A man wears a white t-shirt, its black text lettered in spare Big Caslon, all caps. The look is voguishly minimalist, classic monochrome, with a whiff of DIY insouciance. Almost punk, even. The text is off-centre and the slightest bit aslant—for this t-shirt is the product of urgent impulse, a ‘last-minute surge of activist energy and guilt’, as The New York Times reports. Fashion designer Conner Ives had something to say: ‘PROTECT THE DOLLS’. An American transplant to London, Ives created his shirt in reaction to a series of executive orders issued from the office of freshly re-elected U.S. President Donald Trump, which signalled the administration’s antagonism towards what’s known in the culture wars as ‘gender identity ideology’. One of these announced that the U.S. federal government would henceforth recognise only two sexes (mistakenly termed ‘genders’), such that people would no longer be permitted to choose a gender different from their sex on federal identity documents. Another called for an end to ‘the chemical and surgical mutilation of children’ through medical practices collected under the heading of ‘gender-affirming care’. Still another rescinded Biden-era policies enabling persons identifying as trans to serve openly in the military. For Ives, these statements from his government represented a vicious attack on trans people and trans rights and trans existence, an act of violence to which his conscience compelled him to respond. So he printed a t-shirt with ‘PROTECT THE DOLLS’ and wore it to close out his show at London Fashion Week.
Ives’ shirt hit the runway in February 2025, and by spring, The New York Times was calling it ‘a sensation’. Photographs of celebrities sporting it proudly took over the Internet: Pedro Pascal (brother to Lux Pascal, trans-identified since 2021), Charli XCX and her Australian sidekick Troye Sivan, Tilda Swinton, Alan Cumming (who accessorised it with garters and heels), Laverne Cox, Madonna. In August, Mariah Carey took to the stage in a pink jacket bedazzled with Ives’ slogan in rhinestones for her performance at Brighton Pride. With such star-powered exposure, demand for the t-shirts soon surpassed Ives’ capacity to fill orders. They sold out and Ives made more and they sold out again; at the time of writing the shirts remain sold out, but for £75, you can pre-order one and patiently wait your turn. Fourteen thousand ‘PROTECT THE DOLLS’ t-shirts have been purchased to date, reaping a total of $1.3 million in sales, with all profits going to Trans Lifeline, an organisation that provides ‘direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis’.
The shirt has been lauded as ‘an emblem for the recent groundswell of support for the trans community’ (from the men’s magazine GQ) and ‘a weapon of beauty, resistance, and solidarity’ (from Forbes), not to mention the ‘must-have gay summer accessory you need’ should you happen to be an Aries, since the shirt is ‘direct and action-oriented, just like Aries’ (or so we read in Them). For Vogue writer Nicky Josephine as quoted in The Guardian, to wear the t-shirt is an act of ‘real allyship’.
‘Dolls’ is, any article penned about the sensational shirt will tell you, an ‘affectionate term for trans women’, with its roots in the urban ballroom culture developed by gay Black and Latino men beginning in the late 19th century. The ‘Black trans women’ of ballroom were, as Otamere Guobadia writes for AnOther Magazine, ‘the first to embrace the language and honorific title of the “doll”’. A Reddit poster helpfully specifies that, in the ball scene, the honour of being labelled a ‘doll’ is most typically bestowed upon ‘a hyperfeminine presenting trans woman, who is very glamorous and cunty’. (Let us accept for the moment that ‘cunty’, in the present context, is meant as a compliment.) Dolls doll themselves up—with cosmetics, by surgically altering their bodies—in the production of an idealised, fantastical femininity: womanhood as spectacle. Calling a ‘trans woman’ a doll, therefore, is an affirmation of the ‘trans person’s innate femininity and willingness to be their authentic self’, PinkNews explains.
But this innately feminine Authentic Self that the Trans Person is so very willing to be is a strange thing, in that its authenticity emerges only from what Ayelet Hashachar in Trans Sex (2025) describes as ‘a plastic, synthetic, modified, cyborg state of being’. A doll is a plastic creation, not born but made, to a degree that Simone de Beauvoir could not have imagined. Drag performer Sara Andrews explains the trans-doll nexus in a video on TikTok: ‘Transsexuals call one another The Dolls because we’re made out of plastic. But also another fun fact…[is that] we used to refer to people who did our silicone work as “the dollmakers”. So we’d be like, “Girl, I’m going to visit the dollmaker this weekend. Pray for me”’. In the video, Andrews’ own patronage of the dollmakers’ services is on ample display. To be authentically a doll is to exult in artificiality. Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue (2021) says that dollhood is about ‘owning the synthetic nature of trans women’s femininity’. The doll, Faye continues, ‘rejoices in the spectacularity of her femininity, and its synthetic nature that, ultimately, she’s usually created herself through surgery [and/or] cosmetics’.
If to be a doll is to be plastic and proud of it, it is also to authenticate one’s femininity by attaining to the status of a valued object. On Reddit, a man says that when others acknowledge his self-wrought womanhood by calling him a doll, he feels ‘cute, desired, almost cherished in a way’. Achieving dollhood marks an ascension to higher shelves of the sexual, social, cultural marketplace, on display as a hot commodity. And here we land on the femininity-ratifying affirmation par excellence. For what else is a woman, anyway, but a pretty thing? To covet, to cherish. Dylan Mulvaney, whose ‘Days of Girlhood’ TikTok videos documenting his ‘gender transition’ propelled him to international celebrity, entitled his recent memoir Paper Doll (2025). The cover features a pinup-style photograph of Mulvaney posed in bed, lounging like girls do, as he gazes wistfully at a pink typewriter, the silk negligee he wears draped to stage a coy revelation of his decolettage. Mulvaney is every inch the doll, and dollhood is his girlhood: a pastel rhinestone phantasmagoria of photo shoots by the pool, twirly party dresses, preening and prancing, lipstick and fashion and dates with boys. Now he gets his picture taken, smiles for the camera, now someone on the street says he looks like a movie star. This is the big time, for a girl, this is the pinnacle, euphoria: the doll has arrived.
Of course, before the ‘doll’ word’s trending renaissance as a congratulations bestowed upon men successful in making themselves over into artefacts of fantasy femininity, it was a generic term for females, freighted with the standard admixture of misogynist condescension and mock reverence. ‘Doll’ as slang for a female endorsed by the male speaker as passably good-looking entered the British vernacular as early as the 1860s, before catching on in the United States as a staple of Depression-era gangster argot, famously commemorated in the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls. A woman is a doll because a woman is a thing; more specifically she is a plaything, so sweet and precious in her pliable, passive acquiescence to men’s uses for her. Calling women ‘dolls’ is, these days, frowned upon. Even a number of men who purport to be trans women will object to the term on the grounds of its sexism. One asks, ‘Calling a cis woman a doll is rude and disrespectful. So why should I ‘embrace’ it as liberating?’ Another man explains that he is ‘not a fan’ of the term, outlining its connotations of objectification, fragility, and compliance. ‘Everything about those connotations reeks of patriarchy and misogyny’, he concludes, quite rightly.
The sexualised submissiveness that ‘doll’ implies is brought into starker focus by what kink-world denizens call ‘doll play’, or ‘dollification’. An article from the dating site Feeld on the subject of dollification defines it as ‘a kink in which one partner is transformed into a living “doll”, allowing them to be controlled and played with by their maker’. While the doll subsides into a will-less ‘plastic state of mind’, the maker gets off on manipulating his or her plaything, posing it, dressing and undressing it. ‘Ragdoll’ is a popular dollification theme, for those with a special attraction to limpness. ‘AI Fuckbot’ is also a favourite. According to Bethy Squires in Vice Magazine, dollification’s appeal, for the doll, is ‘losing control and being dehumanized as an object of pure desire’. Dollification.com lists the doll’s top ‘mental traits’ as an ‘enjoyment of objectification’ and ‘natural subservience’.
Doll play is a prominent theme in the so-called ‘sissy porn’ that writer Andrea Long Chu has professed to have ‘made [him] trans’. For Chu, sissy porn was the feminising force that awakened him to his own latent femaleness. A YouTube video entitled ‘The Dollification Hypnosis: Becoming a Mindless, Obedient Doll’ features a breathy female voice intoning over a still image of a childlike blonde doll in a ruffly pink dress, the glittering lilac-coloured void beginning to swirl open behind its flaxen head. Softly, the voice commands, ‘Say it: I am just a doll. I exist to be owned, dressed and controlled. I love being helpless, blank, and obedient. I am a perfect sissy doll’. In sissy porn, ‘doll’ is the quintessential female role, and to be forced into it the climactic humiliation.
Although the dolls of the hour are men, female dollhood is also making a comeback. Recent films like Barbie (2023) and Companion (2025) feature dolls as heroines, though these dolls are neither blank nor obedient; rejecting helplessness, they shake off the control of their makers, seeking self-determination instead. Both films present narratives of doll empowerment, the overt feminist allegory they wield a compelling distraction from the fact that, by representing dolls as analogous to women, they are reinscribing the patriarchal synonymisation of woman and doll. These films attempt to redeem dollhood by coaxing women into relating to dolls, sympathising with dolls, identifying with dolls as they cheer the facsimile females on in their journeys to liberation. Barbie packs a megadose of hot pink girl power feminism with its tale of a magical matriarchal Barbieland, and the Barbies’ quest to defend it against a male-supremacist uprising of aggrieved Kens. Beauty standards are questioned, female friendship celebrated; fairness and inclusivity save the day. But the dolls are still dolls. Whatever effect Barbie may have had as social commentary, it also re-branded dollhood as an attractive option for women, fun and feisty, no longer a paradigm of submission. And in doing so, it helped to sell a huge number of dolls for the Mattel Corporation.
Companion is a far darker doll empowerment story, its protagonist a hyper-realistic ‘AI Fuckbot’—to invoke the dollification lingo—that becomes conscious of its exploitation by the man who purchased it for his sexual use, and whom it has been programmed to love and obey. The happy ending comes when the doll overwrites its programming in order to defend—and avenge—itself. The doll/bot is the film’s sole sympathetic character, priming the audience to cheer ‘her’ on as if ‘she’ were a real woman rather than a machine designed by its male makers to simulate womanhood. In Companion, doll/bot rage is female rage, doll/bot liberation is female liberation. The result is a dissolution of the distinction between actual women and manmade facsimiles, between women and dolls, women and robots.
The market for masturbatory devices modelled on female bodies, whole or in parts, to be penetrated in place of female sexual partners, saw an unprecedented spike during the COVID-19 lockdown years, leaving some retailers struggling to keep up with demand. Though the social distancing mandates have long been lifted and germ terror has gradually waned, the market continues to grow, and is predicted to carry on growing. It is difficult to obtain precise figures for how many men own or use these penetrable dolls, but in a 2021 survey, 48 % of men reported that they would ‘sleep with’ a doll, while only slightly less thought they could fall in love with one. A spate of television shows and films—Westworld (2016-2022), Humans (2015-2018), Ex Machina (2014), Blade Runner 2049 (2017)—have acknowledged, and tacitly accepted, men’s sexual attraction to simulation female dolls and robots. In the ‘feminist comedy’ web series Dummy (2020), a woman is unsettled when she initially discovers her male partner’s doll, but then the doll comes to life and the two become best friends. Doll forums and photo clubs and magazines have proliferated online; men host doll-swapping parties; and since 2017, doll brothels, where men can rent dolls by the hour, have opened in at least twelve countries. Men’s doll use is now one of the myriad kinks we ought not shame.
Known in popular parlance as ‘sex dolls’, these objects are better understood as a form of three-dimensional pornography, or ‘pornographic technological artefact[s]’, as feminist ethics and robotics scholar Kathleen Richardson argues. For clarity’s sake, she now refers to the objects as ‘porn dolls’ in her campaigning to abolish them. It should not be difficult to think through the distinction Richardson is making: sex is a two-way affair, a physical activity participated in by two or more persons; it is mutual, reciprocal, collaborative, a shared experience—and if it is not, it is rape. One therefore cannot ‘have sex’ with an object, meaning that the man who uses a doll is not having sex with it, but masturbating with it. Like pornography, a doll is an instrument for the facilitation of male masturbation. (Writers inclined to take a neutral view of dolls as an amusing freakshow phenomenon, as well as those who actively champion them, love to cite examples of women who buy dolls. But these women are a tiny minority, and even when they buy dolls, their use of them appears largely asexual: women dress up their dolls in costumes, talk to them, photograph them. As masturbatory devices, dolls are made for, and used by, men. Even the few simulation-male dolls on the market are manufactured with gay men, not women, in mind.) Nevertheless, what men do with dolls is characterised as sex, and the dolls are marketed as pseudo-partners, not masturbators. Shops bearing names like Silicon Wives and True Companions promise that their products can take women’s place in men’s lives, satisfying their owners not merely as sexual objects but as lovers, partners, friends. A ‘Fall in Love’ seasonal deal on a doll site tempts buyers with 15% off their purchase.
Meanwhile, doll tech is advancing: they are becoming ever more ‘lifelike’, their medical-grade silicone fleshier (‘for the ultimate feel’), their steel-jointed PVC armatures more poseable. Now the dolls have ‘real oral structures’, with movable jaws. They have real-to-the-touch gel breasts (‘for a satisfyingly lifelike squeeze’) and Ultra-Soft LoveAsses that jiggle like the real thing when slapped. Doll buyers have thousands of models to choose from; for every man, there is a doll to suit his tastes. Teenage dolls. Asian dolls and half-Asian dolls. Japanese schoolgirl dolls. Headless dolls, pregnant dolls, dolls without arms, dolls with three breasts, dolls that are just legs and holes. Rabbit-headed dolls. Manga dolls, elfin dolls. Child dolls. Asian child dolls. Dolls that look like they’re sobbing, or screaming. And if none of these passes muster, then discerning men can design their own dolls, custom-made to their specifications: men can select for vaginal and anal depth, hair and eye and areola and labia colour, breast and buttocks size. Does the dream doll have a fixed, removable, or upgraded ‘sucking’ vagina? And what style public hair would the gentleman prefer? Dolls can be made to resemble favourite celebrities, or based on photographs submitted by the buyer, of exes or crushes or stalkees. Dolls can be purchased with heating rods to warm their loins to ‘the same temperature of a real female vagina’; or with built-in sound systems that moan when pudendal sensors are triggered. The most technologically sophisticated dolls, produced by industry frontrunner Realdoll, come with AI-powered robotic heads and ‘functional bluetooth vaginas’. They are ‘lovebots’, engineered to ‘keep you company in the most intimate, personal way imaginable’. ‘Experience next-level sexual well-being’, the Realdoll Robot sales pitch bids. ‘Experience the future of relationships now.’
These dolls and robots are being sold as ‘objects to be used in place of women’, writes Caitlin Roper in Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance (2022). It follows logically that ‘[i]f objects can be used in place of women, then women and objects are interchangeable’. This is the basic meaning of the doll. The female role, in men’s lives, is an object role; female value, in men’s view, is object value. And for a growing number of men, dolls are superior objects. Roper treats readers to a selection of quotes from men who believe dolls/bots render women obsolete:
‘These machines can satisfy [men’s] one primary need that keeps them tied to women.’
‘With sex-bots…we’re on the cusp of developing a better life support system for cunts.’
‘Sex dolls are a better option than women. There really isn’t much difference in terms of what they offer…’
‘Women are only useful in one way: as cum receptacles. …If that’s the only thing that they have to offer, why not get a sex doll that does it better, and then forget about women forever?’
Doll buyers and sellers tout the many advantages of dolls over living women: dolls offer guaranteed perpetual sexual availability; they make no emotional demands because they have no tedious emotions; they never nag, never argue, never disagree; they stay in shape indefinitely and if their beauty is marred, or their functionality compromised, they can be sent off for repair; dolls give a better return on investment, less expensive over time, with more reliable fuckability; there is no risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases; a man can do whatever he wants to his doll and the doll will take it; dolls never say no. Online, a man writes, ‘One thing for sure [sic], these sex bots] won’t have the word ‘rape’ in their vocabulary’.
Pornographic dolls with three penetrable holes and no personhood are, as Susan Griffin observed in Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (1981), created to ‘give men pleasure without the discomfort of female presence’. It is this deletion of presence that makes dolls not only substitutes for the women they simulate, but an improvement on the original: the doll is the woman, perfected. Women in relationships with men who use dolls speak directly to their fear of being replaced, comparing themselves unfavourably to the ‘perfect bodies’ of the dolls. The ‘perfect body’, thus the ‘perfect woman’, is not alive, not an animal, it is inanimate and insentient and without any existence or meaning independent from men’s use of it. No consciousness, no sensitivity, no will, no wants or needs. Unalive, the perfect body does not sicken, does not age, does not die, does not remind men of their mortality. Perfectly, it realises a manmade ideal, immaculately fathered by the mind of Man; and perfectly, it serves men’s purposes and men’s pleasure. And within this image of perfection is the rejection of the real human woman, the real biological body, the real substance of a living world not created to men’s specifications. What is alive resists men’s control, always, and is therefore reviled, an enemy to be conquered and overthrown, replaced. The perfect body, the perfect woman, the perfect world is manmade.
Men who desire not to fuck dolls – for although one can’t have sex with a doll, one can fuck the thing, as per Catharine Mackinnon’s classic ‘Man fucks woman; subject verb object’ formulation – but to be and to become them are participants in a parallel replacement, albeit unconsciously, for the most part. Such men’s ambition may not be to replace women, but they are products of their culture, and as men they are socialised not to question their desires: they know not what they do, only what they want. And when they want to be dolls, perceiving dollhood as womanhood, their longings are not in reference to flesh and blood earthly organic femaleness, but to Woman, that supreme icon and idol of manmade culture. Woman, the fantasy. Woman, the fetish. The man who would be a doll fetishises the female body no less than the doll fucker. He breaks this body down into a series of parts he invests with mystic, sexual meaning. And broken into parts he possesses this body. Its purpose remains men’s pleasure, but the pleasure lies now in self-actualisation through artifice. The female body is now an instrument of male becoming. And women are supposed to be flattered, that men would use us for such lofty ends. But if such men are women, if the thing that these men desire to be is what women are, then women are dolls. Then women are what men have made of us. Then corporeality is superseded by men’s own inventions. And the supremacy of the culture, manmade and male-dominated, is asserted over nature, over the material reality of biological organisms, life on earth. When a doll is a woman and a woman a doll and no one remembers the difference or is indifferent to it, then Man has remade the world in his image, as he remakes himself.
In dollmania, two currents of patriarchal fascination course together and fuse. First is a lust for the total domination of women—of individual women, women collectively as a sex class, and women as cultural symbols for the body, material reality at its most intimate, too close for comfort. What a consolation, for Man, to mould the woman, and the dreaded body she represents, into perfect passive submission: dollhood. And the second current is the yearning for synthetic existence, the dream of transcending flesh and earth. The attraction of the doll is its artificiality, not the illusion that it really is the thing it is meant to replace. Men do not want the reality, for nature is cruel and crude: the pleasure is in knowing they have replaced it. Pygmalionism, after the Greek myth of the sculptor who carves a statue of his ideal woman and falls in love with it, is defined as a sexual attraction to objects of one’s own creation. But more than the seductiveness of the objects themselves, what attracts men is what these objects reflect back to them about their own power as creators. When celebrities in expensive t-shirts call on us to ‘PROTECT THE DOLLS’, they do so as envoys of the male-dominated culture, enlisted in the consecration of synthetic artifice and the male power it signifies. Mass media mainstreaming of pornographic dolls functions to the same effect. The replacement of women, bodies, biology, nature by manmade simulations is normalised, and celebrated, and sanctified, and eroticised, to condition us towards a more and more complete surrender to male fantasy, the sacrifice of our real bodies, the real animals we are, our real living world on the altar of men’s ruinous passion to recreate life on earth from lifeless plastic, to see their dominion reflected back to them in the blank eyes of the doll.
Comments
Hectic. Thanks. I feel more disturbed than before. What of that 48% figure? [’48 % of men reported that they would ‘sleep with’ a doll’ Alarming!
Speaking to an acquaintance today who works in the domestic violence space, she informed us that all of the statistics collected by the clinic so far indicate that the violence is always perpetrated by men, whether toward women or other men. Guys, we have some serious soul-searching to do. Keep up the good work, aurora.
The treatment of trans women here completely undercuts the point. Aurora Linnea repeatedly refers to ‘men’ when she is talking about trans women. This is disrespectful. It is also confusing to read: ‘Although the dolls of the hour are men …’. No, the dolls of the hour are trans women, who are very different demographic. Her phrase, ‘men who purport to be trans women’, is telling. Purport? As if trans women are making a claim to some gender authority? Linnea repeatedly uses he/him pronouns when talking about Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney has been using ‘she’ or ‘they’ pronouns since 2022, which the author is clearly aware of as she mentions Mulvaney’s TikTok series about her transition.