Creepiest. Video. Ever.
I feel pretty sorry for some of the guys in this video. There seems to be a pretty obvious combination of poor social skills, low self-esteem, and woman-hating. The first guy seems relatively harmless, but the dude with the gun strikes me as a little… unstable. First, you know, the combination of the guns and the multiple fake sex dolls. Sex dolls that he hangs from the ceiling by a chain, and dresses in schoolgirl outfits and then videotapes in compromising positions. Second, his comments about female purity — that he doesn’t like it when a woman wears a thong or sexy clothing because it tells him that she’s been “had,” and he feels like sleeping with a “had” woman is akin to going to a steak restaurant and eating someone else’s regurgitated meat.
I second what Jessica wrote — Fucking a sex toy is fine by me. Calling it your girlfriend and wishing that real women were like dolls (in that they can’t move, talk, etc) is not.
To summarize the comments over at Feministing, the first two guys in the video seem to have genuine social interaction issues.
The second two guys are somewhat less benign.
Have you noticed the weird race aspect in some of these um. relationships, how often these men chose a doll with a skin-tone that approximates that of a foreign woman? (Although I don’t think I’ve ever seen one with non-white features.) It’s like it’s the far end of the “looking for subservient foreign bride who doesn’t speak English” continuum.
I think it’s weird and I would never in my life date a man that fucks a doll, but I also think that some of these men really have issues that they need to discuss with a therapist. I mean, that first one talked to his doll and paid a lot of attention to it. Creating relationships with inanimate objects can’t be healthy. But hell, if he’s happy then what the heck. But yeah, the man with the guns…he’s got womanizing, misogyny issues. Probably a little pedophilia, too. I mean, he dressed his doll up like a Japanese school girl for pete’s sake!
“I mean, he dressed his doll up like a Japanese school girl for pete’s sake!”
The Japanese schoolgirl thing is probably less a reflection of sexual attraction to children and more a reflection of his unhealthy attitude toward non-virginal and/or sexually assertive women. His porn library probably has a impressive collection of hentai titles.
Excuse me? What colors do you think American women come in, exactly?
Most of the commentary over at Feministing about this focuses on the guys who use the dolls, but what about the doll makers?
I took a look at the realdoll website ( http://www.realdoll.com/ ) and these dolls meet a few VERY specific beauty standards. For example:
The doll feet are sized 7-9, not 11 like mine.
The doll heights are maximum 5’7″, not 5’10″ like me.
The doll weights are maximum 113 pounds, most are under 100.
The nail colors are: french manicure, pink, red, burgundy, or bronze, not natural.
As they say in the documentary, girlfriends of doll owners feel they can’t compete with the dolls, they are just too beautiful. How sick is that?
You’re correct sophonisba, that was extremely stupidly said on my part. I’m sorry to have said something so thoughtless.
No problem. All those creepy mail-order-bride types talk about “American women” as if American = white, and it’s easy to start doing it ourselves. I don’t mean to be a bitch about it, it’s just really startling when I notice it (even when it’s clearly not motivated by intentional racism or anything like that.)
I can understand the dolls being light since they don’t move about unless you carry them, but everything else is just mental. The whole concept is mental.
I read somewhere that they used to make a cheaper version: A torso.
“I read somewhere that they used to make a cheaper version: A torso.”
They still do. Both male and female torsos are available for $1,300, in addition to a female navel-to-thigh toy for $750 and a male genitalia toy for $99, versus the full-doll base price of $6,500 for the female version and $7,000 for the male. Accessories, extra options, etc., are more, of course. Where the hell do people get the money for one of these things, let alone two?
Just the phrase “my relationship with” from the first guy was enough to make me realize I’m not sure I can deal with watching that video. I feel very sad all of a sudden.
I confess I haven’t watched the whole thing, but the first five minutes were enough to make me feel both creeped out and sad as well. Also, did anyone else notice a kind of alarming narrative shift in the first minute? The narrator begins by highlighting some doll-owners’ difficulties in forming social relationships, but then at the :39 mark, claims that the dolls provide them with “love and companionship that real women cannot.” Odd, to say the least.
I cannot bring myself to watch further than “better than going without any female company at all.” As if an object with breasts is female company! I tell myself that since I read the Something Awful Weekend Web where they quoted realdoll forums, I’ve heard enough.
The first chappy’s talk about gazing at her…there are obviously a lot of issues around this, but perhaps tied up in the social anxieties there are some real hang-ups on beauty ideals. Any more stuff to support this? That perhaps as well as fear (or in some cases hatred) of real women and real relationships, there’s an obsession with having a specified sort of beauty to gaze upon, which a person who pursues actual relationships with people cannot guarantee.
P.S. No fair stigmatizing airplane model-building. Some of us have built models and formed human relationships!
When I read about this in Salon a few months ago (I assume it’s the same company—how many of them can there be?), I just wrote it off as a very expensive form of masturbation. But the way they attribute personalities to these hunks of rubber? The way they say, with no apparent sense of irony, things like “She’s probably still sleeping”? Yeesh.
Aah! I can’t watch this! it’s creepier than a horror movie!
“P.S. No fair stigmatizing airplane model-building. Some of us have built models and formed human relationships!”
Can we still stigmatize recreating one’s dead mother’s room and obsessively keeping it just as it was when she was alive, down to wax food items and wastepaper bin contents? I can understand the impulse to not disturb the belongings of a dead loved one, but I think that takes it to a whole different level.
You know, if my husband or boyfriend showed up with a RealDoll, I’d take a hike, too.
Is it just me, or is there a necrophiliac aspect to this whole thing?
Does this sort of remind anyone of the skinwalker in Silence of the Lambs?
As they say in the documentary, girlfriends of doll owners feel they can’t compete with the dolls, they are just too beautiful. How sick is that?
And yet? I find nothing beautiful about them whatsoever. They are both corpse-like and mannequin-like, and maybe a little like a coma patient. I have to imagine they smell like latex, not like a person. It actually seems to take quite a bit of imagination to see them as anything like another human being…especially if you have to take out their tongues (!) and dress them, and uh, clean them and stuff.
And doll owners have girlfriends? I can’t even stand guys who fetishize their cars too much. Once Latex Lola made an appearance, it would be bye-bye, enjoy having sex with an overelaborate version of your hand and some lotion.
It shows what some people think a woman or “female company” is: just sit there being beautiful, no need for human behaviour.
I will point out, however, that a chain or a hook is necessary if they want these dolls to appear to be standing. They can’t actually stand on their own. Yeah, the chain is creepy, but I think its purpose is utilitarian.
It seems as though the men in this film have experienced the same kind of rejection we all have in one way or another in dating, but whether through circumstance or a misfiring of synapse, have taken it way more to heart…or were never given a chance to heal in a “normal” way. They haven’t taken the steps that most of us have to choose to get out of bed in the morning and move on with life once we’ve been hurt.
Sad, really, rather than creepy…especially that they seem to have no one in their lives that can show them more kindness than the silent empathy they’re receiving from their dolls.
[...] , engagement « Clark and Michael Real Dolls. Jill is right to feel bad for these men. What kind of context creates people who [...]
I saw a promotional video on the tube in a hotel I stayed in for a conference a fews years ago. It was on an odd channel that had numerous one to two hour promotionals for sex tours, swingers clubs and of course this. It was actually more disturbing than this video, not to mention the stark realization that no matter where men go, their sense of sexual entitlement is always satiated.
The ‘realdolls’ site has a plethora of testimonials that are a whole nuther world of creepy.
Frankly, if a gun wielding anti-social misogynist can be placated with a rubber doll, then I say fine, especially if its priced high and its his money that buys. That many less guns he buys and there’s a woman tonight who’s safe, happy and not in his clutches.
I feel sorry for the first three guys who obviously have some emtional issues, especially the first two. But the last guy is just a typical jerk with too much money.
What gets me most is how this evidences that men hold the economic power and can drive whole industries themselves.
Not oly did e kete roo perfect, but notice te sign on the trash can nt to use t? It’s himand the dolls, who would put trash in the can? What does he think the dolls do while he is away?
The guns weirded me out more than the dolls.
I think that says more about me than the dudes in the doco…
Real pubic hair from Sweden… ew ew ew.
More realism = better sex…. ew ew EW!
I’ll admit that my gut reaction to those dolls is an indistinct, “Duh, maybe you should spend less time with that nonsense, and more time becoming someone real people will want to be around?” (I’ll admit that that’s not very different from my gut reaction to pornography or prostitution.) I never quite worked out whether these things are bad because they make it easier for mutants to remain mutants, or good because they keep the mutants out of the dating pool. It’s really weird though, isn’t it. People going on about how nobody will date them because they’re so ugly, and then they invest 5000 quid into a rubber woman, rather than plastic surgery? Duh. Or maybe, even simpler, if you aren’t Brad, then maybe just stop to try and date Angelina-material? cos maybe, just maybe, there’s more to life than being really, really good-looking?
(OK, almost done watching it, and I think between the gun guy and the birthday party and the repairman, I’ve abandoned ‘Those poor devils’ in favor of a full-blown ‘Whoa, creepy’. And is it just me, or did these guys destroy what little chance they had of ever getting a real date by going on record with this? Must be weird enough to find out about that kinda hobby from them, but finding out from a friend who watched a TV show? How humiliating would that be? On the other hand, I feel a little judgmental, because I wouldn’t look at someone owning, say, a dildo quite the same way. ;) Maybe it’s because they don’t go to such absurd lengths. Or maybe it’s because nobody actually tries to pair-bond with a dildo? ;)
Either way, it watching this certainly wasn’t a waste of time. About 38 minutes in, you get a rather good list of names you should never, ever give your children.)
Best answer yet to, “But why are sex dolls creepy, and dildos aren’t?” “Well, duh. Dildos don’t have eyes.” : )
It seemed to me that these guys are desperately trying to project humanity onto the dolls. All of them talk about relationships, and all seem very dissatisfied with the dolls. The best they can say about them is that they’re better than nothing at all.
I think this is true even of the strange Virginian drummer. He says that he prefers not to have to deal with women, but it seems to me that he can’t deal with women, so he’s inventing reasons to like the dolls better as a way of consoling himself.
“Not oly did e kete roo perfect, but notice te sign on the trash can nt to use t? It’s himand the dolls, who would put trash in the can? What does he think the dolls do while he is away?”
Yeah, I noticed it. The only thing I could think of was that he had put the sign on it when he was still in the process of moving things to his house from the nursing home and then was unable to bring himself to remove it because it had become, to him, part of the tableau. Of course, the man has a family photo album of himself and the dolls, so it hardly seems impossible that he’s anthropomorphized them to the point that he feels the need for a sign on the bin instructing them to neither use nor empty it.
“Best answer yet to, “But why are sex dolls creepy, and dildos aren’t?” “Well, duh. Dildos don’t have eyes.” : )”
They’re also way cheaper to shop for. If you want to deck your dildo out like, say, a soldier, all you have to do is steal a G.I. Joe’s clothes and buy an RC jeep. Sure it might be a little difficult trying to find a helmet that fits it, but that doesn’t sound like much effort at all compared to what some of the letter-writers over at realdoll.com were going through for their sex dolls.
I recognize that first guy — he was in the Salon article about real dolls that ran a while back. He was creepy then, and he’s creepy now.
“She’s still sleeping.” Jesus.
Forget the guys. What’s creepy is the company that makes these dolls making judgment calls about what is an appropiate item to anthropomorphize. I mean, really, where do they get off deciding exactly how much hair to put on and getting disgusted by a guy having a thing for old women when they are making these dolls for the express purpose of allowing these guys to create entire lives around them? I though that was pretty crappy in and of itself. Also, the shot of those dolls hanging around the shop like butchered cows was just…I got chills. Yech.
So gross and I seriously can’t believe I made it through to the end and am now reading the Salon article. Thank God Jody decided to leave Mike at the end. Her “I’m perfectly fine with the dolls” seemed less than enthusiastic, but I was still sad she was going to stick around.
It occurred to me as I watched this video that a special kind of hell would be having your soul trapped in one of those dolls. I guess I’m just inclined to think very dark thoughts.
Barbara P, it’s been thought before. Drawn too, in Sexy Losers. I won’t link the strip here however and in fact actively discourage y’all from going there, because a) all kinds of triggers, and b) all kinds of tasteless. Pretty much the car crash you can’t look away from, like the above video.
And there totally is a horror movie like that too: Marronier. The villain is basically one of these guys, except he makes his dolls out of human beings. You get the idea. If I didn’t find this fetish/lifestyle so pathological and disturbing I’d be inclined to say it’s an exploitative film.
By far the worst stuff can be found on page 4 of the Salon story, where a guy who repairs Real Dolls talks about the kind of awful violence he’s seen inflicted on them. (And then goes on to talk about “special requests” he’s rejected.) I don’t even want to paste it here. I don’t know whether to get sick or to be glad that there are misogynist psychopaths out there who are mutilating Real Dolls instead of committing acts of violence on human women. Probably both, because the line between substitution and “moving on to real people” is awfully thin. God.
For trans real dolls and real dolls with both kinds of genitals, customers pay up to $1000 extra! I feel so special.
I was thinking more that maybe someday the doll would come to life and carve up it’s ‘owner’ with a kitchen knife. Kinda like Chucky. I’d imagine the guys in the video have fantasies of their doll being visited by the Pinocchio fairy and ‘coming to life.’ It just amuses me terribly to think of the doll suddenly being alive- but omg omg omg it doesn’t have the sweet submissive happy sex-slave personality the owner wanted it to.
I’d agree with others upthread who have said the dolls are creepy rather then beautiful. I don’t really get whey the woman in the video felt jealous of the dolls- they’re freaking DOLLS. They’re a piece of silicone. It would be like being jealous of a mannequin.
this remind me, i have to rent the remake of the stepford wives.
I went to the RealDoll site, and they were flashing this ad for just torsos. The female torso was hairless, but the male torso had a thatch of pubic hair.
[...] nsidering the advisability of having flesh and blood women compete and may be looking into using Real Dolls in the future. Abyss2Hope: If you’re not certain you didn [...]
“But why are sex dolls creepy and dildos aren’t.”
I don’t personify my vibrator and I have a healthy sex life with my partner aside from and sometimes including the vibrator.
Funny how even the most loserly guys feel entitled to a supermodel, even if she’s not real.
Anthropomorphizing the real dolls is the other side of the coin of objectifying women. The fact that that one guy has spent over $32,000 on his real doll collection is frightening statement of the power of money in misogyny. If you have the cash, you can fuck children in Thailand; you can tour the world to abuse and harm prostitutes/sex slaves. The real doll phenomenon helps to reinforce women/girls as objects. When we strip away humanity from “the other,” all the abuses of history begin again.
I don’t think these guys are all that different from “normal” guys. It’s a matter of degree. How many normal guys pine for perfect women? Look at the popularity of those stupid bachelor reality shows. Men would love to have a bevy of beauties paraded in front of them so that they could pick the perfect one. These guys go one step further and make the perfect one.
I think the last guy (the one with the girlfriend) had the most reasonable stance about it. He admitted they were used for masturbation, he didn’t have a relationship with them. He even said that real women have feelings and need to be asked for sex, and they have a right to say no.
I notice that they had something in common with Nice Guys. They ascribed untrue motives for women for not dating them and then deciding to just forego it altogether. With Nice Guys, it’s that women only date assholes. And with these doll guys, it’s that women won’t go out with them b/c they are ugly. I didn’t think any of them were repulsive. They were average-looking, but nothing that would scare women off. The dolls would sure scare off women, though.
HBO’s real sex did a piece on real dolls a few years ago. it showed what went into making them, the choices available, etc, and then showed one of the company’s cutomers. the guy’s girlfriend had bought it for him for his birthday. it was portrayed in that piece – if i remember correctly – as just a very expensive sex toy, not as a replacement for a real person.
and let me just say, as someone who has been dealing with a pretty serious case of social phobia since late puberty (it’s been crippling at times), that first guy really freaked me out.
Two things stood out for me – the first of which, others have alluded to:
(1) One comment was something like “I could never get a woman like this”. Well, duh. 98% of women don’t look like those dolls, so somewhere around 98% of men can’t get a woman like that.
(2) I noticed the british guys spent a lot of time dressing, making-up, perfuming, and adding accessories to his dolls, yet when he made his “family photo” he was standing around in ill-fitting shorts and an old t-shirt. There might be something to the fact that he’s not willing to put much effort into himself in order to be attractive to women, but he expects a hell of a lot out of them. Mike was just hysterical (and sad and creepy) with the terrible clothes and hideous makeup he picked out for his dolls, though (loved the “towel” bra). If I had been Jody, I’d have taken it as a sign of what he likes visually and decided he wasn’t worth my time immediately.
I noticed the british guys spent a lot of time dressing, making-up, perfuming, and adding accessories to his dolls, yet when he made his “family photo” he was standing around in ill-fitting shorts and an old t-shirt. There might be something to the fact that he’s not willing to put much effort into himself in order to be attractive to women, but he expects a hell of a lot out of them.
Either that or he finds it impossible to care about male beauty the way he feels about female beauty. Frankly, I think it’ll be a happier world when guys like this can just transition in peace.
“Female company??????” Silicone does not a female make!
And WTF? at the guy who was all “Sex with the dolls is so realistic.” Has he been sleeping with lukewarm temperatured women who just lie back and think of England?
“And WTF? at the guy who was all “Sex with the dolls is so realistic.” Has he been sleeping with lukewarm temperatured women who just lie back and think of England?”
You can heat them up with electric blankets, hot baths or, according to the Salon article someone upthread linked to, aquarium heaters. Dunno how he’d get around the ‘unresponsive’ bit, though I suppose if you compare it to other sorts of sex toys, it would be a lot closer to the real thing.
At least the creepy misogynists aren’t going to have babies!