Abstract
If we agree that all objects have a historical origin and that historical origins ought to exist within a canon of academically-provable and -researched facts, despite common misconceptions, the logic extends, naturally, to the sex doll. This is the undercurrent through Bo Ruberg’s Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies. An exceptionally well-researched and expansive novel, Ruberg’s third book dismantles the ‘publicly accepted’ history of the sex doll (as an object intended to be a ‘woman’ that was ‘created’ at sea to alleviate sailor’s sexual desires, known as dames de voyage). It seeks to document how this myth came to be accepted as fact, and the other routes this ‘history’ could have taken, depending on who was doing the storytelling. This all builds to Ruberg’s central thesis for Sex Dolls at Sea: through rigour and research, one ought be able to place, though sadly unable to name, those women, queer folk, people of colour, the enslaved, and colonised individuals whose lives are wrapped up in the origins of the modern sex doll as we know it.
To do so, Sex Dolls at Sea is half historical retelling, half adventures in the archive, manifesting in as mysterious a book as an academic text can be. Sex Dolls at Sea is split into two primary sections: a four-chaptered section one (“Searching for the Very First Sex Doll”), and section two (“Interrogating the Story of the Very First Sex Doll”) consisting of three chapters. As a book, Ruberg introduces, Sex Dolls is more than just the retelling of the history of sex dolls, but is also invested in parsing out the work that went into creating the modern myths that follow the modern sex doll (and their subsequent iterations, sex robots), and how rebranding these myths as history intentionally erases the suffering and appears to hallucinate (as it relates to ethics and documentation) ‘acceptable’ scenes from their history.
The widely understood history of sex dolls, Ruberg explains, is predicated on an incomplete “intellectual genealogy.” (p. 47) For the unfamiliar reader, Ruberg gathers us around the intellectual campfire to recite the myth. The ‘history’ of sex dolls emerges with the ‘dames de voyage’ - an object ‘created’ on a vaguely European ship, sometime centuries before the present by some innovative, generous sailor to relieve himself from sexual frustration (humanity’s most natural vice). As its vagueness, straightness and “I suppose so”-ness of the history implies, it is easy to see how the perpetuation of the myth has become the uninterrogated, uncorroborated history of an object considered to be too feminised and sexualised to be worthy of historical interrogation.
The rest of Sex Dolls seeks to find the sources or potential influences of each element of the dames de voyage myth - from which vague European nation, from which century, of what materials, could the ‘first’ sex doll have originated? Ruberg observes the large gap in archival collections and sex dolls, or so it would seem if the nautical naissance of sex dolls were to be true. Ruberg discusses stories and advertisements for sex dolls from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, from which the fiction of the born-at-sea sex doll seems to have already supplanted itself across France, Germany, and parts of the United States (notably in the latter half of the twentieth century). Through the perpetuation of myth, we see the advertising, storytelling, and other primary sources related to sex dolls in the 20th century ridding itself of its association with women’s autonomy, queer people and the enslaved - all of whom are mentioned in ‘messy’ primary sources. Through close readings of memoirs, journals, letters, sea shanties and stories created, set, or sent from the sea, Ruberg concludes that the dames de voyage as an origin story is “purely from the twenty-first-century imagination” (p. 107). The way these ideas perpetuate within European-influenced cultures, Ruberg explains, could not have existed without the ravages of European colonialism, specifically as it relates to the transatlantic slave trade and colonial efforts in what would be the Americas and East Asia.
We then move toward what the archive can prove about the sex doll’s origins, and Ruberg does not shy away from exposing its racist and xenophobic histories. Every attempt at sourcing a provable history of sex dolls is challenged against the myths that populate even ‘authoritative’ (and Wikipedia-approved) sources. The myth had to come from somewhere, right? This is Ruberg’s challenge throughout the second section of the book. The fifth chapter seeks to correct notions about sexual technologies, which, Ruberg argues, and readers of this journal would agree, have always had a queer element to them. This is especially true in thalassic contexts. Sex Dolls moves to discuss the non-European origins of sex dolls, while still looking for the origin of sex dolls ‘born’ at sea. Ruberg argues that Dutch colonial efforts in Japan could have been what supplanted the story of a water birth to the sex doll in her current mythologised form, transferring properties to “Dutch wives” to sex dolls. Could it be as simple as boat travel being necessary for the Dutch to ascend on Japan, that the myth of the born-at-sea sex dolls came to form?
The final chapter is where all of Ruberg’s pursuits come to a head. All of these myths were not about the sex dolls themselves, but were invented to legitimise the actions, mindsets and behaviours of those who use them. There is no one person, or group of people we can thank (or blame) for the invention of sex dolls (asea or ashore). We recognise that the pattern of thinking that got us there mimics the idea that each invention has an individual inventor. Through Ruberg’s research, we see this inherent wanting to attribute an object to a trackable inventor (or group of inventors), and by doing so we create a seemingly ‘legitimate’ history. Ruberg explains how, when it comes to objects like sex dolls (and other objects with a sexual association, thus making it taboo) the twenty-first-century myth is actively erasing ‘nontraditional’ identities and ‘unappealing’ eras in the life of the sex doll in order to “render sex dolls either more appealing or less “deviant.”” (p. 194-5) The historiographical gymnastics performed by those ‘bards’ who perpetuate(d) the dames de voyage myth have intentionally eradicated the true, very human, and very harmful stories used to legitimise this attribute of human behaviour.
The myth of the dames de voyage was not something I was familiar with before I embarked upon reading Sex Dolls at Sea, so I was delighted by Ruberg’s approach of not assuming a considerable amount of sex-tech knowledge on the part of the reader. Sex Dolls never uses a reader’s presumed (lack of) knowledge as an excuse to under-interrogate a source. One such example is when Ruberg explains how a gap in the archival literature as it relates to sex dolls may be because of the literacy capabilities of lower-class individuals generally in the Early Modern Period. Ruberg does not make reference to the demographics of the sailors whose primary source materials they use (and aside from the presumed straightness and maleness of these primary source creators, parts of their identities can be hard to determine, especially when discussing class and assumed literacy levels without risking being proven wrong in the future). Though more true for Europe’s Early Modern Period (the earliest dates of when dames de voyage are alleged to have been created by lonely sailors at sea), the only archival evidence of lower-class folks tends to be in court or legal record. With that, and when considering the average literacy rates at this time, any evidence that proves that a lower-class, heavily romantic sailor created the first sex doll while at sea is not likely to exist. Calling the dames de voyage myth an ‘objective’ historical truth and origin of the sex doll is impossible to prove.
Sex Dolls is a book that begs to be longer, in order to explore research pathways that the main body of the text discusses in passing. Why was legitimisation the approach taken by the sources Ruberg discredited? Or to expand on the ‘Dutch wives’ histories: are there any other variations in the dames de voyages myths across different cultures that could be explored to the same length and detail? It would be interesting to connect this research to the legal lives of sex dolls explicitly. Do these myths influence the way laws are written in a certain geographic area? Is there any correlation between genesis stories and the law? Because of the starring role Dutch/bamboo wives play in the latter sections of the book, I would like to see more research into the intersection between international trade and the invention of sex dolls as they are discussed in this book. In the opinion of this reviewer, it would be of considerable academic interest to interrogate the sources Ruberg presents related to the iterations of the bamboo wives tale that began either as a local response to Dutch sailor’s interests or that they were something invented by the Dutch. Incorporating any of the provided suggestions, however, may veer too much into a deeply sociological novel that Ruberg may prefer to avoid, or doing so would be too outside the scope of the novel’s subtitle (we are talking about imagined histories of sexual technologies, after all).
The graduate-level student who is interested in diving into the history of objects, or wants a model for the furthest extent of their academic writing ought to read this book. Sex Dolls should be put onto the shelf after being read (and enjoyed) by academics wishing to learn more about sexual technologies and/or the retelling of complicated historiographies - or both! Creatively written and smartly asserted, Ruberg argues why we situate our academic writing into the contexts of others, or why we sometimes need to blow others’ academic credibility out of the water. Has Sex Dolls at Sea helped legitimise the doll itself as a ‘historical’ object, worthy of study, reflection, and defended from being misunderstood? Is that even the point of the book? Regardless of one’s answer, this book is research that takes itself seriously. It stays strictly within the confines of history that dispel any idea that a comedy is necessary when talking about sex tech in order for it to be worthy of consideration-academic or otherwise. Ruberg also takes the reader seriously - doing the best one can, academically and logically, to say that just because it feels like anything went when inventing the myth of the dames de voyage, doesn’t mean anything goes when we are attempting to explain the history of sex dolls with academic rigour. For this research, we thank Ruberg and we read Sex Dolls at Sea.
