The recent discovery of a visibly abused sex doll stuffed into a suitcase and abandoned beside a country road, initially mistaken by police for a real woman, raises troubling questions about what men are doing with these expensive toys. These highly realistic, life-size dolls, often customized to the purchaser’s specifications and sometimes based on photos of real women, are the basis of a rapidly expanding market valued at $6.6 billion in 2025. While it may be only a small minority of men who use these dolls to enact violent fantasies of sexual torture and mutilation, the realization that any do so is unsettling. Is mistreating the dolls cathartic for these troubled men, or do the dolls serve as practice for what they want to do to real women? Feminists have objected to the commodification and dehumanization of female bodies implied by the production of these devices; as one professor put it, “the disposability and desecration of the female form in these contexts cannot be viewed entirely in isolation from broader cultural hostilities toward women.” But what does it imply for sexual freedom and imaginative fantasy if we ban their existence because of the potential that some men will abuse them?
Battered Sex Doll Stuffed in Suitcase Raises Questions
