Comments Elsewhere

Hersehele: “If this is these peoples’ sexual fantasy — if they get off on violent mutilation — it is orders of magnitude better that they get dolls for that purpose, and stay far the hell away from real women.”

Of course it is better to do creepy things or brutal and violent things to a realistic-looking doll than it is to do them to a real woman. But (1) just managing to be better than a rapist or serial killer is not enough to guarantee that you’re not a creep; and (2) I don’t know what evidence, if any, you have for the implicit claim that men who indulge in violent or pedophiliac fantasies with RealDolls will substitute that for acting out, or trying to act out, violent or pedophiliac desires on real people. This is a standard argument that you get from porn-liberals and prostitution-liberals, but the number of rapists, serial killers, and pedophiles in the real world who use violent pornography or child pornography to “prime” themselves (and, in the case of pedophiles, often to groom and then control their victims), and the number who begin their careers by using and attacking women in prostitution, ought to at least make you pause before suggesting this kind of substitution theory.

I’d be glad, personally, to make any kind of RealDoll that any man wants for any purpose at all, if I could make it a condition of ownership that the new owner had to go and live on a private island of my choice in the South Pacific, where he could enjoy the RealDoll to the end of his days but would never come into contact with human beings besides his fellow RealDoll Islanders. Barring that, though, I have trouble regarding this as obviously positive.

Vivid: “Why is it that if a man does not want or can’t have a relationship with a real woman, he must hate them? Maybe he simply doesn’t want the bother, because he doesn’t think it is worth the effort?”

Because it suggests that, at best (1) he thinks of his sexuality as a matter of “release” for an undifferentiated appetite, (2) thinks of intimacy with a a real woman as merely “bother” or “effort” that you have to go through in order to get that “release,” and (3) that therefore he prefers a lifeless tube for the purposes of “sex” that’s hard to differentiate, in any relevant respect, from necrophilia. If a man thinks that way, I’d certainly rather that he do it with a doll than with a real woman (but see above on substitution theories); but that doesn’t keep me from thinking that his attitude towards women, and towards sex, is profoundly creepy and anti-woman — indeed, anti-human.