Listen to this articleIn the 1960s, the sexual revolution reached its peak, with millions of young Americans revolting against the conservative sexual values of society. Free love was in the air, and everyone was experimenting with sex. Around the late 1960s, the modern history of first sex dolls started when they appeared on the back pages of men’s magazines like Playboy and Hustler.
These blow-ups dolls featured construction with vinyl materials, as polymer science was still undergoing a technological revolution at the time as well. The first blow-up dolls had crude features that looked nothing like a real person. However, the shape of the design and the holes were all that mattered to the horny men that decided they were worth purchasing.
Over the next few decades, society ridiculed blow-up dolls, with many finding their way onto comedy movie sets. You know the type of movie where a guy can’t get laid, so he buys a blow-up doll and keeps it in the cupboard, only to have his roommates find him and mock him.
While blow-up dolls were a reasonably popular fuck toy up until the 1990s, it was the launch of the “Real Doll” in 1196 that changed the industry forever. The Real Doll featured construction with silicon, not vinyl. Manufacturers found it easy to work with silicon, adding more realistic features to the doll’s face and body while improving the feel of having sex with the doll.
The Real Doll dominated the sex doll market for a few years before the technology became widespread, and more sex figure manufacturers started to emerge online. In 2019, some 50-years after the introduction of the first plastic blow-up doll, sex dolls are an entirely different sex toy to its predecessor.
