What sex dolls do, is they actually get in the way of any kind of intimacy and real connection, genuine human relationships because they keep the user alone. They're penetrating a doll, but there's no connection because again, they're alone. They're masturbating into an object.”
Episode Links
Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Caitlin Roper
Author and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout
Caitlin Roper is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation, a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture. She is a founding member of Adopt Nordic WA to fight sex trafficking, co-founder of the Feminist Academy of Technology and Ethics, and has been an organizer and speaker for Reclaim the Night Perth.
Caitlin’s writing has been featured in the Guardian, Huffington Post, ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, Mamamia, The Ethics Centre and Arena magazine, and she has been interviewed on The Project, ABC’s Lateline and Triple J Hack. Her book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance was published in August 2022 by Spinifex Press. Caitlin has also contributed chapters to Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade (Spinifex Press, 2016) and Man-Made Women: The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).