What is 'real?'

Yet again, I swear I wrote about this before, but I can't seem to find the article anywhere.
So here it is now:

At some point toward the end of this past Project Runway season (that's how I gauge time, by the way), four of my friends all got together at a friend's house to watch a couple recorded episodes. Once they were over, the host suggested we watch another program he had recorded, but not seen yet, called "Guys and Dolls."

It was a very serious, if often funny, documentary about four men who own what are called Real Dolls--poseable sex dolls made in California that cost between $6500 and $10,000. These dolls not only have mouths--they have tongues! Real hair, huge breasts, the ability to hold a lifelike body temperature if submerged in warm water for a while...

The things these four men say, the women they date, the trip into their psyches...this documentary is priceless.


As a man with a sex drive stuck in sixth gear, it is hard to watch this movie and not feel some kind of shared guilt for what these four creepy men feel they need to do to fulfill their sexual urges. I mean, they're men. They get horny. They want to fuck and they don't want to be bothered with pleasantries, don't want to be stalled by refusals, don't want to have to settle for ugly fat women, don't want to resort to questionable prostitutes.

Don't get me wrong--there is a gaping, bottomless crevasse between me and these guys, since I would never allow myself to stoop so low as to have sex with a doll (unless it would somehow save the world or the life of a loved one; I would make that sacrifice). But I understand that not everybody has the standards/drive that I have and, more importantly, I understand where they're coming from. I understand their need to quench those urges, how frustrating it would be if you could never get a woman. I mean, imagine if you were 30 years old and you had never had sex. You've been bursting at the seams since you were 13 years old, but no woman ever even looks at you. Or maybe a couple women do, but they weigh 400 pounds and smell like Cracker Barrel Spreadable Cheese and probably have herpes from some skeezy, truck drivin' Johnny Herpeseed. What would you do?

Some guys would lower their standards and tie one on with the toothless fatties. Some guys would become serial rapists. Some guys would join eHarmony and find a boring Yang for their Yin. Some guys would save up for 11 months out of the year and spend the month of December in Bangkok sex clubs. Some guys would decide they either need to buy a sex doll or cut their balls off and, with that in mind, I think these fellas chose the more harmless of the two options.

In addition to the sex, however, there is an even creepier need being fulfilled by these dolls--companionship. Not all the featured customers, but at least two that I can remember, actually treat these dolls as if they are real women. They take them to the park, they have pictures of themselves together, they act as if the dolls have feelings. They change their faces--literally.


These dolls come with removable, interchangeable faces--sleeping face, awake face, happy face, fuck-me-in-the-face face, etc. They put make-up on them, brush their hair...like I said--it's creepy. But I can't look away.

My favorite thing about this documentary, as far as stylistic choices go, is that the breasts and vaginas of the Real Dolls were blurred out in every shot. Blurred out! But they're not even real!?!

I wonder if this was in the original BBC broadcast, or merely a function of it playing on American television. Either way, the interesting thing about this is that the blurry patches lend a touch of humanity to the already fairly-lifelike dolls. It is as if the director wanted to protect their feelings, to spare them the embarrassment of having their naughty bits on display for all to see.

Interested in watching it?

Unbelievably, I just found the entire 46-minute BBC program available online, for free.
You need to watch it. Trust me--it is riveting. And I guarantee you will watch it at least until the point where my friends and I all almost threw up and turned it off. But we made it pretty damn far along.

In fact, I'm gonna try again right now. I can't stop myself!!!