There were sustained protests before France banned prostitution, in 2016, with a version of the sex buyer law pioneered in Sweden. A group of notable prostitution enthusiasts, calling themselves the “343 salauds (scumbags)”, thought it would help if they launched a campaign called “Touche pas à ma pute”, translated, according to taste, as “hands off my whore/hooker”.

After what were, presumably, two miserably pute-starved years for the salauds, who included Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, it emerges that they will, after all, have recourse to silicone alternatives, in a new sex-doll brothel. Councillors and some feminist groups had asked the council of Paris to close down Xdolls, in line with anti-prostitution law – and because it demeans women.

But having investigated the flat hiring out silicone female dummies, for €89 (£78) an hour, the council has found – how could it not? – that the dolls being dolls, the establishment could not be a brothel, and was therefore legal.

We have yet to hear from the pimping community’s friends at Amnesty International on the human rights implications of the Paris decision. Should it be welcomed, for helping to normalise – as Amnesty advocates – just another aspect of the multi-faceted sex trade? Or deplored, for encouraging doll rivalry with living sex workers, Amnesty’s preferred term for prostituted women and girls? Or acknowledged for confirming what is obvious to opponents of the sex industry, but difficult for Amnesty to grasp: that, like it or not, female objectification is central to prostitution?

In Paris, two councillors put out a statement regretting this official permission for Xdolls, which, it says, achieves with its sex dummies “the pinnacle of the dehumanisation of the relationship between women and men”.

All credit to the councillors, who have publicised what is only now becoming clear: that many sex buyers are happy – may even be happier, if “Fanny”, the star of an Austrian brothel, is any guide – for their purchases to be, literally, objects. But, “pinnacle of dehumanisation”? There’s more compelling competition, surely, for that accolade, from men’s treatment of real women as disposable receptacles, than from the brothel-based opposite.

Oxfam apologises to Haiti over sex allegations Read more

If the sex dummies are the ultimate in dehumanisation, what do we call trafficked Rohingya women, Oxfam’s disaster-zone sex procurement? How do we rank the massed commodification at the Presidents Club, Trump’s survival – “I grab them by the pussy” – and, more recently, the proposed use of “beautiful girls” by Cambridge Analytica’s Alexander Nix?

Filmed undercover by Channel 4, Nix told a journalist posing as a Sri Lankan fixer how his company ensnared politicians. He could, for instance, “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”.

Playing his part, you might think, almost too well, the journalist checks the girls’ ownership: “Not Sri Lankan girls?”

Nix: “I wouldn’t have thought so, no, we’ll bring some, I mean that was just an idea, I’m just saying, we could bring some Ukrainians on holiday with us, you know what I’m saying.”

No, actually. Where does Nix buy the girls? Off a pimp? Is there a catalogue? What is the routine compensation for being sold as bait – and possibly worse, as his fellow vacationer – to a person like Mr Nix?

As much as the market for sex dolls and robots says something utterly grim about relations between the sexes, it is distinctly less dismal to imagine our old Etonian, Mr Nix, when out on a smearing assignment, accompanied through the airport by an inanimate sex offering such as “Saucy Gina” (non-ambulant, but she could perch on the trolley) than by a flesh and blood woman. Nix’s targets might even, research indicates, appreciate this thoughtful gesture.

Academics have discovered how readily men will assess any female-looking robot for its sex slave potential. As a typical respondent puts it: “Can you fuck it?” With the obvious difference that deployment of military robots occasionally indicates protectiveness towards living combatants, one clear advantage of sex dolls and automata could be, similarly, to liberate humans from tasks that imperil, or just diminish – one has only to think of Harvey Weinstein in his bathrobe – human life.

But what if, as the Paris councillors and feminist critics have argued, these parodies of sexual inequality help marginalise consent, while they reinforce the objectification of women? Kathleen Richardson, professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort university, started a campaign against sex robots. “Their use,” she has said, “is just contributing to and elaborating on the idea that you can relate to an object like you relate to another person, and in turn, that you can treat a person like an object.”

In some circles, it’s true, men have hailed the end of flesh and blood women, and their ultimate replacement by robots that always want sex (except when they’re set to “resist”) and never talk back. Elements of Reddit are exultant. Then again, the rapidity with which the cackling Alexa became creepy may indicate limits beyond which men could be unable to enjoy their automaton’s awesome responsiveness without wondering what stands in the way of another incredible AI development: Revenge of the Sex Robots. Or, less Uncanny Valley, a faulty product, stuck in “gripper” mode.

If, as is still possible, the ideal sex dummy continues, more reassuringly for purchasers, like a cross between Siri and a reimagined Roomba, all may not be lost. Although no amount of survivor testimony, nor argument, could convince France’s salauds, or Amnesty, that “sex work” is gendered exploitation, maybe customer excitement about the new female-shaped masturbatory aids could finally do the trick. Their great attraction, according to an Austrian psychologist explaining the queues for Vienna’s “Fanny”, is: “The man can do anything with the doll.” Should women be competing with that?



• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist