The Sex Robots Are Coming: seedy, sordid – but mainly just sad

The sex-doll industry is going from strength to strength in the drive to make the figures more lifelike, but where will it end?

People say there’s no such thing as loving an inanimate object,” says James, solemnly. “I don’t necessarily think that’s true.” James is a 58-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, and the owner of four life-size dolls. Every morning he carefully gets them dressed and puts on their makeup. One day he might take them for a picnic; on another they’ll stay in and watch television. The latter involves a painstaking process where he must bend the dolls into a sitting position and adjust their eyeballs. But that’s OK, because there’s nothing James wouldn’t do for his synthetic companions, with whom he shares a bed and has sex up to four times a week.

James is among the protagonists of The Sex Robots Are Coming (30 November, 10pm, Channel 4), an investigation into the development of animatronic, AI-enabled silicone sexbots, and part of C4’s Rise of the Robots season. While James’s silicone sweethearts remain resolutely inert, change is afoot in the world of sex dolls, with a drive to make them ever more lifelike. First stop is Realbotix, the throbbing heart of the sex doll industry in San Marcos, California, where – on workstations spilling over with custom-made nipples and wobbling artificial labia – researchers are utilising new technology to persuade their dolls to smile, pout, flutter their eyelashes and tell jokes. Down in the dolls’ nether regions, heating and lubrication systems are in the early stages of development for a more “authentic” sexual experience, along with muscle spasms to simulate female orgasm. “Pubic hair is making a comeback,” offers company owner Matt, running his hand through some plastic pubes.

Matt McMullen, CEO and creative director of Realbotix
Bad hair day … Matt McMullen, CEO and creative director of Realbotix.
Matt sees a glittering future in which sex robots are “as commonplace as porn” and rejects the notion that his dolls are damaging to women, reducing them to body parts that can be modified to suit the quirks of their owners. “It’s not for everyone,” he shrugs, while clearly praying that it is.

This is, it’s fair to say, not your average dystopian future doc: it’s less an AI-style vision of evil robot hordes than a fascinating if dispiriting glimpse of what can happen when dysfunctional men are left to their own devices. Still, there are scenes here that are the stuff of nightmares: from the headless plastic bodies – each large of breast and tiny of waist – that dangle helplessly from the Realbotix walls, to chief engineer Susan reaching roughly inside a doll to remove an eight-inch vaginal insert, prompting women everywhere to cross their legs in agony. And there’s James bending one of his dolls, naked save for her pants, face down over a workbench in his garage (to adjust a screw in her shoulder, you understand).

James, it turns out, also has a wife, Tine, who is a living, breathing human, and is the very definition of long-suffering. Two years ago, she left the marital home for nine months to care for her mother; she returned to four new lodgers, distinguishable by their caramel complexions, slim-line figures and willingness to remain silent at all times.

James looks pained when asked what he would do if he had to choose between his wife and his favourite doll, April. “I honestly don’t know,” he says. If, when the cameras ceased rolling, Tine ripped off one of April’s beautiful limbs and beat her husband to a pulp with it, the makers of The Sex Robots Are Coming have wisely kept stumm.