Why Can't Men Play With Sex Dolls? (Or, Why isn't MY sex-toy empowering?)

Have you ever read or heard an account of a man going to a porno shop to buy himself his very first Fleshlight (NSFW)? Was it a powerful experience that left him flush with confidence? Did he walk out of that porno shop with a brown paper bag and the swagger of independence?

Not much a realistic narrative is it? Okay, try this one on for size: a mouth-breather in a heavy overcoat slouches into Babylon to a chorus of fake moans echoing from the jerk-off booths where a mustached man idles against his spunk-mop. Pit-stained and nervous, the man enters the shop, buys his Fleshlight, averting his eyes from the bored punk chick who takes his money as if it expects to be sticky, and slinks out of the store and into the night to watch ANAL ANNIHILATION 3: The Quickening in his dingy studio apartment.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Contrast with this:

The staff members who work at the store left me pulsating with a sense of sexual liberation, feeling that there was no shame in any interest or fetish that I might have locked away. The saleswoman lead me around Babeland describing different products, asking me if I liked anal stimulation as casually as an employee at Banana Republic would ask if I want a rewards card. With each object she offered, she gave an informative explanation coupled with an open understanding of the good it can bring into people’s lives. Having a bizarre-looking stick described to me as if it were a family photograph or beloved tchotchke transformed the process into something much more normal and inviting.

“If you treat something as your ugly toy, then you will think it is ugly and never want to use it,” she explained and I realized how true that was. Before coming into the store, part of me looked at toys and fetishes in a negative light, but I was so wrong. What started off as a trip to buy a vibrator turned into a realization that everyone has a different way of pleasing themselves and that knowing what mine is will only make my life better.

If only my masturbatory habits were so life affirming!

A funny thing happens when you try and talk about sex toys and men. Masturbation is an assumed habits but if you use something like a plastic poon-tang, you are an aberration-- a real man goes out and gets laid; you want sex toy, buy a Mustang.

A dildo is a form of independence from male dependence; a fleshlight is a loser's security blanket. What's worse if it you add the notorious Real Doll to the equation:

Just ask Salon:

For a cool $5,000, scrubs of all shapes and sizes can obtain unlimited access to all three orifices on a bootilicious bombshell fashioned from high-grade silicone flesh.

Sure, your local porn palace offers any number of disembodied vaginas sculpted after those of adult film vixens, and the plastic blow-up doll has been around for decades. And Abyss Creations has a number of competitors: Triple-X-Sextoys, for instance, offers a silicone love doll modeled after pornstress Chasey Lain for $259.

But Realdoll is the Cadillac of the club. With five anatomically correct body types; nine head styles, including a Japanese cutie named Mai; and a wide choice of characteristics including eye and hair colors as well as breast size, the company has gone a long way toward fulfilling the promise of that prescient 1975 flick, "The Stepford Wives." You know, the one where a cabal of yupper-crust executives take over a Connecticut town and replace their wives with oversexed androids who dig housework.

Well damn.... buy a dildo and it's rainbows, lolly-pops and You-Go-Girls rolled up in plastic phallic form; buy a Real Doll, it's a patriarchal conspiracy.

Continued:

Crikey, what have we come to? After all, $5,000 can buy a lot of trips to the local brothel for sex with an actual woman, not a lifeless puppet. Apparently some guys would rather own a trailer than rent a penthouse.

Hear that, ladies? Why buy a ninety dollar vibrator when you can go out, get drunk and fuck a random dude in your local dive bar? Ahem. Excuse me: I mean, fellas, why buy a sex toy when you can fuck a hooker? Ladies? Carry on.

Well, screw the biased (and male) writer of this article-- Where's The Pants is about the feminist/masculine conversation; what does a feminist scholar have to say about this?

"Obviously, I don't think it'll make women obsolete," says M.C. Sungaila, an attorney and writer in Southern California specializing in feminist issues. "But reducing a woman to an inanimate object in order to relate to her in the most intimate way is kind of disturbing."

Sungaila grants that individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives but objects to Realdolls' larger message.

"Knowing that it's out there and that somebody thought this was a good idea -- to make money off the complete objectification of women -- is discomforting to say the least," comments Sungaila.

You'd think Sungaila never Jilled-off with a Feeldoe (and I find myself wondering whether, if she did, was it to Martin Luther King speeches and Betty Friedan Audiobooks?).

I believe we've moved on from the antiqued image of the 70s, second-wave feminist and the "All Sex Is Rape" strawman, but there is a lingering cultural threat from male sexuality-- specifically, male masturbatory habits.

In the use of porn, we reduce women to objects- we dehumanize; in the use of sex dolls, we only seek to perfect the patriarchal project, with perfectly submissive, perfectly docile sex holes in vaguely feminine shapes.

We shoulder the guilt of the long-standing stereotype that man is a beast with a penis and woman is a complex work of art: remove the penis from a man, you have safe sexuality; remove the personality from a female, you get pale imitation.

I don't solely blame the old-thinking feminists for this perception: no, I blame the lingering sexist attitudes of men for most of the issue.

Women are the competition and the prize. A woman's value is in her vagina and a male's virility is in how much value he's accrued in the plunder of said vaginas. If a male uses bought and paid for, toy vaginas... well, the question becomes, is he a real man? It is aacceptable for a man to remove himself from the competition for sex?

Ask most men and the answer is no: refusing the compete is to admit failure. The very definition of "Loser."

I recognize that I come at this from a male perspective: if you ask a woman about her objection to the idea of realistic sex dolls (as I've gathered from the comments sections of these various articles), the question then becomes one of relationships.

Can a man who has invested his sexuality in a silicon girl with a fixed smile ever be emotionally rehabilitated? And if one has voluntary chosen to "love a synthetic human", are they mentally disturbed and in need of psychiatric help?

The (full) documentary, Guys And Dolls, delves into the lives of men who have used these toys to varying degrees and purposes: we have Davecat who considers himself on the forefront of a new kind of sexuality, "Organiks" loving "Synthetiks"; we have Everette, the photographer who has found his perfect subjects; Gordon, the liver-faced, angry misogynist loser we've come to expect. And then we have Michael, who uses his 6 Real Dolls the way a woman would use a variety of vibrators and sex-toys-- something to hold him over until he finds himself a real, flesh and blood woman.

Michael finds his woman, Jody, someone he openly talks about on camera as "the one." She knows he has a secret and it bothers her that he won't share. So he shows her his doll collection. On his birthday.

She leaves him a week later. So much for honesty....

Two of these men are simply lonely; one has a fetish; the last is someone you wouldn't want in the gene-pool anyway.

What's wrong with these men? They're human.

They have problems. They have idiosyncrasies. They don't fit in very well. Or they're just plain disgusting. And most well-adjusted women wouldn't give them the time of day.

To quote Everette, "There are worse things in life than living with dolls, really. Like living alone."

So why shouldn't disgusting people be happy too? Is it so wrong to be QuirkyAlone?

It all comes back to a piece of M.C. Sanguila's quote: "individuals have the right to pursue their own fantasy lives," full-stop.

Part of sexuality is objectification: it is breasts and abs and detachable penises.

Part of modernity is isolation: the disintegration of traditional communal ties, the re-ordering of society along more niche, individualist lines.

Industrial societies are becoming more physically alone, while increasing their interactions through objects. Flirting through texts, selecting dates from the content of their essays, falling in love through font.

That is modernity. Get used to it.

So if a girl can name her dildo Long John Silver and still find herself, if she so chooses, a mate-- why can't John screw his Real Doll until the right Jane comes along? Or not?

Why can't men play with dolls?

Desperate House Husbands.

Perhaps the problem with the modern woman is that, like the modern man, she's not so sure she wants to be modern. And when she does, she may not want to be fair about it. Perhaps the problem with relationship is that modern equality is a thoroughly defensive.

Take Karen Karbo's article in the NYT's "Modern Love" feature: the entire feature is about how she found herself an "accidental breadwinner"-- and ended up resenting it and her S.O's (tongue-in-cheek, she says she couldn't imagine being her mother, dusting on Tuesdays, etc, then goes on to say she wanted her "househusband" to dust on Tuesdays, etc.. and give the kids more than cereal for breakfast).

It's all standard-issue role reversal: as the "wife" now, he must take on the traditional gender roles women have been trying to free themselves from for years, follow a work-like schedule of the routine tasks June Clever would have done. Not to say he shouldn't be playing video games, but there's a reason that Soap Operas existed: you can't be cleaning all the time. And if you were expected to, you wouldn't be a house-wife, you'd be a slave.

But Karbo doesn't get juicy until she talks about her leaving a relationship and the financial troubles it represents...

It’s not just a problem from my mother’s era. Several years ago, a friend of mine decided she’d had enough of her arts administrator job. With the support of her husband, who worked somewhat unhappily as a doctor, she quit with the idea of taking a year off to decide what she wanted to do. The year slid into two, then three. She walked her dogs, attended yoga classes. Then her life became a third-rate show on basic cable: she discovered her husband was having an affair with a nurse, and worse, when she confronted him, he said he wasn’t going to stop.

My friend was devastated. She knew she had to get out but couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. I imagined that she was afraid to be alone, that she would miss her husband’s companionship. “There’s always Match.com,” I said, trying to console her.
She snorted. “It’s not that. I don’t have a job, and I don’t think I could get a job that would pay enough.”

Enough to live in the way she had become accustomed, she meant.

They are still married.

Poor thing. Cheated on by some rotten shlub, having laid around, done yoga and ate bon-bons all day. She couldn't leave the bastard, though-- she's too accustomed to that good living.

Of course, when the tables are turned, after her own house-husband played too much Halo....

When we divorced, he wanted alimony, child support and the house — the house that was purchased with my money, in my name. During one of our last conversations, I wept with incomprehension. He wanted my house? Whatever happened to the way people divorce in the movies, where the husband packs a bag and moves into a sad hotel, leaving his wife (whom he supported) in the house?

The Cuddle Bum said that if I insisted on leaving him, he had no choice but to play hardball. (In response, I stepped up my freelancing work and got a better lawyer, who spun things into my favor quite nicely. Don’t talk to me about hardball.)

So the heroine wins again-- she gets herself the freedom from a relationship, "wins" the divorce by keeping the house (again, Karbo is very knowingly tongue-in-cheek, here).

What's depressing is where Karbo ends up: in a thoroughly litigated relationship, with seperate budgets and an almost renterly attitude. Her current beau pays his share of the bills on the 15th, while Karbo pays for herself and her daughter.

Is this the direction of the modern relationship? separate beds, separate budgets, separate lives?

In moving towards a state of equality, it seems that relationships of equals mean equally on-guard. A shame, but it's meant to be.

I've waited a long time to even consider the possibility of marriage, for this very reason: while I have, in the past, thought a relationship might be "forever" I couldn't get over the fact that marriage is a litigative trap-- a legal concept, masquerading as a rite of love. My partner (read: girlfriend) at the time wanted marriage and specifically for the security it provided.

For her: security.

For me: utter dependence and debt.

Is the only way to have a long-lasting relationship the clearly delineated Karbo way?

The day Jim and I moved in together, I gave him a formal accounting of how much our monthly nut would be; he would pay for himself, and I would pay for my daughter and me. Since then, he has written me a check for his portion on the 15th of every month. Sometimes he buys the groceries, and sometimes I do. But he always pays for both of us when we go to the movies, and spends lavishly on buttered popcorn and Milk Duds. I am always touched by this.

I couldn't imagine "togetherness" more romantic.

But, I suppose, what other choice do we have? It's slavery, independence or nothing, it seems.

Makes me wonder how the communist's fucked.