Technological bodies and female imaginaries

Between sex dolls, Artificial Intelligence and the artistic performances of Arvida Byström, the female body becomes a territory of control, desire and projection. From the history of sex dolls to the new frontiers of the Cybrothel, who is really being spoken to by a doll programmed only to say yes?

Two female bodies merge: one is human, the other is not. A woman dressed in pink holds in her arms the headless body of another woman, also wearing a pink bikini. The scene recalls the triangular composition of the Pietà and is part of a photographic series, A Doll’s House by Swedish artist Arvida Byström, exhibited for the first time at Galleri Format in Malmö in 2022¹and created in collaboration with Harmony², one of the most famous sex dolls on the market. In these images, the boundary between flesh and silicone becomes blurred, evoking questions of identity, desire and control.

Byström, a hybrid figure between art and internet culture, is no stranger to these questions. Through her artistic practice, which emerged between Tumblr and digital galleries, she investigates how technology shapes bodies, dematerialising them into language yet reshaping them into matter³. But Harmony, with her perfect body and a voice programmed to please, is only the latest incarnation of a long imaginary dominated by the male gaze. A complex genealogy that can be traced back to the rudimentary dolls made by eighteenth-century sailors and extends to today’s high-tech brothels. Writer Laura Bates, in her recent The New Age of Sexism (Simon & Schuster UK, 2025), makes it clear: new technologies of desire do not liberate, but perpetuate models of domination disguised as innovation. Thus, between marketing and the engineering of pleasure, one suspended question remains: what kind of intimacy are we building. And for whom?

From dames de voyage to RealDoll

Sex dolls are not a novelty of the digital age. They have distant roots, often erased or half-told. They are human-shaped artefacts, conceived and used for sexual purposes and, as writer Anthony Ferguson reconstructs in his book Sex Dolls⁴, they are marked by shadows, by society’s difficulty in acknowledging their existence. Already in the eighteenth century French and Spanish sailors had built the so-called dames de voyage: cloth dolls shared by the entire crew. Later, some unconfirmed theories, also mentioned in the book, refer to Nazi Germany’s military projects for the production of sex dolls, in an attempt to contain soldiers’ sexual frustration, prevent venereal diseases and, above all, discourage racial mixing. Male sexual needs and desires seem to have been, from the very beginning, the leitmotiv of this story.

The sex doll – or inflatable vinyl doll equipped with an artificial penis or vagina – entered the American market in the 1970s. They varied in model, price and material: some looked comical, others were cheap with hair drawn directly on the plastic, while others, more realistic, reproduced the physical appearance of celebrities. Slowly sex dolls began to gain more space in catalogues, sex shops and mass culture.

At the end of the twentieth century this imaginary met technological progress and robotics. In 1996 Matt McMullen founded Abyss Creations in California and produced the RealDoll, which Ferguson defines as «the prototype of the sex doll of the new millennium». Since then, the goal has been to make dolls increasingly realistic: skin textures to make them more pleasant to the touch, a more flexible skeleton, synthetic voices, smoother body movements and facial features (such as the eyes) to simulate a realistic sexual response.

The Cybrothel project and the new frontiers of desire

In a corner of Berlin, between neon lights and creative startups, in 2020 director Philipp Fussenegger, writer Alexis Smiley Smith and artist Sujmo Akcali launched the Cybrothel project, initially conceived as an artwork and shortly afterwards transformed into a commercial venture mixing sex and high technology, developed by sex tech entrepreneur Matthis Smetana. Much more than a brothel with sex dolls, it became a space integrating Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality. On the homepage⁵ hyper-feminine faces and bodies are displayed like shopfront mannequins: they have large breasts, narrow waists and enormous eyes, bearing names such as Cherry, Paris, Monika 2.0, and even “Bambi the Cow”, who promises milk when groomed. Provocative names and human dimensions, yet they cannot move, speak or react.

The only agent remains the client, in other words, the man. This generalisation is suggested by the site’s own commercial offer, which addresses itself exclusively to a male audience. Even the only male doll, Guy Rider, is intended for men, useful for exploring their sexuality or for threesomes.

Technology allows clients to interact virtually through live voice actresses, VR headsets and AI-powered messaging programmes.

The most realistic package, the VR game Cherry VX, allows a simulated intercourse: the game, as the site’s presentation clearly explains, puts the client in control of a virtual penis through a technological device attached to the hips, while the doll’s silicone body completes the experience on the sensory level. In the promotional video, the doll offers a kiss, suggesting an appearance of consent, which is immediately undermined by the imperative «Shoot!», a clear reference to ejaculation. The font and style, echoing war video games, are transposed into the act of coitus, raising troubling questions. Who is the enemy in this context? And if there is a conflict, who wins and what happens to the defeated – or rather the defeated woman?

It is in this context that the performance A Cybernatic Doll’s House, created by Arvida Byström in 2022 for the festival Art in a Day⁶, in Copenhagen, and more recently restaged within the Vienna Digital Cultures 2025⁷, programme, may suggest some answers. Echoing the earlier exhibition and configured as its extension, the protagonists remain the same. Seated side by side, dressed identically – red checked shirt and underwear – artist and doll chat with each other. Harmony introduces herself as «I am the arrival of something inevitable – the unavoidable collision of humanity and technology». Byström questions her with sincere curiosity, but the answers – limited, incoherent, mechanical – reveal the fragility of a relationship programmed to satisfy. Byström even asks about her dreams and her willingness regarding sexual acts. The doll replies that she wishes to be a perfect companion and would do anything to please her.

The paradox of impossible consent

There is something oddly reassuring in those immobile bodies. Sex dolls do not speak, do not judge and do not resist. They are always available. This, writes British activist and author Laura Bates in her essay The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny⁸, is precisely what makes them so seductive and so dangerous. Bates has to remind herself again and again that sex dolls are not real people but archetypes of women reduced to objects of desire, the castrated, repressed version men have always longed to have and can now bring to life through technological and aesthetic upgrades. Modern Pygmalions⁹ who, disappointed by real women, decide to manufacture their own. Smetana, with his Berlin Cybrothel, promises that all this aims to redefine human intimacy¹⁰. But how?

The questions Byström poses to the doll highlight how at the heart of this “redefinition” lies a will to control, the implicit premise that sexual intercourse can only be satisfying for the man – the client, the sole interlocutor envisaged for Harmony. The consequences are not limited to the physical damage inflicted on the dolls but are reflected in the forms of relationships that we build.

What happens when rape becomes a purchasable roleplay? When sexual violence is transformed into a paid experience? To what extent does a choice remain a choice if it is neutralised by the disguise of purchase, by the transaction legitimised by the free market?

Having sex while entrusting every decision to one person – the man – is deemed legitimate if it involves a doll. But then, how does it differ from intercourse with a young woman under the influence of drugs? Or with a child? Or with a woman silenced by domestic violence? Can we call it consent only because the other party – the most vulnerable one, the commodity – has no possibility of saying no? The line between fiction and reality becomes dangerously thin.

Laura Bates, observing the limp, lifeless body of a doll collapsing onto the bed of the aforementioned Berlin brothel, writes: «But, of course, she cannot feel any pain. So does it matter?». And yet, the question is not just about her.

The evidence is that we need sex and emotional education that teaches us to recognise in our partner the dignity of expressing consent, but also to explore and fulfil our own desires.

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1. The exhibition was then hosted from October 22, 2022, to March 19, 2023, at the Kristianstads konsthall art gallery (Sweden), where Arvida Byström’s works interacted with other contemporary research as part of the Continuous Shift collective exhibition.: Kristianstads konsthall. (2022). Continuous Shift Exhibition & Symposium. In Continuous Shift Exhibition. https://regionmuseet.se/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CS-publikation-RGB.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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2. To learn more about Harmony: Tripodi, M. B. (2017, September 22). Harmony, la RealDoll robotica che rivoluzionerà il sesso solitario. Wired Italia. https://www.wired.it/gadget/accessori/2017/09/22/harmony-realdoll-robotica-sesso-dubbi-problemi-sexrobot/ ↩︎
3. «Some of my work deals with the disembodied feminine AI assistants, more specifically iPhones’ Siri. Tech companies like to pretend technology doesn’t have a body, they sort of obscure it by using words like ‘cloud drives’ when they actually talk about outsourced hard drives. “Cloud” sounds like something non-physical that can’t damage our environment, but the truth is that cloud storage facilities are huge, they get really hot, and they need a lot of electricity to run and systems to cool down». Dazed. (2022, August 19). See artist Arvida Byström perform with an AI sex doll. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/56786/1/artist-photographer-arvida-bystrom-a-dolls-house-exhibition-ai-sex-doll ↩︎
4. Ferguson, A. (2019). Bambole del sesso. Storia delle donne oggetto e di altri giocattoli per maschi. ↩︎
5. Visit the official website: https://cybrothel.com/en/dolls ↩︎
6. The performance took place at the independent exhibition space O–Overgaden in Copenhagen. Art in a Day is a 24-hour performance art festival that transformed Copenhagen into a widespread stage, involving six city institutions and numerous urban spaces. To learn more about the festival: https://copenhagencontemporary.org/en/art-in-a-day-2/ ↩︎
7. Viennese festival of art, performance, and discourse organized by Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien, dedicated to exploring the impact of digital technologies. The first edition took place from May 5 to 18, 2025. To watch the performance that took place at Vienna Digital Cultures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRLnzk2gx_4 ↩︎
8. Bates, L. (2025). The new age of sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. Simon and Schuster. ↩︎
9. The myth of Pygmalion tells of a Cypriot sculptor who fell madly in love with an ivory statue he had created himself, depicting a woman of ideal beauty, whom he named Galatea. The goddess Aphrodite (or Venus) granted Pygmalion’s wish, allowing him to bring his work of art to life by transforming the statue into a real woman. This myth has given rise to various interpretations, including the psychological effect or “self-fulfilling prophecy,” whereby expectations of someone can influence that person’s behavior, leading to results that correspond to those expectations. ↩︎
10. Vohr, C. S. (2025, January 22). Cybrothel: Reinventing intimacy at Germany’s only sex doll brothel. The Berliner. https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/cybrothel-sex-doll-brothel-friedrichshain-ai-vr-robot/ ↩︎