Katy Perry is furious her name image are being used to sell sex dolls online for about $31 a pop.
A likeness of her face adorns boxes of “Katy Pervy” dolls, and she’s now set to launch legal action after learning about the misuse of her image.
The soon-to-be-married “Roar” singer is “distressed” her likeness is being used to promote the inflatable sex toys that are available on eBay in the U.S. and U.K., according to a source. Her legal team is now said to be gearing up to have them removed.
Packaging on the dolls shows a woman who resembles Perry earlier in her career. The woman is lying on her stomach, her purple hair down, while sucking a lollipop.
An eBay seller in the U.K. advertises the toy as a life-size inflatable sex doll that is “especially for the guys that find it hard to get off with a real girl. … A stunning inflatable life-sized doll that leaves little to the imagination as to just which pop artist she is meant to look like.”
According to the seller, the doll is made of flesh-colored PVC materials and has “three inviting holes” as well as “pert boobs.”
Perry, 34, wants the dolls of the market before she marries Brit actor Orlando Bloom, 42, next year.
Sex dolls have become more realistic looking in recent years. In 2018, the House unanimously passed the Curbing Realistic Exploitative Electronic Pedophilic Robots act, which would prohibit the import of childlike sex dolls, robots, or mannequins. Lawmakers said the dolls – customizable to include accessories such as false eyelashes and wigs, and settings to change facial expressions to fear and sadness – make “rape easier by teaching the rapist about how to overcome resistance and subdue the victim.”
However, the bill did not receive Senate approval.
The robots, imported from China, Hong Kong or Japan, are labeled as clothing mannequins or models in order to avoid detection. Some advocates argue that sex dolls that resemble children actually provide a safe outlet for pedophiles.
University of Toronto forensic psychologist and sexologist Michael Seto compared childlike sex robots for pedophiles with methadone treatment for heroin addicts. “For some pedophiles, access to artificial child pornography or to child sex dolls could be a safer outlet for their sexual urges, reducing the likelihood that they would seek out child pornography or sex with real children,” Seto told The Atlantic in 2016. He added: “For others, having these substitutes might only aggravate their sense of frustration.”
Other experts including Kathleen Richardson, a De Montfort University professor of ethics and culture of robots in the U.K., said victims of child abusers don’t support the use of robots.
She told NBC News in January 2018: “They say that pedophiles who offend are so cut off from their own humanity that giving them a machine wouldn’t address the underlying problem.”
