Fined for clothed dolls at a stadium, seriously?

The South Korean K League team FC Seoul released a photoshoot of a small crowd at a weekend football game in mid-May. They were the only spectators in the entire stadium. The fans were dressed up in their in team colours, waving their signs like fans genuinely excited to be there, and they were properly socially distanced like we all need to be during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now they’re being fined the equivalent of over $100,000AUD for it by K League. Why?

Because they were sex dolls. And that’s… bad. Somehow. Apparently.

There’s also been internal punishments for FC Seoul employees involved in the stunt, and what’s more, the company that owns the stadium is even considering punitive measures as extreme as evicting the team from their position at the Seoul World Cup stadium.

Now, obviously, we here at Sex Doll Australia we all think this kind of performative puritanism is ridiculous. It’s tiring for us, after spending a lot of time and effort contemplating the normalisation of sex dolls in modern society, to see these kinds of reactions and the usual clickbait tittering from mainstream press that follows it. It’s not helpful for our community. We don’t like to see kneejerk censorious measures over something as inoffensive and harmless as a fun photoshoot for a sports team trying to engage fans during a pandemic, just because it involves dolls.

It does help to look at the punishment in the context of South Korean society. South Korea has a large, and growing, sex doll consumer base – and that’s increased a lot since a court verdict led to the legalisation of full doll imports last year (prior to that, doll distributors could only import doll parts separately, before assembling them for sale in the country). However, there’s a huge base of people who believe for one reason or another that they are objectifying and otherwise threatening to the fabric of South Korean society. Over 260,000 people signed a petition to the President demanding the reintroduction of a ban on these imports. All of this is happening in the context of a society which is popularly puritan and conservative on the subject of sex and adult entertainment in every respect – for example, in South Korea there is a blanket online ban on accessing porn, which may only be circumnavigated with a VPN.

The Hysteria

Still. You know that the conservative hysteria which leads to kneejerk reactions like this is hysterical when a popular football team can’t even use dolls in a completely non-sexual and entertaining gesture of solidarity with their fans! Particularly during a pandemic, when those fans can’t come out and join in on the fun as they normally would. Someone would do well to remind the K League, and indeed the South Korean government, that there are many commercial uses for dolls that don’t necessarily involve sex. For example, doll manufacturers are often recruited by film studios to create high-end, lifelike dolls for the purposes of dangerous stunts. There’s more to these incredible dolls than whatever runs through the minds of these puritans!

Beyond all of that, though, we’d just like to see a day when the mainstream does not jump up and down in a combination of hysteria and salacious glee whenever a story involving dolls comes to the fore. If only they knew how beautiful our dolls are these days! If they did, we suspect some of these conservatives would be secretly browsing the Sex Doll Australia range for their new companion. Perhaps they’d have someone to watch the football with at home.

Thanks for reading 

Doll-ph