Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance

Caitlin Roper is an activist, writer and Campaigns Manager at Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation, a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising in popular culture. She has a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Western Australia and a Graduate Diploma in Arts (Sociology and Anthropology) where she was awarded the Julie Manville Memorial Prize. An opinion writer, her work has been published in a range of mainstream media outlets including The Guardian, ABC, Huffington Post, Sydney Morning Herald and Arena Magazine. She has been featured on The Project, Lateline, Flashpoint, Channel 7 News, Channel 9 News and Triple J Hack. She contributed a commentary chapter to Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade (Spinifex Press 2016).

In Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating, Caitlin Roper has done compendious research to show what sex dolls and robots are for, how they are developing and how men are using them. It must have been disturbing to do this work, but Roper does a great service to feminism in telling us all that we need to know about their impact on the status of women and children. She details the vicious woman hating abuse that men practise on the dolls, which provides a whole education in the way men despise women. Sex dolls and robots are better than live women, the punters say, because they can be endlessly violated and torn apart without any complaint. I did wonder who would be doing the housework! This is a crucial book for the campaign to stop the sex doll and robot industry.  — Sheila Jeffreys, PhD, author of Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women’s Subordination and Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life Read Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance only if you are willing to face harsh realities about 21st century misogyny. I won’t soon forget the disturbing practices that Caitlin Roper describes, but I also will carry with me the power of her incisive analysis and passionate call for resistance. As I read this book, my heart broke page by page, and at the same time I was bolstered by Roper’s courage. I’m grateful for her willingness to study this chilling intensification of the objectification of women, which takes sexism and racism to new levels of corrosiveness. The work of Roper and Collective Shout has never been more important.— Robert Jensen, emeritus professor, University of Texas at Austin and author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for MenCaitlin Roper’s Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance, is both brilliant and chilling. Her in-depth analysis of how sex dolls and robots are tied into the misogynist commercial sex industry brings to light the degree to which woman- and girl-hating are both monetized and normalized. Roper’s call for global resistance to the objectification of women and girls cannot be ignored after reading this tour de force of a book!— Gail Dines, PhD, Professor Emerita of Sociology, President: Culture Reframed

• Front cover Back cover Excerpt Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter One: Real men and unreal women Chapter Two: Sex robots as the solution to men’s sexual ‘deprivation’ Chapter Three: Sex dolls and technological terrorism Chapter Four: “Girls for sex who don’t rebel”: Robot ‘prostitutes’ and sex doll brothels Chapter Five: Grooming and gaslighting: Sex dolls in public and private Chapter Six: Lifelike, penetrable, custom-designed: Child sex abuse dolls Chapter Seven: “Better a robot than a real child” Conclusion: Resistance