When a radical feminist publisher suggested I review some of their books, I wasn’t quite sure I would enjoy the reading. I am a feminist, I studied feminism, long ago, but I don’t enjoy reading feminist theory that much.

Despite my reticence, I read Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating by Caitlin Roper.  I was completely engaged from the start. In this both disturbing and engaging look at the industry and culture around sex dolls, Roper examines the marketing and ‘moral’ justifications for the use of the dolls for men and the culture of violence that lay very close to the surface in the gross but real world of sex dolls and robots.

It probably won’t surprise you that mechanical, synthetic, anatomically correct replicas of women that ‘realistically’ simulate receptive oral, anal and vaginal sex are potentially a massive market. If only they could get rid of the ‘wowsers’. The argument from the sex doll industry is that the dolls will help men who are unable to form an intimate relationship with a woman, who’s intimate relationship doesn’t fulfil their needs or who are attracted to children. Yes, a popular arm of sex doll production are what Roper calls ‘child sex abuse dolls’. These are dolls for ‘minor-attracted persons’, (MAPs) i.e. pedophiles and are sophisticated ‘life-like’ dolls and robots with orifices suitable for an adult male penis.

After lobby group pressure, the child sex abuse dolls have become illegal to purchase in several countries including Australia, but a ‘child protection’ lobby group in the United States, the Prostasia Foundation, have lobbied for widespread availability of both the adult dolls and the child sex abuse dolls for what they call ‘therapeutic use’.

Roper ruinously dissects these arguments and puts a thorough case for both the child and adult dolls to be prohibited for use everywhere based on the human rights and moral dignity of women and children. This is particularly of interest when the Western world seems to have fallen into a misunderstanding that the secular state is meant to be an atheist state and indeed a state that repels any moral arguments. No matter how we got here, equity principles now make up the moral framework in Western governments.They have been manipulated to wedge out the genuine material needs of populations, the views of the public, and the more primal risks that women and children face.

One of the arguments pro ‘doll’ groups run is that sex robots could train men, in the way a dog may be trained, by installing software that allows the masturbatory functions of the robot to function only if the user treats the doll well. When the trial software was loaded into robots, men complained that they may as well have a girlfriend. The training software was, unsurprisingly, a market failure.

Another suggestion was that the dolls would replace women in prostitution. In the few cases where robot rental schemes have been trialled, the damage sustained by the dolls due to rough treatment made the business unviable. Expensive synthetic machinery, it seems, is no more able to sustain violent rape than adult human women. Ropers book reminds us that biological realities don’t yield to games of pretend and sex reveals itself to be remarkably persistent in driving human behaviour.

The market will exploit the worker as well as women and children, the Left once told us budding socialists. The market, we would have said, needs to be restrained by the government, and the government needs to be led by the people.

Ultimately the morality of the Left was in the prevention of material exploitation by markets, by the owners of capital and by the bourgeoisie.  These were economic arguments but also contained a morality based in resistance to material oppression.

This book made me wonder if we will ever be able to place one simple moral principle in government: the dignity and respect of females and children based on their material weakness to oppression. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to. Every time we try to establish respect for women in the law it gets overridden, watered down or overthrown.

Roper’s book is well researched, and in an area that few of us are willing to face. In researching the book, she joined online forums for robot owners, pedophiles and sex-robot-use advocates. For a woman and a mother, undertaking this kind of unpalatable research is to be commended.

In advocacy for access to robots, pedophiles and sex robot owners place themselves in a familiar social justice framework of the oppressed, not just because of their own ‘innate’ characteristics of desires for women and children but also due to the ‘cruelty’ of women for ‘denying’ men access to what they desire.

The much-feared accommodation towards pedophiles that was always at the bottom of the metaphorical slippery slope is only a step away from any argument that calls them ‘minor-attracted persons’ and views them as an oppressed minority.

The book is an honest academic work from a left-wing political tradition of resistance. The argument at the core of the book, the ultimate argument placed before us by the radical feminist, can be seen as a moral one. And this is where the old Left finds themselves singing along with conservatives that there is a type of sexual behaviour that is not just unpalatable, but injurious to society.

Roper argues we must have a strong and broad cultural consensus of the moral value and integrity of females and children. We don’t have any data on the thesis that giving pedophiles robot children to rape would help them, but ultimately, we must concede that it is morally wrong and harmful to women and children to allow such a product in a market that must be submitted, in part, to the welfare of those who are subject to it.

In an age where corrupted bodies of knowledge are being constructed to support increasingly bizarre ‘equity principles’, small independent publishers and independent researchers are going to be vital to oppose nonsense equity claims.

Support a small independent dissident Australian publisher: buy this book. It is the holiday you never wanted to take to a place you don’t want to go, but you will be thankful you went, because you will learn some important things.