(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

With sex dolls getting more and more realistic, it seems like only a matter of time before they become part of our everyday lives.

What does it say about an ‘equal’ society when the vast majority of dolls are of the female form?

Are women still objects?

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

Women as inanimate objects might make for uncomfortable viewing but that’s kind of artist Stacey Leigh’s point.


Her stark images have been compiled into a book called Play With Me by Grace Banks, a writer and editor of popular culture.

Grace says the book looks at ‘ownership of the female nude in today’s current political, economic and social climate’, using sex dolls, mannequins, CGI, nude neon reliefs to depict appropriations of the female form.



While also seeing the dolls in the bedroom, a more recognisable terrain, the work is questioning whether a woman is seen as more than her body.

‘Artists are reclaiming the ownership of the female body from the pervasive male-defined tropes and spaces for the female body in contemporary art,’ Grace Banks says.

‘The female nude is one of the most contentious topics of our post-internet age.’

Banks is keen to talk about Kim Kardashian-West and THAT naked photo with two black stripes censoring her body.

‘Was this a harmless post or a step back for feminism?,’ she asks.

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

The world reacted, the internet broke but it really brought out varied views on where the female body is in society.

Bette Midler said that ‘if Kim wants us to see a part of her we’ve never seen, she’s gonna have to swallow the camera’.

Piers Morgan told her to ‘put some clothes on’, while Chloe Grace Moretz said role models need to teach young women ‘we have so much more to offer than just our bodies’.

When her sister Kylie Jenner turned 18, she was offered $10 million to make a sex tape by a pornography site. Two years later, she has a business worth over $900m (£700m).

But commentators still say the Kardashians/Jenners ‘are little more than walking blow-up dolls’ and are not good role models.

‘I definitely find the whole commodification of feminism really problematic,’ Banks told ID magazine.

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

‘And I’m still conflicted. I feel quite strongly about supporting the virtues of fashion and beauty for women, but I do not think wearing a T-shirt that says “feminism” is a feminist act.

‘But then much of what highly educated feminists do are not feminist acts either.’

After a sex doll brothel opened in Paris, Lorraine Questiaux of feminist group Mouvement du Nid (Nest Movement) reportedly said it was a ‘place that makes money from simulating the rape of a woman’ and called for it to be banned.

Members of the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement have argued that replacing women with sex dolls would be ‘cheaper’, ‘hotter’ and ‘the future’.

A new wave of art is working to depict the female form on women’s terms in what Grace describes as a ‘wide movement of feminist art’.



‘These are contemporary artists, sure, but they’re also activists, theorists, political commentators and more,’ Banks says.

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

(Picture: Stacy Leigh / Castor Gallery / Laurence King Publishing / mediadrumimages.com)

‘They deal with online post-internet feminism, but in working largely offline their work shows a triumph of real-life feminism versus online activism.

‘With the tools once used to objectify them, these artists transform women’s bodies into a self-governed piece de resistance.’

China’s online sex toy market is already worth $3bn-a-year and is expected to grow exponentially in years to come.

The sex doll, seen by many as a mass produced version of the female stereotype, is driving a significant part of that growth.

The craze for sex dolls is not just a recent phenomenon, with Dutch sailors in the 17th century using them to keep company while at sea.

But their significance in society has certainly changed.

As women are arguably taught to view themselves as objects, the commodification of female bodies is unlikely to vanish from the history books for at least a little while yet.

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