silicone sickos
this is quite possibly the saddest phenomenon going.
Go ahead. Flinch at the notion of a man having sex with an imitation woman and classify him: Lonely loser. Pathological creep. Misogynist. Potential rapist. Sicko. True enough, some men who have sex with Real Dolls are creepy — not the kind of guy you’d want to be alone with — and many are tragically lonely. But some defend their Real Doll fetish as being no different than a 3-D version of a Playboy centerfold. Then there are men who are disfigured or infirm and can only have sex with a prosthetic lover. And those like Davecat, for whom a Real Doll is a “teddy bear with benefits.”
i’ve seen these featured on hbo’s “real sex” series, and there was a whole show dedicated to them on telly here the other night (okay, I just realised that makes me sound like I watch a lot of sex shows. really, i don’t). there is obviously a huge market for fake-human, dead-eyed sex dolls.
the appeal? I suppose i can understand how there are lots of people out there who just aren’t gettin’ any, whether they’re socially defective in some way, or just through circumstance. what i find really depressing about the whole thing is that I have the feeling part of this is due to the disconnect from “real life” that it’s so easy to experience these days. i mean, most days, we spend more time interacting with computers than we do with humans. that may be a wild generalisation, but i think it’s a fairly accurate one. i truly believe it is possible to grow up completely ignorant of general social mores, physical human cues, true relating on an interpersonal level. these are things you only learn through years of experience around humans. but these days children are spoonfed television while they’re pre-verbal. they can be homeschooled and kept indoors on computers and video games to such a degree that they are nearly insulated from *life*. then you hit those awkward teen years, when you don’t really understand how you feel about the opposite (or same) sex, and fear of rejection is so painfully acute. so you beat off to magazines and manga-zines. suddenly you’re an adult, and you’re expected to already have figured out the rules of dating and sex and it becomes to embarrassing to reveal your lack of experience.
i can totally see that happening – and then turning to this not-so-niche market to satisfy their desires. It’s like when you were a kid and used to practice kissing on your pillow, just on an older, wider, and much more expensive scale. i can almost understand that.
what i can’t understand is those people who try to “normalise” it by pretending it’s just another kink. because unless you consider it “normal” to have sex with the equivalent of a dead (albeit silicone) body, it’s soooo not. these are the people who describe their “relationships” with their dolls. They anthropomorphise their dolls to an extent which is really skin-crawling. and if they are capable of twisting their brains that way, i shudder to think what else they’re capable of.
