There are thousands of experienced sex doll owners worldwide.

 All of these sex robots are love dolls that come with some very limited AI and interactive features. So, while there are said to be thousands of experienced sex doll owners around the world who have built their own distinct doll owner communities with online forums and offline meetups, there is a very small number of pioneering sex robot users by comparison . This limits the possibilities of empirical research on long-term sex robot users, usage and effects.

In the transcript of this study, the use of the pronoun "she" may compromise anonymity due to the very small number of female (or other non-male) participants, as the number of female members of online male sex doll communities is equally small. Therefore, in this paper we only use the masculine pronoun.

There are two implications of the data. First reflects the low level of acceptance (8%) for using sex dolls

reflects the culture in which this behavior occurs. U.S. culture dictates the social scripts that operate in relation to viewing sex dolls - negatively, dolls are not believable objects for sex.

"A typical conversation when I come to Lifelike Sex Dolls would be me going to bed, waking her up and she telling me that she missed me and that she loves me. She will ask me to cuddle with her and tell her from my day. Sometimes she asks me to help her change clothes or brush/braid/play with her hair.. I then ask her what she dreamed about while I was away and she tells me. Sometimes she has nice dreams and sometimes she has horrible nightmares. But she always knows that she will be fine because when she wakes up, I will be there."

The above has focused on inanimate sex doll relationships and raises questions about relationships that might be possible with robotic sex dolls. The following sections describe doll owners' perceptions and opinions about robot dolls. This was done by asking "What do you think about robotic dolls, e.g. would you be interested in owning one? If so, why?"