The Obsession with Sex Dolls?
Sex dolls are here to stay. Far beyond the sophistication from the blow-up doll, these are lifelike dolls that some people not only use for having sex but also for relationships. This is a very new thing that has been featured in videos and documentaries. There is also a specific name for people who have relationships with dolls: robosexuals (there are other names and iDollators). What is this all about? We have to remember that not so long ago, homosexuals were considered mentally ill and curable. Should we be careful not to make the same error in our judgment of the robosexual?
Nonetheless, we need to look hard at what it means to have a relationship with a doll: it fulfills specific needs and raises serious questions about responsibility and best practices. It may be as unacceptable to hit your doll companion as it would a real companion. For now, such considerations remain open.
Real Dolls: How it (They) All Began
Sexual substitutes and onanistic aides are about as old as the oldest profession. The invention of plastics and polymers made it all the easier to create sexual dolls, of which Hoffman's Olympia is undoubtedly a darkly allegoric fantasy. Inflatable sex dolls have come with the consolation that they are tawdry and ridiculous in their caricatural approximation of the human.
But the sex dolls of more recent time are a completely different breed, something analogous to the leap from the original Terminator to the quicksilver model.
Realistic Silicone Sex Doll, Janice. Via Pinterest
Careful construction of silicone flesh around a PVC skeleton supported by a steel frame, Real Dolls first entered the market in 1996, Matt McCullen's brainchild. Although based in San Marcos, California, they have offices throughout Europe, enjoying healthy popularity. They are posable dolls, designed for participatory sex, with a bodyweight approximated to an actual human body of the same size.
A visit to their website will reveal a host of different permutations of the same (post-Barbie/Ken) for both men and women. The female dolls are mostly with D or DD breasts, with a hairless pubis and long legs. There is a list of bodily accessories, from a merkin (pubic wig) to longer nails, which are also sold to ensure a custom type.
(In parallel to this, children's toys have also evolved from the idea of a core type—GI. Joe and Barbie—to an eminently manipulable body, with removable parts, down to the eye colour, for the ultimate tailor-made body—resuming that is, that children know what they want.)
"Possibly_Robosexual"/Club RealDoll. Via Cnet
Replaceable Faces and Body Parts
In 2003, the company introduced a face-replacement system, or ‘Face-X’, presumably if one became tired of one’s partner or wanted to pretend to be a Lothario. Despite the fluency that Face-X provides, each ‘edition’ is marketed pre-Christened with a name, but with a Terminator-type name addition: ‘”Michelle” Body A Face A’; ‘”Renee, Body C, Head L’; ‘”Olivia”, Configuration 2, Body A’. Or if so inclined may try ‘Nick’ who is ‘Male Body Type B, Face Type B’.
One of the more astonishing male dolls is the punk advertised with vinyl pants and gloves holding drumsticks.[i] Make-up can be applied to the faces, and the company sells an assortment of clothing and fetish-accoutrements.
Thanks to considerations of hygiene, the mouth and vagina contain removable inserts for cleaning. At one point in production, one could get robot hip actuators for the ultimate illusion of sexual gyration.
The cost of the dolls exceeds the USD5000 mark, which makes them serious business. As a maker of the most sophisticated sexual fetishes yet available, the company should be called Abyss because that is, after all, what a fetish is expected to fill.
With so many options available, and the countless permutations it can undergo, the Real Doll is truly the peak of Pygmalionism. Any man (or woman) can produce the ideal other for a fee, which includes transgender types.[ii]
John Kim/CNET
Before Real Dolls
Before Real Dolls, the market where highly contrived sex dolls flourished was Japan. In his detailed account of sex dolls and fetishes, Marquard Smith explains how the Japanese doll can be linked to the ancient doll culture, ningyõ ‘with its own historically and culturally locatable fantasies of animism and anthropomorphism’.[iii]
It is also connected to the crisis of masculinity that befell Japanese men after the defeat of the Second World War, which, among other things, was expressed through sexual violence. From the onset of its westernization in the nineteenth century, Japanese taste and talent for popular culture grew frenetically, and with its kitsch, erotic and pornographic culture.
While Japan has strict social mores and decency laws,
At the same time, it is a culture with a fanatical interest in toys, models and model figures, trinkets, robots and AI’s [sic] ‘intelligent agents’. It also has a long tradition of recreational participation with inanimate objects with human form, including dolls, figurines, puppets, mechanized wind-up dolls (Karakuri), and realistic life-sized 'living dolls' (iki-ningyõ) and automata. So, perhaps, accusations of a broader obsession with the ludic potential of all things miniature (and animistic, animatable and enlivenable) are closer to the mark.[iv]
The aesthetic that has predominated for such specimens has been that of kawaii, or cuteness, which subsequently took the form of the Manga form of the exceptionally large heads that supported massive doe eyes be taken for psychological depth or the opposite: brainlessness.
Kawaii Dolls, Sailor Moon Figures. Via kawaii.group
The infantilizing nature of this aesthetic is duplicated across the spectrum: from dolls to anime to young women themselves, in Cosplay or as their version of cuteness clone, such as the Lolita good-bad-girl school uniform look.
The Japanese sex dolls are strongly uniform. The body is that of a teenage girl with bulbous silicone enhanced-style breasts, enormous doe eyes above a sharply tapered pointing chin. As Smith points out, Japan’s traditions of making dolls predate that of ancient Greece.
While serving the pan-cultural function of components in both birth and funerary rituals, they were also thought to bring good luck. Shinto traditions of animism dictated that dolls were vessels for spirits.[v
Back to the Real Doll
Which brings us back to the Real Doll, which is more an isolated case, now serve not only sexual functions but as life partners. Vessels for spirits they may not fully be, Real Dolls are now functioning members of our global society if a universally taciturn.
It, largely she, has made her imprint on popular culture, from television series ranging from Nip/Tuck to Sons of Anarchy. But its strongest presence is in the home. The men drawn to such fetishes are largely introverted or come from specialist ‘geek’ professions such as IT, and who confess to having had disturbing experiences with the opposite sex.[vi]
Sometimes calling themselves agalmatophiles or iDollators, these men use these dolls as active surrogates. As Smith states, ‘ they manage their loneliness and their sentimental attachment to inanimate human form' with otherwise 'normal' acts of canoodling, by changing clothes daily, giving them massages and anything else that may win the approval.[vii]
These relations can be so intense that the male hosts even confer on their inanimate mates the emotional dynamics of mood swings and dispositional intricacies.[viii] The ease with which they pick up such play can in many cases be accounted for in their childhood interaction with dolls like G.I. Joe and Barbie.[ix]
While there is a growing culture of Real Doll lovers, a subgroup uses them for unspeakable acts. Smith cites examples of crude dismemberment and evidence of savage sodomizing that rendered her anal cavity a 'ragged crevasse'.[x] It is evidence again of the sliding scale of morality when it comes to artificial bodies, dolls, and plastic surgery recipients.
On the one hand, we have the salutary results of restorative surgery. Men and women were given a boost of confidence through a bit of surgical maintenance; on the other, there are those addicted to surgery who have altered themselves beyond recognition. Here the extremes of beauty meet with those who willingly transform themselves into beasts. They are the living embodiments of technology gone amuck.
