Sex Robots
The End of Love

Kathleen Richardson (Author)

9781509530281, Polity Press

Hardback, published 19 September 2025

208 pages
22.1 x 14.2 x 2 cm, 0.386 kg

"A truly fascinating and chilling book which demolishes the hype about shiny new technologies, and shows how love and sex are being warped and commodified in new inhuman ways."
Kathleen Stock OBE, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

"An excellent explainer as to why the critique of and campaign against the production and normalization of porn dolls and sex robots is essential as part of the fight against sexual violence. Richardson brings a laser-sharp focus to a topic few of us understand, and even fewer have engaged in. Thank goodness she has."
Julie Bindel, feminist and writer, author of Feminism for Women

"Readable yet harrowing"
The Spectator

"Kathleen Richardson presents a forceful and wide-ranging critique of the ideologies that underpin the industries of pornography, prostitution, child sexual abuse, and the production of sex robots and related representational technologies. [Her] reframing of sex robots as extensions of exploitative sexual economies offers an important and timely intervention into contemporary discussions of intimacy and technology across AI ethics and feminist theory."
Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies

There are more ways of connecting and communicating via technology than ever before. Yet loneliness is on the rise as we begin to experience an 'attachment crisis' in forming and maintaining intimate relationships. 
 
Enter sex robots. Built from the bodies of sex dolls, they are created to help humans – particularly men – cope with our inability to connect. In this bold and trenchant critique, Kathleen Richardson explores important questions surrounding this emerging technology. What does the rise of sex robots tell us about the way that women and girls are imagined? To what extent are porn, prostitution and child sexual exploitation driving the attachment crisis?
 
The author argues that sex robots are produced within a framework of 'property relations' – in which egocentric Man (and his disconnection from Woman) shapes the building of robots and AI. Can this tide of destruction and disconnection be turned, and what would a revolution for the love of humanity look like?
 
Presenting a passionate case for the abolition of practices that cast women as property, Sex Robots: The End of Love is essential reading for students and scholars of robot ethics, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy of technology, sociology and related fields, as well as anyone concerned for the future of human relationships.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Politics of Dissociation

Subject Areas: Society & culture: general [JF]