I am a doll owner.
I love my dolls, although I haven't spent as much time with them lately as before, which is a shame. The good thing about dolls though, compared to pets for instance, is that they can wait for several orders of magnitude longer than most living organisms are capable of, including Homo sapiens.
Dolls are really an interesting subject to the human society. People are known to be scared of dolls, even those that are not intentionally created to be horrifying. While some of this fear can be described with the uncanny valley, other aspects also come in to play.
My theory is that, due to them being humanoid (I am leaving out the other kinds of dolls), our mind will attempt to read their thoughts and emotions as our instinctive ability can. This creates something like a feedback loop when a microphone is connected to nearby speakers, in the person's mind. Many will find it irritating, but some of our pattern-matching brains also figure out sensations from the loop in ourselves.
There are many people to whom dolls form a major part of their lives, and there are countless ways of owning dolls.
In terms of their roles in the owners' lives, they can be toys, collectibles, artworks, sex partners, family members, secret friends and much more. Some owners believe that their dolls have souls. Some owners care to them like pets and have them in hands every day. Some owners put them in a showcase and never touch them. Some owners abuse the dolls (by normal standards), but love them deeply.
Dolls gives nothing, but can take in everything from their owner. Romantic, isn't it?
I enjoy fictions depicting the relationships between dolls and their owners. Although most of them involve dolls coming to life, which is unrealistic, the interactions are still very interesting, and perhaps also spark self-consciousness questions in doll owners such as myself.
Sometimes dolls are used for their shock value, which I don't enjoy as much, but is acceptable for me. More often in literature or other media, dolls are used as a metaphor for humans without freedom, which is also fine. But the stereotype of a doll owner being of a somewhat twisted character, should not be take seriously.
The underlying argument is somewhat understandable. A doll is not a human, and one can do anything to it. But that does not imply that dolls are substitutes for human beings, or the other way around. In fact a lot of doll owners as I know do not have any interest in people at all.
No one is to be blamed for “abusing” their dolls, and no one is to be looked down upon or pitied for having dolls as their love/sex/life partners.
I will probably write more on dolls in the future.
P.S. This post took an hour and a half to write. I am in the office.