A Quotation, to re-humanize us all a bit.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. ~C. S. Lewis

I don't often quote Lewis, but that, right there, pretty much nails what's so off-putting about those 'extreme outliers' who don't merely use RealDolls as playthings, but overinvest in them as an alternative to relationships with people--or who earnestly or angrily explain that they don't need a relationship, they have a vibrator/sleeve/really great porn.

(Though I confess I still believe Data, were he real and exactly as written, would have a soul. And so would Night.)

Watching myself watch Absolute Boyfriend

So I've watched the first two episodes of Absolute Boyfriend, and aside from the cloying overblown 'cuteness' of the heroine, my immediate first reaction was to think her heartless for failing to appreciate Night--I mean, I teared up, embarrassingly enough, over his selflessly working to earn money he knew she wanted (when in fact she wanted it so she could settle the bill and send him back to the factory to be dismembered). Such pathos. I felt all sorry for him and angry at her (just as the show quite obviously intended).

And then, of course, close on the heels of that reaction I felt a surge of annoyance with myself, for being so easily jerked around by pop culture--and for being so pathetically nice that I'm disliking a character for failing to be kind enough to a robot. I mean really. Honestly, self: that chronic case of Nice Girl Syndrome may need treatment. They probably make a pill for this, or a cream.

But why do I react that way? Either it's a basic part of my nature, or possibly of human nature, to be kind to and take pity on the creatures like Night: selfless Nice Guy, doomed to be in love and also to be a giant clueless nuisance. Or perhaps that isn't nature at all, it's insidious indoctrination, and what I need is to reject it or recover from it or something, while achieving a thicker skin and a little more self-protective Ability To Not Care.

And I have friend-sets on both sides of that argument, willing to step up and praise me for kindness or else tell me I'm too kind, as they see fit.

Although now that I've blithered about it at length, I think there's a third interpretation: both the 'be kind to Nice Guys' and 'stomp on Nice Guys and be kind to yourself' messages are culturally conditioned exaggerations of natural impulses. Which explains why I (and I cannot be alone here) have such a bad case of Nice Girl Syndrome--I got that message earliest, I think, and most often--but which doesn't, really, help with finding a balance between the two.

Still not a Real Doll post.

Sasha Bunny doesn't count as a RealDoll, because it's clearly not real.
What's not clear is who that's being marketed at. Yes, I can guess at uses for it, but...probably none you want me elaborating on.

How about a Virtual Boyfriend to text message you? No?

Okay, how about SergioBoyfriend to...I don't even know what that thing is for. It does make every real man you'll ever meet in your life look more attractive by comparison, though, so there's that.

Ooh, Absolute Boyfriend. Okay, I have to say it: Night is popular enough that again I'm left wondering, why are the RealDolls and up-and-coming robotics all aimed at men? Is it just that women have less disposable income, or have the manufacturers never noticed how many women adored Data, or what?

I swear, after this post I will try to shut up about Real Dolls for a while.

Of course, those of you with strong sanity-preservation instincts will know to immediately start worrying about what I might post next. >:D

So I've been reading the feministing discussion of ages past about whether Real Doll usage can be compared to vibrators. And I do understand that most vibrators don't look exactly like a penis, but...well, leaving aside the men who pretend their dolls are their girlfriends (and I agree that that's more than a little maladjusted), surely most of the doll-users are, more or less, just using them as sex toys or for imaginative play? I mean, the guys in the documentaries are probably on the far end of a bell curve--there could easily be lots of men who've used these toys as toys and who were also sane enough not to want to discuss that on film. And even the guys in the docs could have been edited for maximum effect; maybe there were clear statements of, "I like to pretend that..." which got edited out.

I know the dolls are meant to look human, and vibrators aren't, but to me that mostly just suggests one of two things:

1) The people using the dolls lack the imagination required to use, say, a vibrator, so they need more verisimilitude in their sex toys (and if you don't believe that's possible, go talk to anyone with experience as a phone-sex operator; they'll tell you, straight out, that some people are genuinely too unimaginative/uncreative to fantasize without help),

or else

2) Men simply have larger disposable incomes than women, so they can afford bigger and more elaborate toys. I mean, seriously: these things* cost around seven thousand USD each. You'd have to have a significant amount of cash in your entertainment budget to be able to afford that. Absolute Boyfriends don't come cheap.

I just don't see a significant difference in behaviour between using one 'thing' for sexual gratification instead of another. And while I agree completely that there is something hideously and alarmingly sexist about some of the remarks made by the iDollators, well: I've heard some pretty damned dehumanizing, sexist remarks made by women, in the context of comparing men and vibrators, too.


*I've read a rumour (and no, you don't want to know WHERE I've read it) that Abyss are taking suggestions for the name of the new male RealDoll. My favourite suggestion: Gerard. Seriously.