A Brief History of Sex Dolls: Here There Be Horny Sailors

It Gets Lonely on the High Seas and a Dutch Wife Starts to Look Good.

Modern humans have come a long way when it comes to acknowledging that they have carnal needs. Sex toys are a major money maker and many women feel brave, confident, and unashamed of and because of their collections. The variety of toys made specially for men has expanded impressively and today there are even AI enabled sex robots. They’re high tech but based on a concept that goes back centuries. The desire of men to make love to inanimate objects harkens at least to ancient Greece when statues depicting beautiful women became objects of lust.

Praxiteles is said to have been the first to sculpt a full-size nude statue in the fourth century BC. It was so unspeakably beautiful that a young man who gazed upon it stained its leg with his sperm. During the third century AD, Greek scholar Athenaeus wrote about a man from Selymbria, a city in Thrace on the Sea of Marmara. This man, Selymbria wrote, fell so deeply in love with a statue of the goddess Aphrodite that he entered her temple and locked himself in so that he could spend time alone with it. However much he felt passion, the statue’s stone refused to warm or yield to his touch.

Despite the horrors of the Dark Ages, European men began to embark on long ocean journeys during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Given the length of their time away from shore, they naturally became hungry for intimate companionship. Since women were not allowed onboard a ship for fear of bad luck, rumor has it that the sailors did the best they could with what they had on board.

Some believe that the men used cloth and leather to create what the French came to call “dames de voyage.” The Spanish named them “dama de viaje. The English used the term “Dutch Wives” in homage to other sailors who used them for intimate purposes. During the 1880s, those sailors are said to have traded their leather puppet-like dolls with the Japanese, who even now use the slang expression “Dutch Wives” to refer to sex dolls.

There are those who contend that such dolls did not come into existence until the late 1800s. In 1893, a short story called “En Des Jours pareils! Récit russe du temps de Pougatcheff” (“In Such Days! A Russian Story from the Time of Pougatcheff”) was published. It used the words dame de voyage for the first time, but in reference to sex workers.

Here's a YouTube video that covers some of the sex doll history. Note that it requires login for age-verification.

Due to the temporary nature of the materials used to craft early sex dolls, none of them have survived and very little, if anything, was written about them. It wasn’t exactly something people talked about, after all.

In the mid-17th century, the Japanese Azumagata Ningyo, also known as the substitute wife/woman doll became available. They were written about during the early 18th century but, alas, no images or text about them exists. The dolls are said to have been made of tortoiseshell with leather or cloth bought at the markets of Ryogoku.

During the 17^th century, a father and son duo of Swiss watchmakers named Jaquet-Droz began to create movable dolls that they would use as promotional objects. They and their articulated dolls were also hired by aristocrats who wanted to watch sexy shows featuring horny animatronics. In many ways, these were the first sex robots.

Europe’s colonization of the Amazon Basin during the 1840s was vital to the evolution of the sex doll. Rubber became commercially available. Once vulcanized rubber was developed, it was possible for the French to create inflatable femmes en caoutchouc.

Available for purchase, their appearance was far more realistic than previous dolls, but they were still not widely accepted by the masses. Because of this, they were quite expensive, which did not help them capture mainstream popularity. Still scandalous, the now globally available companions and erotic stress relievers were released anonymously and advertised in French rubber goods catalogs.

With the dawn of the 20^th century, sex doll possibilities increased rapidly. Find out more in the next entry in A Brief History of Sex Dolls.