You Could Have It So Much Better With...Anybody

Reprinted from Salon:

Just like a woman
Thousands of men are shelling out $6,500 for hyper-realistic dolls that answer all their needs -- and don't talk back.

By Meghan Laslocky

Oct. 11, 2005 | Davecat keeps a picture of his girlfriend in his wallet. She's pretty, with long black hair, an alluring mole under her left eye, and glossy red lipstick. Her sheer tank top shows off her full breasts and the hoop through her left nipple.

Ask Davecat about Sidore -- pronounced She-doh-ray -- and he'll tell you she's everything that turns him on: beautiful, loyal, a great listener. Si-chan, as he affectionately calls her, is half British, half Japanese, which is nice because he's always had a thing for both British and Japanese culture. Even their clothing style and taste in music is simpatico -- they're both Goths.

Like many born in the sun sign Cancer, Sidore is a homebody, but then, she couldn't leave the comfort of the bed she shares with Davecat even if she wanted to because Sidore is a 100-pound solid silicone Real Doll.

Go ahead. Flinch at the notion of a man having sex with an imitation woman and classify him: lonely loser. Pathological creep. Misogynist. Potential rapist. Sicko. True enough, some men who have sex with Real Dolls are creepy, the kind of guys you wouldn't want to be alone with. But not all. Many are simply lonely -- some tragically so. Others are disfigured or infirm. Some are oddly sweet, like Davecat, for whom a Real Doll is a "teddy bear with benefits." And others proclaim their normalcy and defend their Real Dolls as no different than a 3-D version of a Playboy centerfold.

Many doll lovers -- or "iDollators," as some of them call themselves -- participate in a confusing online subculture where the lines between art and pornography, the ludicrous and the tender, and fantasy and fetishism blur like watercolors. Spend time talking to Real Doll aficionados as I have over the past year, and you come to understand that behind every Real Doll is a man with a reason.

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Sidore and her plastic sisters are like Barbies dosed with growth hormones and plumbed with orifices (three). While there are other brands of deluxe love dolls, dolls like Sidore are considered head and breasts above their competitors because of their quality and realism. At the Real Doll Web site you can choose among nine body types, 14 faces, five skin tones, six eye colors, a palette of makeup colors, 10 wigs, and three different pubic hair styles. Save your pennies, and for $6,499 plus shipping, you can have your very own synthetic woman sent directly to your home.

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Thirty-two-year-old Davecat is no basement perv. Garrulous and imaginative, he affects a British manner that comes across in e-mails, on his Web site, and in the word choices -- "arse," "bloke," "fecking" -- he uses in our many telephone conversations. Davecat is African-American, lives in Detroit, and is studying to become a court reporter.

When Davecat was a child in a department store, his mother emerged from a dressing room to find him talking to a mannequin who was wearing a short tennis skirt. "I was trying to chat her up," he says. "I remember the beauty of her stillness." With Sidore, he's gotten past just chatting: "I like having her in bed beside me, holding her, cuddling her," he tells me. "I like to sleep with my doll. I'll be blunt: She's a girlfriend."
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Davecat admits that Si-chan's personality is not without flaws. He thinks she might be manic-depressive because she's "relentlessly perky at times" but also, given the amount of time she spends in bed, prone to narcolepsy and laziness. But generally, she doesn't disappoint. Davecat imagines that she's open-minded, a bit sarcastic, an artistic intellectual who, were she real, would walk around with Sylvia Plath books under her arm and go out drinking and dancing with her girlfriends. In short, Si-chan is a girl who Davecat thinks he could never meet. "If I were to go to a bar and try some pick-up lines, the chances of coming home with someone like her are highly unlikely," he says. "No real woman seems to think I'm good enough for them."

Aside from Sidore, Davecat has never officially dated anyone. He compares his interaction with women to a bodily reaction, something over which he has no control, much as he wishes that he could meet a woman who breathes. "People who are allergic to roses can enjoy artificial roses," he says. "In the same way, artificial women serve the same purpose for men who are, in whatever way, allergic to real women."

Let this be a reminder to my boys out there: being single isn't a kiss of death, providing you keep your dignity and wit at some point.

Besides, once I get those Jolie clones going after my ascension to the Presidency in '16, I'll be running way better software than these guys.