As AI-powered technology offers increasingly sophisticated substitutes for human intimacy, gender sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead argues that the growing popularity of synthetic companions exposes a deeper crisis in relationships between men and women

Two recent phenomena deserve to be examined together. The first is the increasingly desperate question being asked by millions of women across the globe: where have all the good men gone? The second is the extraordinary boom in the sex doll and AI companion market – valued at US$6.6 billion in 2025 and projected to more than double to US$13.4 billion by 2033.

These two conversations are intimately connected expressions of the same structural crisis in how men and women relate to one another.

The growth of synthetic companionship reflects the inability of men, as a gender, to navigate a profound change in what women now expect from relationships and intimacy. As women demand greater autonomy, emotional reciprocity and genuine partnership, synthetic companions offer something real women don’t: complete control without the demands of an equal relationship.

When my research team and I gathered testimony from over 300 women and men across six continents for my book Where Have All the Good Men Gone? The Reordering of Intimacy, we uncovered a striking pattern.

The dominant feeling among the women in our research was exhaustion. They described relationships in which they carried the entire emotional infrastructure – noticing moods, anticipating tension, initiating difficult conversations and managing the emotional labour that sustains partnership. They were exhausted by men who were physically present but emotionally unreachable and, crucially, were increasingly opting out.

The men in our research, by contrast, were disoriented. They were confused about what was now expected of them and anxious about constantly getting it wrong. Many had simply withdrawn, finding solitude easier than the uncertainty of genuine partnership with autonomous women.

Both responses reflect the same problem: the old script for love no longer works. Traditional masculinity was built on the premise that a man’s role was to provide and protect rather than truly see and know his partner. That model has become insufficient. Women have evolved and demanded more, while men, as a gender, have largely failed to keep pace.

The sex doll phenomenon gives that crisis a new dimension.

A doll with a ‘co-worker’ personality setting, a ‘tradwife’ mode and Bluetooth-enabled intimate technology does not challenge her owner about emotional availability, refuse to perform the emotional labour of a relationship or demand the uncertainty of genuine reciprocity. A synthetic companion that responds perfectly to touch will never say, as thousands of real women have told us: “I feel alone inside this relationship.”

Real women are increasingly clear about their boundaries, their needs and their unwillingness to compromise those needs simply to maintain a relationship. The sex doll, by contrast, represents a fantasy of unfettered male dominance.

It also offers an answer to what I describe as the ‘semantic gap’ in gender relations: men and women use the same words about relationships but mean entirely different things by them. When a real woman says she needs emotional presence, she means genuine engagement, vulnerability and reciprocal emotional labour. When the sex doll market sells presence, it means availability and compliance: the appearance of intimacy without the demands of genuine connection.

Men have always sought to control and mould women to their liking. Technology has now made that fantasy vastly more sophisticated.

The explicit marketing of ‘tradwife’ aesthetics illustrates the point. The term evokes traditional domestic femininity and has become shorthand in some online communities for a fantasy of pre-feminist womanhood. It’s certainly not incidental that this mode is being sold precisely as real women reject the very roles those ‘tradwife’ aesthetics glorify.

The doll industry is, at its core, offering men a technological solution to the ‘problem’ of female autonomy, and that carries implications beyond the products themselves. Embedded within this market is a deeper message: the crisis in male-female relationships can be answered without men transforming themselves, developing emotional literacy or learning how to be genuinely intimate with autonomous equals.

The market instead offers the option of abandoning the attempt and investing in a simulacrum – a lifelike replica of womanhood that can be programmed, controlled and discarded.

The most chilling detail in recent reporting is the discovery in Australia of a sex doll marked with fake bruises and abandoned in a suitcase. A synthetic woman marked with the signs of violence is disturbing in itself, and it speaks to something deeply troubling about fantasies of dominance enacted upon a body that cannot refuse, resist or report abuse.

The sex doll boom is a symptom of a disease that has already spread widely through the male psyche. It is the technological expression of a crisis already evident in our research findings: men who withdraw, men who panic when asked for emotional transparency and men who cannot imagine how to be intimate with women who refuse subordination.

Previously, these men had no alternative. They had to navigate relationships with autonomous women, however badly. Technology now offers them an exit. They can purchase their own compliant companion and avoid the discomfort of being truly known by another person, genuinely challenged or held accountable to standards of emotional reciprocity.

Humans will always seek ways to explore fantasy and manage desire. The dystopian element here lies in the timing: this market is booming at precisely the moment when the solution to the male-female crisis is becoming increasingly clear: men need to transform themselves rather than expecting women to change or relying on technology to remove the difficulty of genuine intimacy.

Recent reporting has asked whether it matters how we treat these dolls. Of course it does, if only as a reflection of how men’s attitudes towards women are shifting. The deeper question is what it says about our collective future when the fastest-growing solution to gender alienation is the purchasing of synthetic substitutes rather than therapy, education, cultural reform or genuine dialogue between the sexes.

In Where Have All the Good Men Gone?, we conclude with cautious optimism. Both women and men, we found, desperately want to be together. They are not happy alone. But they have not yet worked out how to be together in a world where the old rules have been broken.

The sex doll industry is betting that many men will never work it out and will instead purchase a permanent solution to the problem of relating to autonomous women. Given the current trajectory of male resistance to genuine transformation, that is a bet that may well pay off. A US$13.4 billion market by 2033 suggests that millions of men are already making their choice.

This is alarming because the market boom signals a wholesale retreat from the difficult, necessary work of genuine transformation. It signals that a significant portion of the male population has decided that the problem is women rather than themselves. Their solution is to purchase a woman who is already changed: flattened into compliance, programmed to please and incapable of the refusal that real women increasingly assert.

The women in our research told us that they had given up trying to find a partner because they were exhausted by men who could not meet them as equals, and by the emotional labour of trying to create intimacy from a fundamentally asymmetrical position.

The sex doll boom represents the answer some men have chosen to that exhaustion: to exit rather than change, to purchase a version of femininity that makes no demands and to create a relationship in which the other person has no agency, no voice and no capacity for refusal.

Where have all the good men gone? Perhaps, instead, we should now ask where are the men willing to stay and do the work?

Those men – men willing to be genuinely intimate with autonomous women, men capable of emotional reciprocity and men who can handle being truly known – appear to be increasingly rare. If the sex doll market continues its explosive growth, they may become rarer still.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

READ MORE: Why the Dover blockade was about far more than migrants. The recent protests at the Port of Dover, which brought traffic to a standstill, have been attributed to migrant crossings. But according to Dr Stephen Whitehead, they fundamentally reveal how men who feel they have lost status, security or purpose can be drawn to displays of collective power. Addressing that insecurity early may prevent such movements from escalating.

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