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Real Dolls: Love in the Age of Silicone Meghan Laslocky -- 10/17/2005  [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ][ 8 ][ 9 ][ 10 ][ 11 ][ 12 ]Just this winter, Louise, Caroline’s sister, has joined Caroline and Rebecca to round out what Everhard calls his harem. Right after he ordered Louise from Abyss, he says he bought a twelve-inch-tall bronze-coated statue of a tall woman in ordinary clothes, high heels, and a hat, holding the hand of a small girl in a dress. “It occurred to me that the tall woman had to be what Louise looks like and the girl is my Rebecca when she was little. (The girl is wearing a cross and carrying a basket, so I reckon Louise is Rebecca’s aunt, taking her home after Sunday school while Caroline, Rebecca’s mum, sleeps in),” he writes me in an email. He had thought of just ordering an extra face for Caroline’s body – that would have been much less expensive as a face is just $500 – but rejected the idea because without a third body, sisters Caroline and Louise would never meet except when disembodied. (Early models like those on the Real Doll web site all have heads with permanent faces. But in 2003, Abyss launched the Face X system, which means that a customer can order multiple faces that can be peeled on and off with Velcro, indicated here by the model “F” notation. So there are subtle variations in the letter coding – a H4/B2, like Sidore, has a permanent face, but a F4/B2 would look much the same but have a removable face. Orders for dolls with permanent faces have all but disappeared since the Face X system debuted.) Everhard says that the idea of a doll family came to him when he realized how much larger Caroline (a B6) is than petite Rebecca (a B4). “There is a well-known male fantasy about bonking women of various ages and the idea of having sex with a mother and daughter epitomizes that ideal,” he writes, speculating that maybe the fantasy comes from a biological urge to merge one’s genes with particular bloodlines. “Of course, dolls manage to cheat our gene’s programming in that respect,” he adds. Relationships have eluded Everhard. “You see boys and girls walking around together, but how they get together is a huge mystery to me,” he says. The details of boy-meets-girl are a “closed book” to Everhard. “I just want to know how does it happen?” he asks. He’s not the kind of man who can strike up conversations with women, and he’s also, he’s noticed, not someone who can contribute equally in conversations in groups. For Everhard, dolls are a solution. He says he’s driven to impress women, but he’s a failure at it, and since he’s had his dolls, he worries less about not having a real girlfriend. He told me that he could almost imagine how conflict in human-to-human relationships might actually make for a more enriching experience, but that doll love is less hassle because dolls don’t have needs beyond those that he imagines. He’s noticed that during his photo shoots of his dolls, he imagines that they are bickering with each other or even with him. Doll owners, he says, can invent conflict just as much as they can invent the physical details of a beautiful woman and her very thoughts. “Real dolls are imitation women. They are only an approximation to the real thing. To the bestof the real thing,” he emphasizes. And Hello Dolly gives him a chance to squire a beautiful woman. “With real dolls, you can’t walk down the street and make everyone envious,” he says. “[Hello Dolly] is an equivalent.” end of page 13 [ 13 ] read more ... [ 14 ][ 15 ][ 16 ][ 17 ][ 18 ][ 19 ][ 20 ][ 21 ][ 22 ][ 23 ] |
