While there are options for individual customization, it’s possible that women haven’t shown a lot of interest in sex dolls because they haven’t been involved in process or assumptions about female sexuality. Rick*, who sells sex dolls in Toronto and asked for anonymity for this article, explained that he wasn’t selling many male dolls because they don’t meet the tastes of straight female consumers, questionably noting that he “would love to make something like The Rock, because that’s every woman’s fantasy.”

Sinthetics is one of the few sex doll manufacturers with a female owner, which might help explain why their the male doll business has been steadily catching up. Last year, Sinthetics sold an equal number of male and female dolls.

The male-dominated market inevitably projects the male gaze, says Julie Carpenter, a Research Fellow with the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. In turn, a very narrow idea gets replicated over and over again based on exaggerated Western ideals. “So far, we’ve mostly seen mostly straight presenting men who are having a Pygmalion experience of building a Frankenstein thing that appeals to them,” she says. “I have yet to hear any of these men explain how they made their design choices.”

When representatives of the sex doll industry do offer explanations for why straight women have largely eschewed male dolls, they typically depend on binary cliches. Men are hornier than women. They’re more visual. Men were hunters who became accustomed to objectifying others. Women like to be courted and treated tenderly, which is tough for a hunk of silicon. The insinuation is clear: Men will happily pound away at objects — see, fleshlights and, of course, the apple pie in American Pie — while women require emotional connection.

It’s possible that advancing technology and the addition of artificial intelligence will hasten the appeal of sex dolls and robots to straight women.

Writing on Bloomberg, Harvard mathematician Cathy O’Neil recently posited that increasingly lifelike sex robots could take the place of men — especially once those robots learn both their way around female anatomy and how to do the dishes. “Are women not as capable as men of crude objectification?” writes O’Neil. “There’s room here for everyone’s impure thoughts and desires. Robots don’t discriminate, and they can probably give good massages.”

The perpetuation of the tired hunter-prey paradigm of heterosexual relations ignores the fact that: 1) plenty of women don’t need rose petals scattered across a dimly-lit bedspread to get off, and 2) plenty of men also like to cuddle — even if it’s not with a flesh-and-blood person. “If we accept the patriarchal explanation that men’s tastes in women can be reduced to fuckability, then the dolls are a pretty good substitution,” says Shelly Ronen, a sociologist at Haverford College. “But I think that’s a little simplistic.”

Ronen says that some of the reasons women aren’t buying and using these dolls likely has nothing to do with gendered sexuality. “Women make less money than men and these dolls are extremely expensive,” she says. “Thanks to social forces, women might be more ashamed of wanting to have these and it may be more difficult for them to transgress. [And] there are a lot of normative pressures, and consuming pornography is considered more normal for men even if there are women out in the world that want a doll to have sex with.”

Women in the sex industry also have theories. Bryony Cole, CEO of Future of Sex, a media platform and think tank that produces original research on contemporary sexuality, points to the lingering orgasm gap — 95 percent of men orgasm when they have sex with women versus 65 percent of women orgasm when they have sex with men — as a sign that women are still playing catch-up on the basics. “Women are still focused on how to achieve an orgasm, men are focused on getting more efficient orgasms,” she says.

Plus, there’s lingering stigma to contend with. Just this month, a vibrator was stripped of an innovation award at the Consumer Electronics Showcase, banned from exhibiting, and referred to as “immoral.” Polly Rodriguez, CEO and Co-Founder of Unbound, which sells sexual health products to women, says that there aren’t many women buying sex dolls for the same reason you won’t find female race car drivers in Saudi Arabia: “We have a hard enough time giving women permission to enjoy their own bodies, let alone a sex doll.”