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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Mike Kelly buys into the doll-as-healthy-transitional-object theory, but also posits that dolls play a needed role in natural selection. "There's definitely people out there who shouldn't be in the gene pool," he says. "This is a way to keep people happy that shouldn't be having kids anyway." He added that some men -- himself excluded because he says he has a real 25-year-old flight attendant girlfriend -- can't attract high-quality women because they lack top-notch genetic material. Men like that, he says, should just build mates and not spread their seed.
Maureen, one of the craftspeople who works at the Real Doll studio, proposed a more benign version of Kelly's theory. She speculated that the domestic pairing of guys and dolls is more or less a safety valve. "These lonely guys, instead of going out and causing trouble, they have something like this to keep them home and keep them company," she says. "A lot of them, it's like they marry them, which is kind of creepy, but whatever keeps them out of trouble."
In one particularly animated thread on Hello Dolly, doll lovers challenged misconceptions that "doll bashers" might have about who has sex with dolls and why. Here's a distillation of their arguments, culled from more than 50 posts:
Doll lovers are not to be confused with necrophiles. Remember that many doll lovers heat their dolls before using them, and necrophiles like their lovers cold. One owner, Bunster, points out that women aren't accused of necrophilia for using dildos ("dead penises!"), so men who sleep with dolls shouldn't be, either.
Doll love is not an indicator of violence against women. "A rapist would get no satisfaction from a RD -- it does not resist, run or scream, or submit..." writes ric. Technoguy concedes that it is "quite possible that some doll owners may be having fantasies of a kinky or even sadistic nature while 'using' their dolls ... From a psychological perspective, it is probably healthier to exercise those fantasies with a doll than a real human female who might be emotionally scared or even injured by them." Zaneta declares, "If I go to hell/pergitory [sic)]/reincarnated as a scum sucking life form for my ownership of a doll so be it. I'm still better than a rapist, child molester, [or] murderer."
Doll lovers are not lonely geeks who can't get real girls. Wolverine, owner of Tia, writes, "I've had something like 84 [girlfriends] in my lifetime, I bought a Real Doll because I thought they were awesome, not because I was hardup." Bunster chimes in: "I've had some pretty f*cking gorgeous girlfriends in my time, but I'd rather have a RD than be married to any of them. The politics of relationships aren't exactly fun most of the time -- most of us tolerate it only because the physical part is the pay off." Darkland adds to the thread that casual sex has never been his thing, but he's "still got the pesky issue of having the sex drive of a football team hopped up on methamphetamines ... thanks to Real Doll, voila, problem solved."
Doll owners are capable of love. As ric writes, "I've come to the conclusion that doll owners are some of the most romantic, sensitive, sensuous people around ... Many doll owners get a doll because of longing for real love. They don't want to jump into a realtionship [sic] just for sex, and end up with a broken heart or hurting someone else when the sex fizzles. So, they get sex from a doll instead and wait for love to happen." (Kelly suggested in a telephone conversation with me that doll owners should be considered a new breed of sensitive male: "If you think about it, they're the right guy to meet because they're not going to get you into bed immediately. They're going to be interested in you as a person.")
In their heart of hearts, all men would like a Real Doll. Soragesum suggests that doll taboos are a function of their price point: "I would bet money that any single one of the guys [who say they have no interest in dolls] if they secretly had access to a realdoll, if they thought no one would know or find out, would fuck her silly, at least for awhile."
Doll love should be considered healthy and normal. Technoguy speculates that if Real Dolls were cheap and accessible to Everyman, they would be championed: "then practically every guy in the USA would want and get one for his 18th birthday. It would then suddenly be considered a 'healthy' part of one's 'normal' sexual development. Adolescent psychologists would be recommending them, anti-abortion groups would be saying that they were a wonderful way to prevent unwanted pregnancies that had to be aborted, and the law enforcement experts would claim that they would drastically cut down on sex crimes."
From a clinical standpoint, doll love is a mystery, with no blanket diagnosis that fits this particular brand of lust. Dr. Douglas Tucker, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco's Department of Psychiatry who specializes in treating sexual offenders, says the pro-doll arguments are not off-base. Broadly speaking, intercourse with a love doll doesn't signal anything particularly wrong or unhealthy, and arousal by such a lifelike depiction of a beautiful nude woman is natural. "I think most guys would approach this as a novelty and could muster some arousal," he says, adding that he would hesitate to label men who enjoy sex with Real Dolls pathological. But Tucker dismissed the notion that Real Dolls are no different than women's dildos or vibrators because lifelike dolls, unlike vibrators, are simulated humans -- they have what he called "pull." "All of the stimuli are telling you it's human," he says.
Tucker says that even if a study were done of real men and their Real Dolls, it's unlikely that a single common denominator would emerge. In the meantime, it's guesswork. Doll love could signal any number of things. For example, an iDollator with a harem might have been surrounded by dominant women as a child. Or, in the cases where men prefer dolls to live human sexual partners, doll paraphilia could signal severe problems with trust, intimacy or social anxiety. Tucker ventured that for certain men, doll love could stunt normal emotional development because intimacy with another person is a milestone in maturity. Immediate gratification and complete control of the emotional content of a relationship with a doll might make a man accustomed to absolute control with women -- a dynamic that would likely not play out well in a real relationship.
Tucker says pedophiles or doll owners with violent tendencies toward women -- a group that he speculates is a small subset of doll owners -- possibly could use a doll to "rehearse" offending behavior. And while it's not known whether fantasizing about pedophilia or violence leads to action, in the psychiatric community those fantasies are considered very troubling. It would be dangerous for a pedophile to use a young-looking doll, for example, because it would reinforce his fantasies with orgasm.
Back at McMullen's Real Doll studio, where a jumble of headless bodies hang from racks like Rockettes at a slaughterhouse, there isn't much concern about why men want to have sex with dolls, only with respecting and meeting their demand. Seven dolls were lined up in office chairs, clad in black stockings and negligees, waiting to meet that human need. "She's going to Orlando," said Maureen as she painted red nail polish on a B4 with long black hair and green eyes. The whole row of sister dolls were shipping that day, packed in closet-size boxes marked with "Fragile" and "Do Not Drop," off on maiden voyages to Ohio, Washington state, Las Vegas, Utah, Michigan and another one to Florida.
Years of trading in silicone fantasy hasn't worn McMullen down and there are still new frontiers he wants to explore. Soon, a big-butted voluptuous Body 10 will debut, modeled after an erotic cartoon character called Druuna that has many Hello Dolly fans. Other innovations on the horizon include bodies with detectable rib cages, collar bones, backbones and clavicles; a removable, interchangeable vagina system, for ease of cleaning and sensory variety; and wireless animatronics to enable facial expressions.
For now, McMullen has no plans for a Real Doll robot. While he concedes that the concept of an android love doll is in theory attractive, the technology isn't advanced enough, yet, to shoehorn a robot into a Real Doll. McMullen doesn't think that is what his customers want anyway. "I think a lot of people like the fact that it's just a doll," he says. "I don't see the dolls walking and talking. I don't see them doing domestic stuff around the house. Keep your love doll in the bedroom."
And those without dolls in their bedroom -- specifically those with spouses and families and maybe people reading this story -- should keep their judgments to themselves. "It is not weird," he insists after recounting the many expressions of gratitude he's received from men, including a burn victim who thanked him for giving him back a piece of his life and a paraplegic who just wanted a body beside him at night. "What if you lived all by yourself, and what if you didn't want or couldn't have a relationship, and you were just lonely, and you just wanted to feel that contact? he says. "You can't possibly identify with that person because you've never been in that situation. To feel contact, to feel a body next to you, is a human need."
