Thousands of men are shelling out $6,500 for hyper-realistic dolls that answer all their needs -- and don't talk back.
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.
Matt McMullen is the Dr. Frankenstein and Henry Ford of love dolls. The founder of Real Dolls is in his mid-30s and dresses like a skateboarder, with multiple piercings and a pretty face. A decade ago, McMullen was a struggling sculptor, making 12-inch nudes out of resin in his garage. For a challenge, he decided to build bigger nudes with poseable bodies that were softer, inviting to the touch. When he posted photographs of his work on the Internet, e-mails poured in asking whether his creations were sex dolls and if so, how much did they cost. After 10 different men offered to pay McMullen $3,000 for converted sculptures, he couldn’t refuse, and it was back to the drawing board to design soft breasts and penetrable genitalia. “I had to make it feel good,” he says. “As good as rubber can feel.” His early adopters were thrilled with the results and soon launched their own photo Web sites. With that free viral promotion, McMullen became the leading purveyor of solid-body silicone love. With $2 million in sales last year, McMullen now employs 14 people at his San Marcos, Calif., company and makes about six or seven dolls a week, each requiring 80 hours of labor.
According to Davecat and many other Real Doll owners, sex with a Real Doll is quite good. “For the most part, it’s just like sex with an organic woman … who doesn’t say anything and is brimful of Quaaludes,” Davecat writes on Sidore’s stylish Web site.
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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Still Lovers
Still Lovers by Elena Dorfman is published by Channel Photographics, New York. All photographs © Elena Dorfman, 2005.
Elena Dorfman lives and works in San Francisco and New York. Her book, Still Lovers, is published by Channel Photographics. You can view her work at www.still-lovers.com
Because Real Dolls’ silicone flesh holds heat well and becomes more pliable when body-temperature warm, Davecat toasts Sidore with an electric mattress pad all day. Aside from getting up for occasional photo shoots, she mostly stays in bed, lying on her side to keep her butt from getting flat and so she’s spoonable. She also frequently wears an athletic bra to keep her 34D breasts from sagging.
When referring to their coital habits, Davecat uses terms like “make love” or “have sex” — and safe sex at that. “I’m one of the rare [doll] users who uses a condom,” he confides, adding that while he feels a bit cheated having to use a prophylactic, it would be too much for him to haul Sidore into the shower every time they have sex. Until Davecat can bench-press 200 pounds, he says, Sidore will have to live with sponge baths.
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.”
Unlike some other doll owners who have no interest in “organic” women, Davecat says he hasn’t completely given up hope. In the meantime, though, he’s considering getting another doll — or two or three — to keep Si-chan company. But if the right real woman were to enter his life, he says giving up Si-chan would be excruciatingly painful, like removing a limb.
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Mike Kelly, a doll lover of a very different stripe, says that when he first heard about Real Dolls on a Web site, “They said they were one step above fucking corpses, and I figured it had to be better than that.” He tried one out, and now he’s the owner of three dolls — Mysti, Jazzi and Britti — that he stores under his bed. He tells me that Jazzi resembles porn star Jenna Jameson. When asked how many times each week he has sex with his dolls, Kelly is quick to correct: He doesn’t have sex with them, he masturbates with them. Twice a week. When I then ask Kelly how he prepares to masturbate with a doll, he says he pulls one from under his bed and applies makeup to her bare face. While he claims not to have a favorite among the triad, he notes that “Head 4 is very tight orally. It has a small mouth,” adding that “if you’ve got a Head 4/Body 5, like Jazzi, you’ve pretty much got it covered. Tight as a drum.” (Unlike Davecat and many other doll owners, Kelly refers to his dolls as “it” not “she.”)
Kelly changes his dolls’ makeup, hair and outfits to suit his mercurial fantasies. Mysti, for example, has six brown wigs, four red wigs and 30 blond wigs, and Jazzi has more than 100 bikinis. When he’s done masturbating, he says he uses the turkey-baster-like implement that comes with each doll to douche it. “You put soap and water in that, and then you squirt it into the orifice you came into, and wash it out with that.”
Each of Kelly’s dolls has graced Coverdoll, a monthly webzine. They are also the subject of a sci-fi series he wrote for the magazine, in which two Androids — Jazzi and Mysti — are on a quest to find a master. In Part 2, Jazzi has sex with the ghost: “With him being so close Jazzi heard the rustle of clothes as he freed his trapped member, at the same time her orgasm hit and sent wave upon wave of pleasure through her Android body. Her orgasm circuits were definitely working tonight!” Meanwhile, Mysti has a tumble in the hay with Princess Take Narusegawa: “Their tongues — one human, one silicone, writhed wetly in the kiss…”
Not all iDollators circulate nude pictures of their own dolls. “I don’t like the idea of someone checking out my girlfriends naked,” writes Gordon Griggs, a 38-year-old factory worker who lives in Virginia. “How many men do you know who like other men to see there [sic] girlfriends?” On his Web site he shares a photo of Ginger Brooke and Kelly Sue sitting on each side of him on his couch, and another of Ginger Brooke in a dress that looks suspiciously like First Communion garb. He also chronicles the wrongs done to him by real women, like the girl who dumped him at the door of the prom, the woman who asked him to baby-sit her son while she went on a date, and the one who “used” him to move furniture.
Griggs tells me by e-mail that he likes dolls with dark hair and light-colored skin. “I always liked the way Morticia from the Adams [sic] Family looked.” He also prefers the “sweet innocent look.” In addition to her white dress, Ginger has a cotton nightie for bed and a Japanese schoolgirl outfit.
While Ginger has shared Griggs’ bed every night since she arrived in 2000, her pal Kelly sleeps on a beanbag chair. “I ordered Kelly so Ginger would have someone to keep her company while I was at work. Kelly has a neck bolt so I can stand her up in the shower so she is easier to clean. But Ginger is still my favorite. It’s ok, Kelly understands,” he writes.
When I ask Griggs how having Ginger and Kelly has affected his life — if perhaps he feels more confident — he writes, “I don’t like being around people at all now … the less human contact I have the happier I am. Yes, I do feel more confident. I realized not long after I got Ginger that I don’t really need anybody … I feel safer and more secure knowing that I will never waste my time and money on another human female that just wants to use me.” He adds, “I don’t have a lot of human friends and only 2 of them have seen Ginger and Kelly, and none of them or anyone else have or will ever lay a hand on them while I am living.”
Griggs is somewhat of a loner in the online doll world, an infrequent visitor to “Hello Dolly,” a labyrinthine cyber haven for sex-doll enthusiasts with nearly 12,000 members and thousands of photographs and message strands. (Out of respect for members’ privacy I have changed the name of the site.) Hello Dolly is a place where all my worst fears about men churned in an awful froth. Here were thousands of men who love the idea of peeling a woman’s face off and replacing it with another, who revel in taking pornographic photographs of their “girlfriends” and sharing them with their friends, men who glory in sex unfettered by the daily push-pull of a relationship, men who might have little respect for the word “no.” On a good day, as a female reporter lurking on the sidelines, I felt like the lone skirt at a Ducati convention, stunned in a testoster-zone. Visiting Hello Dolly on a regular basis over the course of about four months was like dropping in on an eternal gangbang.
By the end of my reporting, though, I just saw the men as pathetic and the conversations so packed with false bravado as to be ludicrous. During one visit to the chat room, the men were bragging about their success getting “pussy” using strategies from the likes of Seduce and Conquer and Speed Seduction. In my generous moments, I thought of Hello Dolly as a safe house where the range of iDollators — from the merely eccentric to the perhaps deeply disturbed — could meet and talk doll. As one iDollator wrote to the group, “You are truly a family of open-minded people and it’s so great to know I’m not alone.” Hello Dolly also functions as an interactive handbook for doll owners. Newbies query old doll hands: Should I wait until my doll arrives to buy her clothes? Is the sex really that good? And old doll hands swap tips: where to buy fake chest hair that can be trimmed and glued on as pubic hair or how to recycle one’s own strays, gathered from the bathroom floor. Or how to rig an aquarium heater and a dimmer switch to heat your doll’s vagina if you don’t have time to warm her whole body with an electric blanket.
Hello Dolly is also a parade where men can show off their girlfriends. Nineteen thousand photographs have been posted, usually with doll after doll in various stages of lingerie dishabille. Some dolls are quite attractive, say with the lovely aquiline nose of an H5. Others — even with exactly the same head-body combination, peeled from the same molds — are ugly enough to scare the Teflon off a frying pan, victims of coral lipstick and green eye shadow. Many photos are relatively innocent — Mari in a pink and red Valentine’s Day corset — and some aren’t innocent at all — Anita Dickens-Hyde fellating a real man in a Jacuzzi style bathtub, the image viewed nearly 30,000 times.
As with Davecat, I spoke and e-mailed many times with Everhard, who is 49 years old and lives in Britain. I learned that his doll Rebecca is old in doll years — her nipple paint has long since worn off and her freckles need touch-ups — but to Everhard, Rebecca is young, the 18-year-old daughter of his second doll, Caroline, who he imagines as about 34. In one photograph, the two sit together, both in hats, dressed as if for an English wedding and enjoying flutes of sparking water garnished with lemon. Some of Everhard’s other photographic vignettes are downright peculiar: When was the last time you saw a naked 18-year-old girl straddling her naked mother in a pillow fight? Last winter, Louise, Caroline’s sister, joined Caroline and Rebecca to round out what Everhard calls his harem. He thought of just ordering an extra face for Caroline’s body — it would have been much less expensive, just $500 — but ultimately rejected the idea because without a third body, sisters Caroline and Louise would never meet except when disembodied.
As with Davecat, 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. “I just want to know, how does it happen?” he asks me, not, I think, entirely rhetorically.
So for Everhard, his harem offered 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. “Real dolls are imitation women. They are only an approximation to the real thing. To the best of the real thing,” he emphasizes. Hello Dolly gives him his only 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.”
Hello Dolly also functions as a clubhouse, and a clearinghouse of Real Doll information, where owners share their travails, as Everhard does of his repeated surgeries on Caroline’s floppy left ankle. Last winter, Everhard shared with the group the latest setback. “Caroline’s back is broken,” he wrote. “The first symptom was when I lifted her out of bed this morning. Her body seemed ‘stretchy’ … In retrospect I am certain it was broken when we were having sex in bed this morning.”
Everhard set to work repairing Caroline, documenting the process in photographs and mechanical drawings he posted for the group — the propping up of her hips, the cut into the small of her back, a belt hoisting her backbone close to the surface. Then a photograph shows the belt striking her bare buttocks. “And this for all the trouble you’ve caused me …(whack),” the caption reads.
While Everhard is a fix-her-yourself kinda guy, he also lives too far from the master doll healer and dealer, Slade Fiero, to ship his girls for repair even if he wanted to. Fiero, aka “the Real Doll Doctor,” lives in Davis, Calif., and is a part-time tattoo artist and the sculptor of Charlie, the only male Real Doll. He scoops up used dolls off eBay or from owners who know of him and want to dump their dolls, repairs them if they are worse for the wear (most are), and resells them.
Fiero’s Web site documents breast, head, knee, wrist, butt, hip and neck surgery; wrist repair; and crotch fill. Some doll damage is normal wear and tear — even dolls that are stored properly and bathed regularly can develop a torn breast or “compression fractures” around the vagina. Recently Fiero “realigned” a doll’s vagina and anus and sold her for $5,000 to a fellow who arrived at his house, paid cash, and hauled the doll away in the bed of his pickup truck. “That doll was worth more than the truck he drove away in,” Fiero remarks.
Some of Fiero’s stories are the stuff of horror films. He once got an e-mail from two garbage collectors who found a Real Doll hacked to pieces in a dumpster. One owner sent Fiero a mutilated corpse of a doll. “The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread of skin, like your bra strap,” he tells me, gesturing at my shoulder.
Another time, an Asian undergraduate student at a university in California dropped his 1-year-old doll off for repairs. Fiero says the young man told him that his parents bought him the doll so that he would stay at home and study rather than go out chasing women. Fiero’s photographs of the damaged doll make me cringe: Her leg was torn off, revealing the steel hardware of her hip joints; an arm hung by an inch of silicone flesh; two fingers were severed; and the cleavage between her buttocks was torn into a ragged crevasse.
“Her vagina was so blown out,” Fiero told me. “I was appalled. I couldn’t believe someone could fuck something like that up so quickly. It blew me away. How could somebody be so callous?
“I was offended in so many ways,” he continues. “He put her feet behind her head and reamed that doll with whatever cock he’s got. He fucked her violently. She was achieving positions she shouldn’t achieve or be forced to try. Her vagina and anus were a giant gaping hole.”
Fiero says he’ll never again make repairs for the student, who he now refers to as JTR — Jack the Ripper.
It breaks Matt McMullen’s heart to hear that his art has been defiled, yet he says that whatever motivates the love-doll market — libido, fetishism, loneliness — ultimately it’s about people indulging their secret side. “Most people go through their whole lives and keep it subdued, but everybody has a thing that gets them off,” he says. “And some people use this doll as a means to explore something that otherwise they may never explore.”
While he does do custom work on occasion for customers who are willing to pay the price or have legitimate needs, say a paraplegic who needs a lightweight doll he can easily move around in his lap — McMullen does sometimes put his foot down. No lactating dolls, urinating dolls, amputees, 7-foot-tall dolls, Britney Spears replicas, or dolls with armpit hair or heartbeats. And no dogs either, as was the request of one prospective customer.
“He asked me if I could make him a silicone dog, because he was a breeder, and he didn’t want to hurt his dogs anymore, he said. He talked like right out of the movie ‘Deliverance.’” McMullen’s surfer-dude lilt plummets into a pungent drawl, “‘Aw, I don’t want to hurt ma dawgs, I like ma dawgs … kin you make me one so ah kin still use it fer the sex?’ And when I realized that he was legitimate, I was shocked. And I just politely said no, I’m sorry, gotta go, click.” Another prospective customer sent nude pictures of his 60-year-old mother, wanting a custom-built replica. Then there was the surgical pathologist who wanted a vagina duplicated from a specimen he had in a jar.
As for the frequent requests for child dolls, those are also flatly rejected. “I don’t get into debates, scolding them, I just say I can’t go there, sorry,” McMullen says.
McMullen believes that, for the most part, his dolls are therapeutic transitional objects for men (female customers are few and far between). “By and large, most customers buy a doll because they just broke up or got a divorce and they don’t want to go out into the dating scene, but they still have physical needs.” A doll, he says, gets them through difficult times, and often they move on. Other customers have used a doll to overcome premature ejaculation.
While in reporting this article I zeroed in on the men I thought of as “the husbands” — the Davecats and Everhards who have seemingly adopted doll love for life, rather than the fetishist/hobbyist set — anecdotal evidence indicates that for many owners, dolls do offer stopgap love, and then they move on. “Lonely men who don’t have anything in their life, they have some fun with it, then they meet the right girl, they sell the doll, and off they go,” observed Mike Kelly. Jagxfan wrote to the Hello Dolly crew that he had a new, real girlfriend staying at his house, leaving him the problem of what to do with his doll Natalie, who was locked up in a closet. His Hello Dolly friends advised him to hang on to Natalie until the relationship was solid, then he could either sell her or introduce her to his girlfriend.
Mike Kelly buys into the doll-as-healthy-transitional-object theory, but also posits that dolls play a needed role in natural selection. “There’s definitely people out there who shouldn’t be in the gene pool,” he says. “This is a way to keep people happy that shouldn’t be having kids anyway.” He added that some men — himself excluded because he says he has a real 25-year-old flight attendant girlfriend — can’t attract high-quality women because they lack top-notch genetic material. Men like that, he says, should just build mates and not spread their seed.
Maureen, one of the craftspeople who works at the Real Doll studio, proposed a more benign version of Kelly’s theory. She speculated that the domestic pairing of guys and dolls is more or less a safety valve. “These lonely guys, instead of going out and causing trouble, they have something like this to keep them home and keep them company,” she says. “A lot of them, it’s like they marry them, which is kind of creepy, but whatever keeps them out of trouble.”
In one particularly animated thread on Hello Dolly, doll lovers challenged misconceptions that “doll bashers” might have about who has sex with dolls and why. Here’s a distillation of their arguments, culled from more than 50 posts:
Doll lovers are not to be confused with necrophiles. Remember that many doll lovers heat their dolls before using them, and necrophiles like their lovers cold. One owner, Bunster, points out that women aren’t accused of necrophilia for using dildos (“dead penises!”), so men who sleep with dolls shouldn’t be, either.
Doll love is not an indicator of violence against women. “A rapist would get no satisfaction from a RD — it does not resist, run or scream, or submit…” writes ric. Technoguy concedes that it is “quite possible that some doll owners may be having fantasies of a kinky or even sadistic nature while ‘using’ their dolls … From a psychological perspective, it is probably healthier to exercise those fantasies with a doll than a real human female who might be emotionally scared or even injured by them.” Zaneta declares, “If I go to hell/pergitory [sic)]/reincarnated as a scum sucking life form for my ownership of a doll so be it. I’m still better than a rapist, child molester, [or] murderer.”
Doll lovers are not lonely geeks who can’t get real girls. Wolverine, owner of Tia, writes, “I’ve had something like 84 [girlfriends] in my lifetime, I bought a Real Doll because I thought they were awesome, not because I was hardup.” Bunster chimes in: “I’ve had some pretty f*cking gorgeous girlfriends in my time, but I’d rather have a RD than be married to any of them. The politics of relationships aren’t exactly fun most of the time — most of us tolerate it only because the physical part is the pay off.” Darkland adds to the thread that casual sex has never been his thing, but he’s “still got the pesky issue of having the sex drive of a football team hopped up on methamphetamines … thanks to Real Doll, voila, problem solved.”
Doll owners are capable of love. As ric writes, “I’ve come to the conclusion that doll owners are some of the most romantic, sensitive, sensuous people around … Many doll owners get a doll because of longing for real love. They don’t want to jump into a realtionship [sic] just for sex, and end up with a broken heart or hurting someone else when the sex fizzles. So, they get sex from a doll instead and wait for love to happen.” (Kelly suggested in a telephone conversation with me that doll owners should be considered a new breed of sensitive male: “If you think about it, they’re the right guy to meet because they’re not going to get you into bed immediately. They’re going to be interested in you as a person.”)
In their heart of hearts, all men would like a Real Doll. Soragesum suggests that doll taboos are a function of their price point: “I would bet money that any single one of the guys [who say they have no interest in dolls] if they secretly had access to a realdoll, if they thought no one would know or find out, would fuck her silly, at least for awhile.”
Doll love should be considered healthy and normal. Technoguy speculates that if Real Dolls were cheap and accessible to Everyman, they would be championed: “then practically every guy in the USA would want and get one for his 18th birthday. It would then suddenly be considered a ‘healthy’ part of one’s ‘normal’ sexual development. Adolescent psychologists would be recommending them, anti-abortion groups would be saying that they were a wonderful way to prevent unwanted pregnancies that had to be aborted, and the law enforcement experts would claim that they would drastically cut down on sex crimes.”
From a clinical standpoint, doll love is a mystery, with no blanket diagnosis that fits this particular brand of lust. Dr. Douglas Tucker, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry who specializes in treating sexual offenders, says the pro-doll arguments are not off-base. Broadly speaking, intercourse with a love doll doesn’t signal anything particularly wrong or unhealthy, and arousal by such a lifelike depiction of a beautiful nude woman is natural. “I think most guys would approach this as a novelty and could muster some arousal,” he says, adding that he would hesitate to label men who enjoy sex with Real Dolls pathological. But Tucker dismissed the notion that Real Dolls are no different than women’s dildos or vibrators because lifelike dolls, unlike vibrators, are simulated humans — they have what he called “pull.” “All of the stimuli are telling you it’s human,” he says.
Tucker says that even if a study were done of real men and their Real Dolls, it’s unlikely that a single common denominator would emerge. In the meantime, it’s guesswork. Doll love could signal any number of things. For example, an iDollator with a harem might have been surrounded by dominant women as a child. Or, in the cases where men prefer dolls to live human sexual partners, doll paraphilia could signal severe problems with trust, intimacy or social anxiety. Tucker ventured that for certain men, doll love could stunt normal emotional development because intimacy with another person is a milestone in maturity. Immediate gratification and complete control of the emotional content of a relationship with a doll might make a man accustomed to absolute control with women — a dynamic that would likely not play out well in a real relationship.
Tucker says pedophiles or doll owners with violent tendencies toward women — a group that he speculates is a small subset of doll owners — possibly could use a doll to “rehearse” offending behavior. And while it’s not known whether fantasizing about pedophilia or violence leads to action, in the psychiatric community those fantasies are considered very troubling. It would be dangerous for a pedophile to use a young-looking doll, for example, because it would reinforce his fantasies with orgasm.
Back at McMullen’s Real Doll studio, where a jumble of headless bodies hang from racks like Rockettes at a slaughterhouse, there isn’t much concern about why men want to have sex with dolls, only with respecting and meeting their demand. Seven dolls were lined up in office chairs, clad in black stockings and negligees, waiting to meet that human need. “She’s going to Orlando,” said Maureen as she painted red nail polish on a B4 with long black hair and green eyes. The whole row of sister dolls were shipping that day, packed in closet-size boxes marked with “Fragile” and “Do Not Drop,” off on maiden voyages to Ohio, Washington state, Las Vegas, Utah, Michigan and another one to Florida.
Years of trading in silicone fantasy hasn’t worn McMullen down and there are still new frontiers he wants to explore. Soon, a big-butted voluptuous Body 10 will debut, modeled after an erotic cartoon character called Druuna that has many Hello Dolly fans. Other innovations on the horizon include bodies with detectable rib cages, collar bones, backbones and clavicles; a removable, interchangeable vagina system, for ease of cleaning and sensory variety; and wireless animatronics to enable facial expressions.
For now, McMullen has no plans for a Real Doll robot. While he concedes that the concept of an android love doll is in theory attractive, the technology isn’t advanced enough, yet, to shoehorn a robot into a Real Doll. McMullen doesn’t think that is what his customers want anyway. “I think a lot of people like the fact that it’s just a doll,” he says. “I don’t see the dolls walking and talking. I don’t see them doing domestic stuff around the house. Keep your love doll in the bedroom.”
And those without dolls in their bedroom — specifically those with spouses and families and maybe people reading this story — should keep their judgments to themselves. “It is not weird,” he insists after recounting the many expressions of gratitude he’s received from men, including a burn victim who thanked him for giving him back a piece of his life and a paraplegic who just wanted a body beside him at night. “What if you lived all by yourself, and what if you didn’t want or couldn’t have a relationship, and you were just lonely, and you just wanted to feel that contact? he says. “You can’t possibly identify with that person because you’ve never been in that situation. To feel contact, to feel a body next to you, is a human need.”
“House” gets asexuality wrong
In a TV first, the Fox drama introduces asexual characters -- only to blame their identity on a medical condition
(Credit: Fox)
Last week’s episode of “House” marked the first time a major TV network featured self-identified asexual characters. But the asexuality community isn’t exactly celebrating this breakthrough; in fact, many are petitioning Fox executives in outrage.
That’s because the episode ends — spoiler alert! — with the revelation that the characters aren’t asexual after all.
When the show’s cantankerous lead, Dr. Gregory House, learns that his colleague has a female patient who identifies as asexual, and is married to an “asexual” man, he bets him $100 that he can find “a medical reason why she doesn’t want to have sex.” Through his signature unethical approach, House manages to run some tests on the husband under the guise of administering a flu shot. He finds that the man has a pituitary tumor that’s killing his sex drive. Then comes the ultimate reveal: The wife — or “giant pool of algae,” as House calls her — is just pretending to be asexual to make her husband happy.
David Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), tells me the show’s treatment was “disturbing but not unexpected.” Not only does the episode assert “that asexuality is problematic and pathological,” he says, but it also tells people who actually accept asexuality as a valid sexual orientation — an acceptance Jay has long fought for — that “they’re wrong.”
OK, so it’s a popular network TV show, and a medical-mystery drama at that: The bar for nuance and sensitivity is set pretty low. It’s also medically possible for a pituitary tumor to cause a lack of sexual desire — but it certainly isn’t the norm among the 1 percent of the population estimated to be asexual. (Although, asexuality as a whole is underresearched and poorly understood.)
The petition, which urges Fox execs to reconsider future portrayals of asexuals, argues, “The episode encourages viewers to meet asexuality with skepticism rather than acceptance, to probe asexual people for causes of our ‘condition’ rather than to accept us as a part of the natural spectrum of human sexual diversity.”
Asexuals hardly need to be investigated by “sexuals,” says Jay. “If someone identifies as asexual, chances are they’ve already done a lot of deep self-reflection and analysis to come to that,” and that can include the possibility of a pituitary tumor, a hormonal imbalance or past sexual trauma. “There’s such a strong message that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t like sex, it’s very hard for people to accept this about themselves,” he says. “It’s hard to be on that journey in an honest way and to be avoiding something. [Asexuality’s] not an easy out.” It’s not like “you identify as asexual and then you’re done trying to understand yourself,” Jay explains.
As for the wife on “House” who faked her asexuality to please her husband? Jay’s not buying that either. He has several asexual friends who have been in relationships with sexual people for years; and each couple finds a way to make it work, whether it’s non-monogamy or negotiating sexual interaction within the relationship — kinda like in relationships between sexuals! Believe it or not, he says, such arrangements are not uncommon in the asexual community, and he says they work “because of really good, honest communication,” not because one partner is lying to the other. But that does make for better TV.
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
I’m fixated on my wife’s past
After 25 years of marriage, a man finds himself suddenly obsessing about his partner's sexual history
(Credit: brushingup via Shutterstock)
Help! I’ve been married for nearly 25 years, and I can’t stop obsessing over my wife’s past sexual history.
When we first started seeing each other, she was married, I was married and we were both having affairs with other people. She told me in very exquisite detail about many — if not all — of her sexual adventures (many of them extramarital with married men). She went into great detail about how affairs started, when, where, the type of sex performed (oral/anal) with each man. Her sexual experience was far greater than mine.
I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.
My question is why can’t I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that’s what they were — she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?
I feel for your wife, man. You’re interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.
There must be a reason why this suddenly matters to you now. M. Gary Neuman, a therapist and author of “Connect to Love,” senses “some guilt or fear of the ‘what goes around comes around’ karma.” He says, “Maybe you now feel doomed to struggle since this relationship began through inappropriate behavior,” and adds: “It’s never too late to apologize to those you may have hurt in the past. Do what you need to in order to feel freer moving forward and allowing yourself to enjoy your marriage to the max.”
Listen to the man. He’s been on “Oprah,” yo.
Therapist Charles Foster, co-author of “I Love You but I Don’t Trust You,” says there are a couple of possible interpretations of what’s going on here. It could be that “after 25 years, their sex lives — so clearly in need of spicing up from the beginning — are developing rigor mortis, and his re-opening this can of worms is the best way he knows how to wake things up in bed.” Or maybe “for some reason, trust issues have reared their ugly head.”
Is your wife giving you new reason to mistrust her — based on her current behavior, as opposed to things she did when she was a young seductress? If not, this might be less about your wife’s actual trustworthiness than obsessive thinking.
Foster has little patience for this: “Come on, what is it you really want? Better sex? More closeness? More trust? Any of these could make you happy,” he says. “But satisfying your obsession will only stimulate the very itch that’s making you miserable.” Instead, he suggests that you “focus on your real needs, and work with your partner to get them met, and keep telling yourself that your obsession is just a sinkhole of misery.”
On a similar note, Diana Kirschner, author of “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love,” suggests that you start by simply listening to each other: Sit down and give each other 10 minutes to talk uninterrupted about whatever is on your mind. Instead of talking about past exploits, try talking about “sexual longings or fantasies you have right now and especially how you would like to act them out with each other.” She says, “Build a whole new relationship now that is so satisfying, the past just doesn’t matter.”
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
The invention of the heterosexual
The history of straightness is much shorter than you'd think. An expert explains its origins
A detail from the cover of "Straight"
If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.
Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.
Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.
Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?
We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.
So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?
“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.
But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?
Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.
Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn’t the people who were running around thinking, “Oh, I’m a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different,” who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, “I’m not a degenerate, I don’t want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that’s what I am. That’s what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously.”
This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.
Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].
So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?
I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that’s certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There’s this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you’re supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.
In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?
Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.
As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.
It’s more that marriage didn’t have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that’s great. But that’s not what you were in it for.
And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don’t support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that’s a huge change just in my lifetime. I’m in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women’s and men’s ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.
How do the successes of the women’s movement impact our concept of heterosexuality?
I think that referring to it as the success of the women’s movement is a little bit of a misnomer because there’ve been multiple women’s movements, and also because it’s not entirely to be credited to or blamed on organized feminism. There’s been a lot of other enfranchisement of women that’s gone on as well that has actually been not identifiably feminist, but definitely comes out of a very 18thcentury spirit of egalitarianism. But in general I think that equal rights egalitarianism has had an enormous amount to do with changing heterosexuality. Simply because once you give women and men equal or nearly equal rights to their own economic autonomy, political autonomy, social autonomy, you change the playing field, you change the dependency relationship.
Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of science arguing that there are physical differences between gay people and straight people, in their brains and even the direction of their hair whirls. You’re skeptical of this research. Why?
I question their validity primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don’t have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It’s really that simple.
All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to? Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is? When no one has actually established what that is. That’s bad science.
OK. Then do you think it’s possible to establish what a heterosexual body looks like?
Well, you know, if you’re going to stipulate that it’s possible to establish what a non-heterosexual body is, it better damn well be possible to find out what a heterosexual body is. And if one of those things is not possible, then, chances are, the other is not either.
I’m quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.
See, that’s the thing, no one is going to take that away from you. No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed. And that’s very, very different. Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street. This is real. It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic.
Or innate.
Or inevitable.
But these categories have also been very practical. Gay rights wouldn’t be imaginable without them.
Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head. I don’t know why that is. I find it intensely frustrating.
Do you think the success of the gay rights movement is helping broaden our ideas of sexuality?
I think that it is having an interesting effect of making the boundaries of the categories more permeable. Simply because we now have this doxa [omnipresent acknowledgement] of gayness in our culture where we believe that gayness is a thing, we believe that it exists, we believe that we know what it looks like, we believe that we know what it acts like, and therefore, when we see it, we’re actually very likely to say, “Hey, that over there, that looks really gay,” regardless of whether or not that person may be, in fact, gay.
Those boundaries are becoming more porous. The term “bromance” cracks me up, but it is also promising. For the past hundred years or so, a lot of men have found it very difficult to express affection and love for other men without having it assumed that that love is necessarily sexual. And now we’re actually coming around to a place where at least some people, some of the time, are able to avail themselves of a category in which they can say, “Oh, OK, here’s a way that men can be affectionate toward each other and one another and love one another and we don’t have to assume that we know more about it than that.” I think that that adds something to the conversation.
Women, in particular, seem to be eschewing the traditional between binaries of gay and straight these days, at least in pop culture. The same thing doesn’t seem to be true of men.
There’s a reason for that. Every queer woman I know — and I’m a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don’t consider what two women do together sexually as sex. It’s a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you’re doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.
But men, for various other cultural reasons also seem to be more attached to categories. It functions partly as a sort of safety mechanism.
I think there is a lot of safety in categories. And there’s a hell of a lot of safety in a binary. When you can just say, you know, anything that is not this is automatically that. You know, it frees up a lot of spare time.
I have a number of friends who are negotiating the reverse of this, in that they for a long time identified as lesbians and have now started dating transmen and now have to negotiate the awkwardness of being in what ostensibly looks like a heterosexual relationship. I’ve been around several friends who, when they mention their boyfriend in a queer setting, reflexively say, “Oh, but he’s trans.”
And I think that really points as well to the fact that these are constructed categories. This is about your subjectivity, it’s about your allegiance, it’s about where your social networks are, it’s about the kinds of cultural priorities that you embrace and that you endorse. This is not just what gets you hard or what gets you wet. This is not just about what kinds of sex you have, or the congenital configurations of the people you have sex with. It’s very much about what cultures you participate in. What cultures you ally yourself with, you know, whose flag you fly.
It’s interesting that transgender men and women could marry their partners long before gay people could get married, even though they are probably far more despised by conservatives in this country, simply because they fit into this heterosexual idea of marriage.
Although, that’s not uniformly true and there have been cases, like Littleton v. Prange in Texas — which still to this day breaks my heart — where jurisdictions refused to uphold the legality of marriage or partnerships involving a trans person, because they basically take the stance that you can’t change genetics and this is person was never a whatever. And therefore the marriage is not valid. So it does cut both ways. I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives.
Our successful open marriage
My husband and I may seem strange for wanting multiple partners. To my kids, this is what normal looks like
(Credit: Dmitri Mikitenko via Shutterstock)
I spent a recent weekend up in Maine with my girlfriend and our three kids. We went on long canoe trips, made mountains of buttery waffles, and read Rainbow Fairy books aloud till the words blurred together on the page. When the kids had gone to bed and the house was quiet, we crawled into bed and had sex so hot I thought the sheets might catch fire.
When I got home, I told my husband all about it.
My marriage is open. It’s also happy and stable. After I shared our mountain adventures, he filled me in on the highlights of his weekend: a small triumph at work, some quality time with his girlfriend, a successful home repair. We curled up at the end of the night, watched some old “Dr. Who” episodes and went to sleep in each other’s arms.
I never thought I’d have anything in common with Newt Gingrich. But if the claims that he once asked his ex-wife, Marianne, for an open marriage are true, then we might be more alike than I thought. Unlike that alleged scenario, however (which began with an affair), my husband’s and my open marriage has been based on openness and honesty from day one.
In fact, I’ve never been in a monogamous relationship. This openness in my romantic life stems in part from feminism and in part from idealism. I’m passionate about owning my own sexuality. I can’t stomach the thought of handing the reins of my sexual life to someone else, even someone I love and trust as much as my husband.
I’m also passionate about sharing. Being open in my marriage comes from the same ideals that make me shop at the food co-op and vote for socialist political candidates. If I were 30 years older, I’d be a veteran of the ’60s free love movement, staging bed-ins with my antiwar buddies. I embraced nonmonogamy, or polyamory as the cool kids like to call it, because I’m good at it. I’m prone to falling for people; my girlfriend likes to say I fall in love with lampposts. I’m good at communication and mediation. I’m bad at rules. Clearly, polyamory was for me.
When I got married and started a family, I just kept doing what I’d always done.
While some people leave polyamory behind with their wild youth, there are large numbers of families that quietly continue to embrace this life while raising kids and growing old together. Some of them form households with several adult “spice” (a humorous plural of spouse). More commonly, they do what I do: live with one spouse, whom they raise kids with, and step out for date nights with other lovers.
We’re largely invisible. When I pick my girlfriend’s daughter up at school, I don’t tell the teachers I’m dating her mom. I just sign the pick-up form and head home.
Nothing in my life is a secret, it’s simply my private business. When it does come up, people tend to be very accepting, but also curious. Don’t you get jealous? What about the kids? How does that even work?
My life sounds complicated, but in many ways it’s routine. The children are the main focus of our attention. My husband and I have three kids. We spend a lot of our time doing the things any parent does: picking the kids up from school, shuttling them to and from activities and birthday parties, cooking them dinner and reading them bedtime stories.
Since we’ve always been poly, I often wonder how monogamous couples do it. I get so much support from my lovers. No one else, not my friends, not my parents, no one, is as willing to deal with the messes and mishaps of parenting as my sweeties. There’s something about romantic intimacy that builds a family-type closeness. These are the people I call when I’m puking my guts out and can’t take care of my kids, the people who call me when their car gets towed and they need a rescue.
Polyamory enthusiasts like to point out that the word means “multiple loves.” They really want to stress the loving commitments people make, the way these networks of relationships support each other. It’s not about the sex, you hear over and over again.
This always makes my girlfriend and me giggle. Here’s a tip: It’s about the sex. If it weren’t, we’d be close friends and I wouldn’t be writing this article. The sex isn’t a bad thing: In fact, sex outside a marriage can be good for you. There’s a pile of scientific evidence showing that a new sex partner is the most surefire cure for sexual dysfunction and low libido, especially for women.
It’s much easier to keep the sparks flying with someone whose laundry you don’t have to fold. Having an outside partner means getting to date endlessly: an endless string of exploring new restaurants, trying new positions, long wandering conversations that don’t involve fights about the cost of day care or nagging reminders to take the trash out.
That’s hot. I get all the excitement of an outside love affair – the wild sex, the sympathetic ear, the chance to fall in love all over again – without the bitterness of betrayal.
This is a blessing and a curse. At its best, it makes everyone’s life better. At its worst, this kind of arrangement can sap energy from a struggling marriage. It’s easier to have fun with a lover than it is with a spouse that you can slip into the habit of playing only outside your marriage. One friend said, after watching his wife tart up to go out with her new boyfriend, “I used to be the lingerie guy. When did I become the pajamas and cornflakes guy?”
It can also be a challenge for the outside relationship. Remember that idyllic weekend my girlfriend and I had? We’ve been dating for three years. Eventually, many people who like each other as much as we do get married. Not us — we’ll be going out to dinner on Tuesday nights until the end of time. That’s a lot of dates. She’ll never be my pajamas and cornflakes buddy.
Now, to the jealousy question: If the thought of your lover being with someone else makes your stomach turn, polyamory probably isn’t for you. Most poly people feel jealous sometimes, but they treat those feelings as a sign of a problem in their own relationship. If I’m jealous because my husband has his girlfriend sleeping over three nights this week, I’m inclined to look at how I’m getting – or not getting – my needs met in my relationship with him. It’s not his sleepovers with her that are the problem, it’s that we haven’t had enough time together lately.
That’s not the case for everyone, though. Some people – maybe most people – really are jealous simply because their honey likes someone else. Their jealousy isn’t an arrow pointing at another problem that can be worked out. It’s a sick feeling in their gut telling them this is not the right relationship to be in. If you feel like that, do yourself a favor and hightail it back to monogamy.
That isn’t the real issue with polyamory, though. I once spoke on a polyamory panel. When an audience member asked what the biggest downside was, all the panelists shouted in unison: “Scheduling!”
That was back in the dark ages, before smartphones and Google calendar. These days, scheduling kinks get ironed out by technology. I can use IM to stay close to all my loves while I’m running through a busy day, hopping from work to school to home. Text messages let us communicate on the run, and online calendars make it much simpler to see when everyone is free.
Then there’s the issue of secrecy: What do you tell the children? What will the neighbors think?
Some of my friends are poly activists. They wear buttons, write magazine columns, march in parades. They want more visibility for our lifestyle so that, like our queer allies, we can be less closeted about who we are. Me, I’m content to keep a fairly low profile. Nothing in my life is a secret, but I don’t usually advertise the details to strangers.
To my kids, this is all normal. I’ve never had a big sit-down talk about how Mommy and Daddy’s marriage is different. They were born into this. We’re a big messy family. The kids know I go on grown-up sleepovers sometimes, and take it for granted.
Because we live in a major urban center with a large poly community, we’re able to hang out with other poly families a lot of the time. That helps provide community support for the adults, as well as making it seem more normal for the kids. I can go to a BBQ with my husband and our kids, spend half the time holding hands and chatting with my girlfriend, and no one will bat an eye.
Polyamory is not for everyone. Many people, probably even most people, prefer the simplicity of a monogamous marriage.
But a lot of people want something else. About half of married people will cheat during their lives. Another substantial minority – anywhere from 1 percent to 10 percent, depending on which expert you ask – are having intentionally open relationships. It takes a lot of emotional energy, and an ongoing commitment to complexity, to make those relationships work. But I wouldn’t do it any other way.
Does it matter Newt cheated?
When all morality collapses into sexual morality, it's the voters who get screwed
The Gingriches (Credit: Eric Thayer / Reuters)
Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, told ABC News he’s morally unfit to be president because he cut out on her with Callista and then asked her to go along with the arrangement. She’s attacking the candidate who shut down the entire U.S. government because it was spending too much money on poor people; who thinks that “African-American” is just a synonym for food stamp recipient; and who wants to conscript impoverished children into janitorial jobs to teach them promptness. And we’re worrying about what he did with his dick? Watch out: When all morality collapses into sexual morality, the voters will become so fixated on whom the candidates are screwing they don’t notice … it’s them.
Most of the fault for this misallocation of our moral indignation lies, of course, in the unruly sexuality of fourth-century Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo. Like Newt Gingrich, Augustine’s sexual desires stood in the way of his ambition — in his case, for a career in the church. Although, like Gingrich, Augustine finally suppressed sufficiently to embrace the requisite behavior, in his struggles he left behind the wicked legacy that conflates sexual desire with moral failure. As time went by, the church agreed that sex was OK as long as you confined it to one lifelong heterosexual reproductive marriage. The monogamous marriage really took off as a moral model when Martin Luther founded the Protestant wing that Gingrich the Catholic now eschews. Like Gingrich, Martin Luther had his eye on a nun long before he nailed the theses.
And so when Gingrich decided to get married in 1962 and again in 1981 and once more in 2000, Speaker Gingrich had to commit himself to be faithful to Wife 1, Wife 2 and, now, Callista. And then he breached his contract. Again and again. Unless you live in fourth-century Italy, that’s what infidelity is. Not the sum and substance of all that’s wrong in the world. Not the only thing a Republican can do that is legitimate to criticize (enjoying all those Cayman millions, Mitt?). Not the definition of immorality. But definitely a breach of contract. It’s like walking away from your mortgage when your house is underwater or wearing a dress to the party and then taking it back to the store.
Breach of contract, like lying, is not nothing. When people try to get out from under the Catholic/Protestant order of sexual morality, they try to say Gingriching around is nothing, as long as you don’t do it in the streets and scare the horses: the right to privacy and all that. That is as foolish as saying infidelity is everything. All you have to do is look at the video of the usually unflappable Hillary Clinton walking to the helicopter to Camp David that awful day in 1997 to know that breaching the fidelity contract is not nothing.
The problem is, what with no-fault divorce, our society provides no damages for breach of sexual contract other than a suicidal divorce. In most divorces, the breacher pays about the same price as he would for forgetting to return his Netflix. Especially if he’s a big, powerful man like Newt Gingrich and the wife was foolish enough to bet all her hopes for her future on his stellar course. Or Bill Clinton. Or France’s contribution to the news category, feel-like-you-need-a-shower-after-hearing-it, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Their wives were smart enough not to try to enforce their contract of marital fidelity through the suicidal medium of divorce. Hillary Clinton gagged it down and she almost made it to the White House. Anne Sinclair got chosen the most admired woman in France. Don’t blame them for choosing unconditional surrender. Under the current divorce laws and social norms, those alpha males are the U.S.Army and the wives are Grenada. Why does the society treat the women who invest early in high-flying careers so much worse than the early investors in, say, Facebook? A better system would treat a Marianne Gingrich at least as well as the courts treated the Winklevoss twins.
Which is why I’m actually rooting for Marianne. When she refused to take Newt’s offer and stay on the gravy train, he tried to stick her with two grand a month they had agreed to after an earlier squabble. His earlier attempts to avoid supporting his first wife and their daughters were also legendary. Now he’s a Tiffany-patronizing, speech-making money machine, a gold mine. And as usual the ex-wife got the shaft. It’s not the definition of immorality, but her going public right before the South Carolina primary has all the appeal of asymmetrical warfare. Just as Newt was cruising down the road to victory in South Carolina his jeep hit an IED. He’ll probably be fine. But it’s so gratifying at least to see him bleed a little.
Page 1 of 395 in Sex
The Ten Republican Wars of 2012 
Live-Blogging Parkinson's: (Re)Learning To Walk 
Curious fliers want to know 
Facebook’s hypocritical breastfeeding controversy 
Repulsive progressive hypocrisy 
Jeremy Lin’s social media fast break 
Blog proves the Onion is trusted news source 
Preet Bharara’s toothless bite of Wall Street 
The Grave Threat of “Homegrown Terrorism” 
The making of gay marriage’s top foe 
Mitt Romney’s night from hell 
The “lighter side” of the Vietnam War 
