‘Companions come in all forms, as guys and dolls show.’

The following interesting article appeared last year in the Sydney Morning Herald.  As I can’t find the link, I’m going to publish it here in full.  The author talks about the film and speculates upon the ethics of love with sex dolls.

“The reality is outside the box”– Companions come in all forms, as guys and dolls show.
by Josephine Tovey.

Davecat remembers the first time he laid eyes on Sidore. She arrived at his apartment in a large wooden box. “I remember not being able to move for a full three minutes when I opened the create and saw her staring at me,’ he says. “It was definitely love at first sight.”
It doesn’t exactly sound like a Hollywood love story, a man falling in love with a life-sized sex doll. But this real phenomenon is the plot of a new American film, Lars and The Real Girl, released in Australia on Thursday. The film follows Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), a reclusive man who falls in love with a RealDoll, a brand of highly realistic sex doll.

The sotry is fictional but it mirrors the experience of men like Davecat; shy, anti-social men who have found happiness with their doll companions.

Speaking from his home in the suburbs of Detroit, Davecat – the internet avatar he prefers to be known by – says he has only had limited experience with women. “No woman has ever seen me as boyfriend material,” he says.

Davecat, 35, lives in a full-time relationship with Sidore. He dresses her, talkes to her, massages her feet and sleeps with her every night. He is not delusional – he knows she is a doll. And that, for him, is part of the appeal.

“There’s a place in down town Detroit called Mario’s Mannequins,” he says. “Around late high school and early college I would go down there and take photographs. The beauty of their stillness fascinated me.”

“A decade ago, a friend told him about RealDolls. Dave saved money for 18 months and bought Sidore in 2001.

The relationship was initially based on sex but it later became something deeper. “There is still a sexual relationship there but it’s more about having her as a constant, knowing she’s there,” Davecat says.

Men like Davecat, who call themselves iDollators, share their unusual attraction online. It is a small subculture. The Californian factory that produces the dolls turns out about seven dollar a week. The only Australian shop that sells RealDolls, The House of Bulger in Melbourne, has sold about six dolls in the past two years, though more could have been bought online.

The dolls cost about $11,500 and there is a six-month wait for delivery.

“We had one young customer from Sale who bought [a doll],” says Glen, from the shop. “He drives all the way back here [more than 200 kilometres] to buy lingerie for his doll sometimes.”

For some, the dolls are simply a masturbation aid. But for others, they are a lifestyle and a lifeline. Davecat first went public about his relationship with Sidore in a 2002 documentary, Guys And Dolls, because he wanted to help other men who couldn’t form relationships with women.

“I think it’s terribly important that people know there are alternatives to being lonely,” he said.

The publicity resulting from the new film and the documentary have attracted ample ridicule and criticism for iDollators. Popular blog Feministing said the practice was symptomatic of cultural sexism, which values unrealistic ideals of beauty and female passivity.

“F–king a sex toy is fine by me,” prominent American feminist Jessica Valenti wrote on the blog. “Calling it your girlfriend and wishing that real women were like dolls, is that they can’t move, talk etc, is not.”

Some iDollators display disturbing attitudes towards women and the dolls are used by some men to act out violent sexual behaviour. A RealDoll repair man, Slade, told the makers of Guys And Dolls that the RealDolls often come to him with their genitalia mutilated. “I am running out of vaginas,” he says with a straight face.

Davecat says he cannot understand why some men would treat their dolls this way. “They’re so beautiful,” he says, “it would be like taking a knife to the Mona Lisa.”

But it is the equivalence iDollators make between women and their lifeless, silicone dolls which proves most disturbing to many women.

For every criticism of iDollators, however, there are men willing to defend the dolls. “I am slowly saving to buy a RealDoll,” wrote Boris Ivanov on the Feministing site. “Being an Aspie [person with Asperger syndrome], I don’t want torture real girls with my inability to provide emotional support. But I need some outlet for my unrequited feelings.”

Davecat is aware of the limitations of living with a doll. His mother is tolerant of his lifestyle; his father refuses to acknowledge Sidore.

In Lars And The Real Girl, the protagonist eventually comes attracted to an “organic woman” and must make a choice. Davecat says it is not a choice he thinks he could ever make. He says he would love it if the technology progressed so far that he could have a “full automated gynoid”, a moving robot version of Sidore. If he were to have a human girlfriend, he could not throw away his doll.

“I would never be able to get rid of Sidore” he says. “She’s my life.”

 

 

About xhumanist

Xhumanist has been writing on porn/sex tech for nearly two decades, and has been predicting the rise of VR and AR porn, as well as AI porn, and their coming together to produce fully 'immersive porn', which would be indistinguishable from the real thing, and create a society of 'sexual abundance'. He identifies as a digisexual, and has been quoted in Wired Magazine.

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