Casey Calvert is an adult-film actress in Los Angeles. She stars in pornographic movies which are shot at film studios, but half of her income, according to a recent BuzzFeed article, now comes from “personalized porn.”

What is “personalized porn”? For anywhere from a couple of hundred to several thousand dollars, Calvert will make a porn video specifically tailored to a client’s request. These one-of-a-kind, producer-direct-to-consumer videos are very popular, Calvert says, because porn is so quickly and widely pirated that it is difficult for clients to feel intimate with porn stars unless they pay the porn stars to address them by name or act according to their (often disturbing and bizarre) requests.

“You can’t pirate someone saying your name,” Calvert says in the BuzzFeed piece. “You can’t pirate someone wearing exactly the clothes you want them to wear, doing exactly the things you want them to do. It’s the connection, the interactivity.”

It is significant that in a world saturated with porn—a world in which even “children’s” shows and Disney movies are pervaded by innuendo and immodesty—people should be starving for “connection” and “interactivity.” Casey Calvert is a person, of course, as is everyone who is, sadly, caught up in the exploitative, dangerous, and dehumanizing porn industry. But so much of Calvert’s personhood is bleached away by the corrosive effects of porn that her “fans” are willing to pay a lot of money for some hint, however fleeting and twisted and contrived, of intimacy with her as a human being.

Perhaps nowhere is this heartbreaking desire for companionship more on display than in the booming sex-doll industry. Until just a few years ago, sex dolls were a sick joke. Not even porn addicts could be expected to stoop so low as to seek solace with a life-size curvaceous version of Gumby. Today, sex dolls are virtually everywhere, and getting even more ubiquitous with each passing month. Factories cannot keep up with demand. Sex-doll brothels have appeared in England, France, Germany, and Spain. A sex-doll brothel that opened in Russia before the World Cup proved so popular the proprietor was considering opening more locations. And in Japan, sex dolls have entered into the icy standoff between husbands and wives who live separately under the same roof. Some Japanese men claim that they actually love their sex doll, taking it on trips to the park and introducing it to their children and friends.

A quick Internet search will reveal that Japan is hardly an outlier in this rush to anthropomorphize robots. But most psychiatrists still claim that sex dolls will do the opposite, that somehow the robots will re-anthropomorphize us. For example, it is reported that some thirty percent of those who visit the sex-doll brothel in Spain have mental problems that preclude them from interacting normally with women. Sex dolls, the experts assert, help men like this eventually learn to approach and become intimate with human females. Some married couples have even begun using sex dolls to “improve” their sex lives, even if there was no particular problem that needed improving.

But is enhanced human interaction really the end goal of this industry? What do men really want when they turn on a porn video or buy or rent a sex doll? (And we should remember here that women constitute a sizable minority of porn and sex-doll purchasers.) What is the illusion that is for sale? What is the difficulty to which Casey Calvert—or an injection-molded assembly of wires and wig and silicone—seems to be the answer?

Ours is an age of complete liberal autonomy. We enter into contracts, not covenants. We have rights, not obligations. We would take, but not give. We believe with Thomas Hobbes that “life is brutish” and with Jean-Paul Sartre that “hell is other people.” We crave intimacy, but we have come—let us admit it—to loathe human beings. We prefer avatars, which present a fantastic version of ourselves while reducing the other to a square, flat image on a screen. (We sometimes call these images “icons,” but they are the opposite. Real icons are windows to Heaven; computer icons are one-dimensional bear traps.)

The truth is that porn and sex dolls—and brothels, and strip clubs, and call-girl services, and advertisements that titillate the passions—are predicated on a fundamental lie we tell ourselves. A client may contact Casey Calvert with a request for a “personalized” porn video because he thinks he craves “intimacy” with her, but in truth he is afraid of intimacy. He is afraid of the fecundity of love, the abundance of sharing, the complexity of commitment. He doesn’t care about Casey Calvert. He uses her to cover over his fear of being open to knowing another person in real time. He is a denizen of liberal modernity, seeking to assuage, for a moment, the suffocating vacuum of incommunication his lonely life has become.

Sex dolls are merely the culmination of this retreat from human relationships. Those who watch porn are complicit in the dehumanization of porn stars. Those who buy or rent sex dolls cannot bring themselves to undertake even that sad, regrettable form of human interaction. A sex doll has nothing to do with sex (because “sex” implies, etymologically, the pairing of male and female). It is not even onanistic. It is the cancellation of one’s humanity, the sublimation of the self into an automaton, the lonely alchemy of soul into silicon.

Sex dolls represent, then, the perfection of liberalism. With the rise of the sex dolls, we will never need to know or love anyone—even ourselves.