As a marketing manager QIDOLL, I am excited to introce the history of sex doll to you guys.
There’s also plenty of speculation about the difference between men and women’s masturbation styles. In his 1936 book Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the English psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis wrote that men are more visual, while women are more imaginative and rely more on their sense of touch. Both Smithand McCullen reiterated this conventional wisdom, and, allowing for individual differences, it seems like a plausible enough explanation for why most dolls,like most porn, are made with men’s interests in mind. Most women care mainly about the actual tactile sensation, while men like things to look real, the thinking goes. When a man is getting it on with a asian sex doll, especially a modern one with its silicone skin and almost-human expression, it’s easier for him to pretend it wants him back.
There are some women who buy female dolls. But McCullen says many of them purchase the realistic sex doll with a male partner—or with the intention of dressing the mup and enjoying them as fashion dolls. “A lot of women like the dolls because they’re like life-size Barbies,” he says. Barbara, a 61-year-old small business owner from California, is one of the few women involved in the community. She says she first heard about the dolls through a news story about people who were using them to cheat their way into carpool lanes. Then she saw Dave cat on the TLC show My Strange Addiction, got in touch, and found him “extremely welcoming.” The community as a whole embraces female members, despite being mostly male, she says.
Barbara and her husband Own four dolls, which she says they use only for photography, though she has “not the slightest objection to people who use them for their ‘intended purpose.'” “Feminists seem to be totally horrified by these dolls, which puzzles me, as Iam a feminist,” Barbara told me in an email. “They say that the dolls ‘objectify’ women because they are so beautiful that real women cannot hope to compete with them on the basis of looks.”
Most feminists, however, probably aren’t objecting because they’re worried about entering into a beauty competition with the bbw sex doll. Complaints about objectification centered on men who treat women as objects—disregarding their agency or feelings and viewing them as mere tools to be used for selfish ends.Sex dolls are objects; they’re also, critically, objects you can own. And these objects you can own are shaped, almost all of the time, like women.
In her Ph.D. dissertation, Moya questions why there is something uniquely perverse about owning a sex doll. As she puts it, “A better spatula does not in spire lengthy monologues about human alienation and the reifying effects of technological mechanization on our lifestyles.” Sexuality is an appetite, not unlike hunger, but we treat the devices used to satisfy that appetite differently. If the doll owners aren’t hurting anyone, why should we condemn something that is basically just fancy masturbation?
But sex dolls do retain something of an ick-factor, even as vibrators and other sex toys have become more mainstream. That’s because the dolls are tied up with questions about gender and power in a way that spatulas(and even vibrators) are not.According to Smith, any sort of non-reproductive sexual behavior has historically been seen as perverse. These days, though, many people are okay with sex that isn’t reproductive. We’re less okay with emotional attachments that aren’t socially productive, and so it seems the distaste is strongest for the small subset of men who consider themselves to be in romantic relationships with their dolls, rather than just using them for sex. We expect a relationship to involve mutual consent, a kind of equality and reciprocity that is impossible with a doll. By its very nature, the relationship is one-sided—at eeter-totter with only one person sitting on it.
But realistic dolls often do inspire real affection, and even devotion. Some men assign personalities and preferences to the dolls they design (Dave cat’s dolls even have Twitter accounts), and they talk about them as one would a live partner. “There is genuine empathy here,” Smith writes, “what the Germans call Einfurlung, an entering into the feelings of an other.”
A love for one’s own creation, though, is also, in a way, self-love, or narcissism. “This is why so much of it has to do with masturbation,” Smith says. “These things are not unconnected.”
Narcissistic or not, that attachment can become isolating. Smith points out that, especially in the age of technology, intimate relationships with objects aren’t so uncommon. “Think about the way you use your iPhone,” he says. “You hold it, and you stroke it, and you scroll. You’re holding it to your ear as we speak. It’s kind of a part of you. It’s an extension of you.” But things are different when the object is human-shaped and the relationship is sexual. Owning a doll can have “social and psychological consequences for men who want to develop these intimate and erotic relationships with an in animate human form. I don’t want to pathologize anyone, but I think there’s a danger around the way that processes like that objectify men’s relationships with themselves in a way that restricts an authentic emotional intelligence.” Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(mythology)
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Regnault
Blog recommendation:
