Sex Dolls at Sea

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor’s dames de voyage.

The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative.
 
Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc: “women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century.
 
Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies.Series Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: "The Beginning of the Modern Sex Doll"--Imagining the History of Sex Tech 1
I Searching for the Very First Sex Doll 29
1 Contemporary Tales of the Dames de Voyage: The History of an Imagined History 31
2 How Fantasy Became History: The Dames de Voyage in Pseudoscience, Erotica, and Advertising 59
3 The Birth of the Dames de Voyage: From Sex Workers to the Sexual Technologies of Sailors 89
4 "All Is Rubber!": The Femmes en Caoutchouc and the Actual Origins of the Commercial Sex Doll 115
II Interrogating the Story of the Very First Sex Doll 147
5 Making Sex Tech Masculine, Making Sex Tech Straight: The Disavowal and Return of Femininity and Queerness 149
6 From Bamboo Lovers to Undersea Kingdoms: Colonialism and Race in Stories of Sailors' Sex Dolls 171
7 Legitimizing Sex with Technology: Prisoners, Nazis, Misogynists, and the Origin Stories that Go Untold 193
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Dames de Voyage--The Feminist Potential of a Fictional Past 213
Notes 227
Index 275 “. . . Warmly recommended, especially to young researchers facing challenges in their choices of obscure, poorly documented topics.”
—H-Sci-Med-Tech

“By challenging established narratives, amplifying underrepresented voices, and offering a critical analysis of the intersections between technology and sexuality, the book provides a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the history of sex technology, a topic whose shrouding in stigma and taboo has for too long affected its academic rigor.”
—Winterthur Portfolio

“Diving deep into the citational traces of sex doll history and transitioning to the potential Afrofuturist retellings of the dames de voyage, Ruberg aims to alter the course of sex tech by queering and challenging the attempts to masculinize, heterosexualize and naturalize the all-male past of cited sex doll history.”
—International Journal of Communication
“This book is a tour de force. Brilliantly researched and eminently readable, Bo Ruberg’s Sex Dolls at Sea will fundamentally change the way you think about histories of sexuality and technology.”
—Lynn Comella, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure  

“Ruberg’s sharp, imaginative take on the history of sex dolls constructively blurs the boundaries between the history of sex, the history of sexuality, and the history of technology. It shows readers how origin stories can be key to understanding a technology’s present, and its potential futures.”
—Mar Hicks, Associate Professor of History of Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology; author of Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing  

“Ruberg expertly unearths the multiple histories of the sex doll, arguing that sexual technologies shape which people, and whose desires, matter.”
—Jacob Gaboury, Associate Professor of Film & Media, University of California at Berkeley; author of Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics

Winner of the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award, SCMS, 2023Bo Ruberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde and Video Games Have Always Been Queer.