It started last month, when a Toronto man intentionally drove his van into a crowd. His ideology? The incel movement — a politically radicalized form of misogyny in which “involuntarily celibate” men envision taking vengeance on the virile “Chads” and shallow “Stacys” they believe are contributing to their sexual poverty. (It’s the same movement, fomented on internet discussion forums like Reddit and 4chan, that inspired the 2014 Santa Barbara shooter, venerated in incel circles as the “Supreme Gentleman”). How, various media outlets wondered, could we combat such a radical, toxic ideology, one that had already racked up a high body count?

Out of this reaction came a modest proposal. George Mason University economist Robin Hanson published a blog post seemingly advocating for “sexual redistribution”: a subversion of the sexual marketplace in which sexual access was state-sanctioned and state-organized. The government, in other words, should intervene to provide incels with sex. “One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met,” he wrote.

It’s not the first time the image of the sex robot has entered mainstream public discourse. Now, as in the 19th century — the heyday of what we might call a “sex robot panic” — the image of the sex robot is a cultural specter of the way an increasingly capitalist, increasingly technologically advanced society tends to commodify human beings. The idea that “incels” might (or should) seek companionship from sex dolls is not a new one in incel discourse, particularly as sex robot technology gets increasingly advanced and sex dolls more lifelike. But it hit the mainstream on May 2 when New York Times columnist Ross Douthat published a controversial column called “The Redistribution of Sex.” The article concluded that “the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incel.” Douthat wrote that “the left’s increasing zeal to transform prostitution into legalized and regulated ‘sex work’” combined with “the libertarian (and general male) fascination with virtual-reality porn and sex robots” will lead to people agreeing that there is a right to sexual access. Douthat’s column has since pushed sex robots to the forefront of the conversation. The contrarian conservative UK magazine the Spectator, for example, published a piece directly advocating for sex robots for incels.

Sex dolls (or sex statues, or sex robots) have been around, as a trope, for millennia. The idea of a man falling in love with, and copulating with, a created woman dates back at least to Pygmalion’s Galatea, a narrative reproduced in the ancient Roman-era Metamorphoses by Ovid and elsewhere. European sailors in the 17th century made their dame du voyage: masturbatory aids for long naval journeys. But the origins of the sex robot as a cultural phenomenon date back more recently, to 19th-century Paris. Paris in the 19th century was a chaotic place. Described by philosopher Walter Benjamin as the “capital of the 19th century,” Paris was a place of intense cultural change. The old city — a city of medieval alleyways and labyrinthine streets — was, from 1853 onward, gradually being bulldozed under Emperor Napoleon III’s chief architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This gave way to a city of wide boulevards, electric gas lights, and (a new invention), department store shopping. Newly industrialized, with a burgeoning middle class who could, for the first time, afford the mass-produced luxury goods technology had made possible, Paris was also, for many, a source of existential anxiety. “Old Paris is no more,” lamented the poet Charles Baudelaire, “the form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart.”

Culturally, too, things were in flux. Increasingly secular, Paris’s cultural milieu was dominated by “positivists” like the writer Émile Zola and scientists like Jean-Marie Charcot, who believed not just in the supremacy of scientific progress, but also in the idea that human beings were fundamentally explicable. They believed that by, metaphorically speaking, taking them apart and analyzing them, you could understand everything about them. (In The Experimental Novel, Zola described his novelistic technique as being like a doctor at an operating table.)

Meanwhile, a reactionary right embraced radical forms of nostalgia: from an aesthetic obsession with the medieval era to deeply conservative Catholicism to misogynist occultism.

It was in this heady atmosphere of competing and contradictory cultural influences that the sex robot became a popular recurring trope. Some of our first references are in the diaries of the novelists and social chronicles the Goncourt brothers. In May 1858, they reported going to a brothel where they heard a rumor about another brothel whose robots were indistinguishable from their humans.

These rumors remained in the seedy underbelly of Paris’s sex trade until 1884, when the eccentric novelist and dandy Louis-Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, published his book L’Éve Future.

That Eve of the Future was not a flesh-and-blood woman but a robot (Villiers was the first to use the term Andreïde, or “android,” in fiction). Created by a not exactly fictionalized Thomas Edison as a replacement for the boring lover of his impassioned friend, Lord Ewald (it’s a very weird book), “Hadaly” is presented by Edison as an example of the triumph of the false, man-made, and scientific over the merely biological.

Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that Villiers, a reactionary ultra-Catholic monarchist, is using L’Éve Future not to praise but to critique this mentality. Villiers uses the robot woman not just as a misogynist device — fake women are “better” than real women — but as a critique of a culture that treats everything, even people, as commodities.

Robot women and doll characters abound in late-19th and early-20th-century media. There’s the living doll Olympia in the 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann. There’s the unnerving real-life case of poet Oskar Kokoschka, who — after his beloved Alma Mahler left him in 1918 — had a sex doll made that resembled her. There’s the false Maria, a robot designed in part to stave off a communist uprising, in Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis.

In each of these fictional cases, the image of the robot woman or sex doll was used to explore wider ideas about the uncomfortable ways that capitalism, dehumanization, and sexual desire intersect. Later robot women stories have also tended to come during similar resurgences of the capitalist aesthetic, like Ira Levin’s 1975 novel The Stepford Wives.

“Sex robots,” therefore, have always been about more than sex. They’ve been a cultural repository for wider uncertainties in times of social change: a literalization of the fear that all human beings are fundamentally replaceable. They represent everything we most fear about what Walter Benjamin, writing about that era in Parisian history, called the “commodity-soul.”

Bottom line is as Douthat and Hanson alike predict sex robots as an inevitable part of our future, incels are bringing a different kind of sex robot into discourse. The word “femoid” has become the preferred incel term for (human) women, on the grounds that all women are basically robots anyway.

Meanwhile, some of the Goncourt brothers’ 150-year-old anxieties are coming true. A sex doll brothel has, in fact, just opened in Paris.