Did you hear about the men who have given up on human romance because they prefer to invest in mechanized, life-sized dolls that are programmed to suck and squeeze? I have just returned from my mother’s funeral (which is why I haven’t blogged in so very long) to find a Reuters article and video report entitled “Japan’s loners turn to dolls for sex.”
Funerals do make one think about relationships – too many of which are dysfunctional or dissatisfying, so it seemed perversely logical to look into this phenomenon of men who prefer their sex partners non-alive and inorganic. These guys have rejected flesh-and-blood women – with all of our bodily fluids, opinions and free will – in favor of sophisticated, pliable silicone dolls.
The Reuters piece interviews a 45 year-old engineer they call Ta-Bo who has spent tens of thousands of dollars on a gaggle of dolls in order to avoid the danger, he says, that “a human girl can cheat on you or betray you.” His customized substitutes weigh about 60 pounds, cost up to $6,000 and are forever young. Disturbingly girl-like, even. When Ta-Bo comes home from work, he likes to snuggle in front of the TV with his dolls before bathing them, dressing them in sexy nighties and bedding them.
Those men who aren’t in a position to purchase, one Japanese blogger reports, can rent them from a new chain of stores for about $100 per hour.
The President of Orient Industry (in the photo in his showroom), the company that produces these plastic companions, understands his mostly single 40+ customers: "Nowadays, women are sometimes more dominant than men in the real world, and they don't always pay attention to men." Who needs vital domestic partners anyway? Not Ta-Bo. Admitting the dolls are his only “emotional outlet,” he brags that, “They belong to me 100%,"
Orient Industry claims to have originally been motivated by the needs of men with disabilities. An American company making “the Ferrari of love dolls” has a more historical point of view. The Real Dolls spokesman alleges they were first developed by Germany and Japan to relieve stress in their WWII submarines. This video tour of their factory is strangely censored with strategic clouds.
Committed to the American expectation of retail choice, you can shop ala carte among a dozen varieties of pubic hair or facial expression (from smiling to orgasmic), perhaps adding a motorized pumping pelvis. Twenty weeks later your individualized, silent mail-order bride arrives.
The more I researched, the more distasteful the findings, including a nasty YouTube clip of someone manipulating a doll’s lips and tongue with a disturbingly invasive finger. Particularly foul was a clip about the doll bought by Kink.com’s CEO for use as a bondage model. Someone violated it over the first weekend at his facility and naturally no one on staff wanted to clean it up.
None of these articles ask why these sculptures are so uniformly child-like or what it means for a hunk of plastic to cross over the line from sex-toy to life companion. None of these journalists express puzzlement in the face of owners who have their closest relationship with a captive and compliant sex object (quite literally).
Because these dolls are so anthropomorphicized by those who sell and buy them, it is hard not to be creeped out. If a fetish is harming no one else and there is no breathing human being used without consent, then why does it feel so weird? Perhaps it is the veneer of relationship commitment that surrounds their marketing and use. This isn’t a case of promising men they can stick in their cock and cum: this is more a means to circumvent real women altogether. (Probably not a bad thing in the case of these guys, a close friend suggested.)
I too love my sex toys, but I know their limitations. They can’t collaborate with me in breaking new boundaries of passion. They can’t interact in role-playing or pick up on my moods. They won’t volunteer to clean out the mush at the bottom of my fridge’s fruit drawer or bring me flowers when my mother dies. I admit that I’ve got a long-term relationship with my plug-in vibrator, but it sure wouldn’t get me off to dress it up in finery and tell it how my day went.
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