Five Key Takeaways From the Sex Robot Madness Documentary

A new sex robot documentary was screened at the 2025 Love & Sex With Robots conference in Montreal, addressing the controversies and philosophical questions buzzing around amorous animatronics.

Sex Robot Madness by New Orleans-based filmmaker Jimmy Meheil is available to watch in full on YouTube now, and —we presume— is named is an homage to the 1936 propaganda film ‘Reefer Madness‘.

Featuring sex robot factory access plus interviews with manufacturers, academics, anti-sex robot campaigners and a former sex doll brothel owner, it’s an interesting look into an industry that’s a tractor beam for opinion.

Here are five big sex robot talking points in the film.

Proper full-scale sex robots are decades away

New sex robots such as Ridmii’s Tenar model and Realdoll robots are, as their manufacturers would admit, still essentially love dolls with AI robot heads stuck on them.

In Sex Robot Madness interview footage, Love & Sex With Robots author and founder of the conference with the same name conference founder David Levy discusses his prediction that we’ll see the first properly-ordained human-robot marriages around the year 2050. He said this is largely because AI chatbots are still a way off understanding human speech to the level that could make them pass for humans themselves.

“Natural language understanding and conversation… these two problems will take at least another 30 years or so to perfect,” Levy said in an interview conducted in 2017. “By the time they are perfected, I think everything else that’s needed for a high calibre sex robot product, all the electronics, artificial skin, everything else, will have been solved previously.”

Sex robots are a “tragedy for humanity”…

In 2015 anthropologist and robotics researcher Kathleen Richardson launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which seeks to have sex robots banned because they supposedly contribute to the objectification of women and human isolation.

In Sex Robot Madness Richardson argued that increased use of sex robots would be a “tragedy for humanity” leading to “more people avoiding real relationships”.

“If we keep putting more of that stuff into our culture it’s just going to create more of a problem. We’ve got incels today, but tomorrow… we’re going to have an ISIS cult that feels it’s their right to have colonies of sex dolls and murder women,” she said.

“Campaign Against Sex Robots rejects the idea that human beings can have relationships with dolls and robots… it comes down to an underlying illusion that somehow, if you have… a robot that looks like a person, it is analogous to a person.

“It’s not; it’s still a doll. Objects are not people, and they can’t be turned into people, nor can they be turned into people who might meet real human needs, like loneliness.”

…Or, sex robots help the lonely

In contrast to Richardson, in the documentary Realdoll founder Matt McMullen (pictured below) said that sex robots help some lonely men have a form of companionship and sex life otherwise unavailable to them, and that’s a positive thing.

“People who otherwise would be quite lonely now have an option. Do I want everyone to be lonely and buy one of my robots? No, I don’t. I would hope that through the course of actually interacting with one of my robots, maybe this person in question could learn how to socialise better and eventually have a living, breathing partner.”

Speaking of a subsection of sex robot customers, McMullen added: “They’re alone and they’re sad and they’re lonely, and to have this character that they took part in creating, that they can converse with and interact with… I think that is a beautiful use of technology.”

Sex robots aren’t just for men

The vast majority of sex robots on the market come in the female form, aimed at heterosexual male customers. Male form sex robots do exist, but are rarely showcased as many tend to be custom models.

Will this change?

Fei Liu, a designer and artist who for a project once built a mini robot ‘boyfriend’ that looked a bit like Wall-E, once said that robots won’t fully replace humans for romance. In Sex Robot Madness she said that robotic partners could have strong appeal for both sexes, though.

“The biggest winners from having sex robots around could be women. On a lot of comment threads talking about sex robots women will be like, ‘Great, no unwanted pregnancies, no STDs, no abuse’. A lot of things that are top of mind for women when we enter into relationships… things to watch out for, right?”

“Women are able to bond more with other people, more naturally, than men can. When you think about sex robots creating socially isolating circumstances, I feel like men might be more vulnerable to that than women are,” she added

Love & Sex With Robots conference founder David Levy is quoted as saying that because millions of women use vibrators, it’s a natural step for there to be interest from women in being pleasured by another kind of electronic device: a sex robot.

“When there are male sex robots available, I think women will be queuing up for them,” he said. “In fact, I think women will be at least as interested in having a male sex robot as men.”

Robot sex is “elaborate masturbation”

Hats off to filmmaker Jimmy Meheil for becoming immersed in his subject and actually having sex with a sex robot, then discussing the experience for his doc.

Speaking of his tryst with a silicone-shrouded humanoid, he said that “foreplay is replaced by awkwardly moving the doll body into some kind of workable sex position. It’s a lot of non-sexy work. Once I did get the sex doll into position, it was difficult to maintain my enthusiasm. The experience was so one-sided that it became prohibitively deflating for me.”

“Currently, it’s a lot more like elaborate masturbation than sex, but it is already somewhere between the two.”

The director didn’t show footage of his encounter in his documentary, but for more of his sex robot insights and interviews you can watch the film in full .