The Consumers of Sex

There is a 30,000 year long history of sex toys – beginning with our ancestors carving 8-inch phallic objects out of siltstone, and continuing on to become an estimated $29 billion industry by 2020 in the US alone.

Sex toys are often seen as a market that is oriented towards women – it's seen as liberation, encouraging them to have a normal and healthy sex life and not to be ashamed of their sexuality. There have even been sex toys designed for women who have survived sexual assault, especially if they find sex traumatic or painful.

Women are consuming sex in many different ways – but so are men.

The sex market is at polarising opposites when it comes to gender. Women are seen as liberated, but men are seen as lonely – for doing the exact same things. Toxic masculinity may play a lead role in how men are perceived for buying sex toys, as men are socially conditioned into perceiving sex in a confusing and unrealistic way.

The following is a testimonial that was left on the RealDoll website:

My feeling is that women have enjoyed sex toys for many decades — toys which are made of the same materials, often made by this same company. If it’s perfectly okay — and it IS perfectly okay — for women to enjoy sex toys, then any sense of gender equality requires us to recognize that sex toys are perfectly okay for men as well. Sex toys is the *one* area where men, rather than women, are the unfair victims of gender stigmatization and prejudice.

I’ve made up a slogan for Abyss Creations: “Real women can make you happy or unhappy. Real Dolls can make you only happy.”

The taboo and shame surrounding male sex toys hasn’t been revolutionised in the same way that women have been, which is why the fear of sex robots being abused is so prominent – especially when technology has the power to modify human behaviour.

One of the arguments against female sex robots is that men, who have been (unwittingly) conditioned by toxic masculinity, will abuse the robot. Besides the idea that female robots may contribute to the myth of women as ever-consenting sex objects, the argument put forward is that ‘sex robots endorse the view that sex is something men do to women, something they get – or even take – from women.’

The primal fear of everyone looking in on the sex robots debate is that men have free reign to abuse, rape, and degrade these sex robots without any consequences, and might transfer this behaviour to real life.

The argument is made even more valid when only 21% of tech executives worldwide are women. Technology is a male dominated industry, especially sex robot production – men are catering specifically to men.

The issue of sex consumption is entirely wrapped up in complicated gender politics, and there is no one solution on how to change it.