'Keep robot brothels out of Houston': sex doll company faces pushback

Kinky S Dolls, a Canadian firm, is targeting Houston as the first market in a planned US expansion

Tom Dart in Houston
Tue 2 Oct 2018 06.00 BST

Houston’s perhaps lesser-known status as a sex trade hub was noted by Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, in June when he lamented that the city had more brothels than Starbucks outlets. And this city has a lot of coffee shops.

But what Houston is apparently badly missing is a robot brothel, so called. Now a Canadian company is trying to fill that yawning gap.

Kinky S Dolls, a firm that bills itself as the first “adult love dolls rent-before-you-buy service in North America”, sells realistic-looking life-size dolls with basic artificial intelligence functions – and also offers them for use by the half-hour or hour at a warehouse in Toronto.

Now the firm is targeting Houston as the first market in a planned US expansion, but is meeting resistance from a Christian anti-sex trafficking and anti-pornography group and the city’s mayor.

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