The Dollification of Women and Girls

A discussion with Kathleen Richardson

Over the weekend, I spoke with Kathleen Richardson from the Campaign Against Porn Robots (CAPR) about the ways in which projected, pornified images of women and girls are warping their sense of self and instructing them to perform these hyper-sexualized representations themselves.

Admittedly, this is a far-reaching topic with many modes and outcomes, including a range of cosmetic surgeries, but also the various dangers involved in grooming young girls to self-objectify. To discuss the proliferation of dolls used by men for sexual purposes is also to question and analyze the extent to which women and girls have become commodities within a porn-saturated culture. In the interest of time, I therefore decided to look at a few representative examples and have pointed to the success of the South Korean feminist movement in rejecting the immense pressures young women face to conform to impossible beauty standards.

There is a general increasing trend towards commodification of the body, but especially the female body. In order to turn a human into a product, one must first sever empathy for that person. This is accomplished through dehumanizing practices. So-called ‘sex dolls’, along with pornography, cosmetic surgeries, and gender identity ideology, all contribute towards altering public perceptions of women as sex objects and commodities which can be purchased for male use or consumption. It is not only the female body which is for sale; now, even the image and very identity of women has been reduced to a product. The manufactured sex doll is not really so different from the manufacturing of ‘womanhood’ attained through breast implants and facial feminization surgery, as both assert that the female form is ultimately a male construction, and that women have neither a physical nor metaphysical claim to autonomy.

Younger generations are being raised to believe that identity is not so much what one does, but how one appears to others. This is a hollow and self-defeating notion of actualization — it lacks internal scaffolding and is vulnerable to external forces — yet from an advertising perspective, it is darkly brilliant. Beauty industries have, for decades, sown insecurity in individuals in order to sell products. By breaking down the self-hood of girls and young women, by reshaping them into unrealistic projections, the industry of objectification continues to expand and benefit from the splintering of women, body from mind: profit accrued at the cost of humanity.

Kathleen Richardson is Professor of Ethics of Culture of Robots and AI at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR) at De Montfort University. She is the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), Challenging Sociality: An Anthropology of Robots, Autism and Attachment (2018) and Sex Robots: The End of Love (2022).

You can learn more about her research and activism here or follow the CAPR on Twitter.