SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA (The Daily Whatever Wire) — Two weeks ago, outside a small town three hours south of Sydney called Goulburn, two citizens were stunned to find a body in a suitcase on a dirt road.
The woman was bruised, with rain-soaked hair. A nose piercing. Homicide detectives and forensic pathologists came to investigate. And this one was a horror, but not in the way anyone would expect.
Buckle the fuck up for this one.
It wasn’t a body. It was a sex doll.
Somebody bruised her up on purpose, used her until she stopped being fun, and dumped her like a busted La-Z-Boy. Except a La-Z-Boy doesn’t have a face or a body. It doesn’t have a customization menu. And no one mistakes a wrecked La-Z-Boy for a hate crime.
So we’re gonna break this story down as a trial. A $13.4 billion industry that treats consent like an FAQ item deserves to be treated like a defendant, so all rise — nobody’s actually going to make you, this is Substack, not a court room, but you get the energy.
CHARGE ONE: They’ll build your ex’s face without asking questions, then hand you a legal disclaimer like it’s a mint on the pillow.
Global sex doll market: $6.6 billion last year. Projected to hit $13.4 billion by 2033, which means somewhere right now a venture capitalist is standing in a glass conference room saying the words “synthetic intimacy vertical” out loud, to other adults, without anyone throwing a stapler at his head.
Companies will sculpt a doll’s face from your uploaded reference photos.
A reporter asked manufacturer Coeros what stops a guy from uploading pictures of a real, identifiable, non-consenting woman. Their answer, verbatim, to the Guardian, was: creating a custom design “should not be interpreted as permission to use another person’s likeness without their consent,” and they don’t “encourage or support” harassment or impersonation.
Gorgeous sentence. A+ sentence. I would frame that sentence. No notes.
Meanwhile, their own website is a four-step wizard — upload photo, pick skin tone, pick “personality,” checkout — and at no point does step two ask “So hey, does she know about this?” I’m picturing the Coeros all-hands where somebody (probably the only woman in the room) pitched a consent checkbox and got laughed off the Zoom. “Legal already covered it with the terms of use, Julie. Sit down.”
That meeting is fiction; I made it up, but you already know everything about it.
Because every company that has ever said the right paragraph to a journalist while building zero actual friction into checkout has had that exact meeting.
CHARGE TWO: The secondhand market is a crime scene with better lighting and worse lighting fixtures.
Once he’s bored, Sally Sex Doll goes to Reddit or the Doll Forum, itemized like a used car with a rebuilt title. Macerated nipples. Perforated limbs. Mouths crusted with mold, which is a phrase I will be saying to my therapist for the rest of my natural life. Now perhaps you will, too.
One owner gauged holes into his doll’s body and never fixed them. Just left her like that. $80, some assembly required, and by “some assembly” he means “some previous act of violence he can’t be bothered to repair.”
There’s now an Australian company offering “discreet disposal,” because apparently enough men stood in enough garages at midnight lamenting I cannot put her out with the recycling that somebody built a whole business around that specific sort of shame.
And here’s something I never considered, and my god how I long for the days before I ever considered what I’m about to type: disposing of a life-like sex doll is hard. It’s not just hard for that sad man who feels so sad about disposing of her. It’s hard because she looks so real, people mistake her for a dead body — like our friends in Goulburn who found the abandoned suitcase.
The guy who runs said company is Jerry Siew, and Jerry doesn’t just run the disposal service. Jerry owns SxDolled, the Australian retailer that sells you the doll in the first place. Same guy, same company, both ends of her life cycle. He told the Guardian the Goulburn incident cost 20 hours of police time and real community distress.
JERRY! Sir. SIR! You sell the thing that made the mess, and then you sell the mess’ cleanup, and you’re out here quoted in the Guardian sounding personally aggrieved about the inconvenience. That’s not a public service.
That’s a crime scene cleanup company that also sells the murder weapon, run by the same man, who apparently sees no contradiction in either half of his business card.
CHARGE THREE: The actual scientists already told us, on the record, with their real names attached.
Jokes stop here for one paragraph because this part is just true and it deserves to land without a bit stapled to it. Johannes Fuss, a forensic psychiatrist who studies exactly this situation, told the Guardian that “the disposability and desecration of the female form in these contexts cannot be viewed entirely in isolation from broader cultural hostilities toward women.”
He’s careful, he wants more data before anyone draws hard conclusions, and I respect that more than I respect almost anything else in this article. Criminologist Kelly Richards went further, calling the whole trend one symptom of a wider retreat from gender equality.
Two fields. Two experts. Zero incentive to be dramatic about it. And the industry’s response to both of them was, functionally, silence and a new eye-color option.
THE SYMPATHETIC READ, OBJECTION SUSTAINED FOR ABOUT ONE SENTENCE
Lonely people exist. A companion who never argues, never rejects you, and never runs out of patience at 11pm is a real comfort for a real kind of pain, and I’m not going to stand on this soapbox and mock a man for wanting to feel less alone at night. That’s not the crime.
The crime is the mold. The unrepaired holes. The doll staged to look exactly like a body, in a suitcase, on a road, in the rain.
Loneliness bought the ticket. Everything else on this list is a choice somebody made with both hands, wide awake.
VERDICT
Ownership: legal.
Manufacturing: legal.
Building your ex’s face without her permission: apparently, technically, currently legal, as long as the invoice clears and nobody’s checking, which nobody is, because checking would cost money and the entire business model is that checking never happens.
Disposal: whatever a man decides to do, alone, at midnight, with an object engineered to resemble a woman, once he’s finished with her.
Read that whole paragraph back and tell me it doesn’t sound like six different things we already have laws about.
I don’t think every man who owns one of these is a monster. I think a lot of them are lonely and got sold a product with no ethics department behind it and no honest warning label on it — just a legal team whose entire job is writing sentences that sound like a safeguard without actually being one. But an industry that can recite the correct paragraph to a reporter, while building nothing that actually stops what the paragraph claims to prevent, doesn’t get graded on its saddest customer. It gets graded on what it built.
Somebody, in a design meeting, decided bruises and busted nipples were worth paying for. Homicide detectives spent twenty hours in the rain outside Goulburn running a murder investigation on that decision.
Final verdict: guilty.
Two men found a suitcase on a road outside Goulburn and believed, with just cause, that a woman was dead inside it, because a company built a product realistic and abused enough to make that the sane conclusion. It seems crazy to demand accountability from a company building realistic sex dolls but yeah, I’m asking.
Nobody’s asking the doll to have a conscience. I’m asking the men who sell her to grow one. That’s not a wild ask for a $13.4 billion industry — it’s the bare minimum, and they don’t clear it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go scald my eyeballs in the shower for the next two hours to burn this mental image out.
Every episode of Criminal Minds I've ever watched tells me whoever did that will eventually get bored and escalate to real women. So there's that to look forward to.
There should be mandatory psych evals and counseling prior to purchase. They’re probably being discarded when the men realize it’s not as satisfying when the woman never fights back.