Letters

Symbols of misogyny or simple sex toys? Readers respond to Meghan Laslocky's article about Real Dolls.

Oct 13, 2005 | [Read "Just Like a Woman," by Meghan Laslocky.]

Salon's piece on love dolls and the men who love them provided an interesting glimpse into a lesser-known sexual subculture. I felt particularly sympathetic toward men whose social isolation, self-imposed or otherwise, conflicted with their need for sexual contact.

Clearly there are multiple paths leading to sexual partnership with an artificial woman, so I can't make any sweeping statements. However, some of the Real Doll owners' stories were littered with red flags. A fourth-tier guy who will settle for nothing less than a top-tier girl may very well have to make the choice between a flawed woman with a nervous system and a doll with a porn-star body.

In the end, the Real Doll merely occupies the extreme end of an already-present continuum. "Safe" women seldom open their mouths, know how to sit still and look pretty, and never, ever ask for anything to change. Some of them even have a few plastic parts of their own.

-- Annie Bradford

Is a story about inflatable girlfriends, replete with links to a site with loads of explicit photos, really material for a lead story? I have no problems with running such a story in the general mix, but with so many other important things going on, I think our time and resources are better spent on more substantive matters.

-- Richard DiMatteo

The phenomenon of Real Dolls is less an extension of pornography than an extension of the disassociated cyber-culture that anxiously shrinks away from actual communication with other three-dimensional human beings. The dolls are essentially blank slates onto which men can project their own -- typically narcissistic -- psyches. It's the same pattern we find in e-mail and Instant Messaging: communication minus the stress of an actual encounter. My forthcoming novel, "Days of Allison," depicts the robotic female mates we haven't yet seen but probably soon will -- no doubt with muzzles on their mouths.

-- Eric Shapiro

As a male reader, I'm getting very tired of female writers like Rebecca Traister and now Meghan Laslocky injecting their pointed and misandric judgments into what are ostensibly pieces of objective journalism about male-female relations and issues of gender. In "Just Like a Woman" there is plenty of evidence, including quotes from the Real Doll owners themselves, demonstrating that these people are emotionally stunted, delusional and even dangerous. So do we really need interjections such as "[The Web site] Hello Dolly is a place where all my worst fears about men churned in an awful froth" and "By the end of my reporting, though, I just saw the men as pathetic and the conversations so packed with false bravado as to be ludicrous."

That the writer insists on underlining her own biases when the facts she presents are strong enough by themselves indicates either a lack of confidence in her material or an unsavory need to generalize, judge and condemn. Please stick to the reporting at hand, and leave the stuff about one's "worst fears about men" for women's studies term papers.

-- Dave M.

I wonder how long it will be before we see the headline "Man killed in accident with leaking waterbed, android."

-- Tom Butler

Next Page: Articles like this one go a long way toward substantiating the idea that leftist women dislike men

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