In the (US) Spectator, Bridget Phetasy reports on her visit to the factory where Realdolls are made:
One of the sex dolls on offer at Aura Dolls in Mississauga, the first “sex doll brothel” in the Toronto area.
Photo originally published by BlogTO – https://www.blogto.com/city/2019/11/sex-doll-brothel-mississauga/.
The floor is slippery. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, I’m taking a tour of Abyss Creations, the factory where the “Ferraris of love dolls”, RealDoll and Realbotix, are made. A thin layer of silicone coats almost every surface. A (real) woman in her late twenties, the PR coordinator, Catherine, shows me round. She has the attitude of a hostess at a theme-park restaurant: bored or stoned or maybe both. I’m sure she’s given hundreds of these tours, heard the same dumb jokes a million times and watched us all slap the ass of a doll reluctantly yet instinctively.
[…]
The employees look at the “love dolls” as more than just sexbots. They know their customers want a couch buddy. They want someone to cuddle at night. Perhaps they’ve lost a spouse and don’t feel like dating.
Whitney Cummings logged on to a forum for men who own the sex robots and monitored their conversations for months. “I thought they were going to be creeps, psychopaths,” she says. “I don’t know what to tell you. They’re very lovely men. They’re lovely. They adore their dolls. They marry their dolls. That is happening.”
What strikes me amid the body parts, the rows of eyes, the wall of nipples and the robot “brains”: these aren’t your weird uncle’s sex dolls. With the introduction of AI, these dolls are offering something their predecessors couldn’t: intimacy and affection.
“I always looked at them as art and I always found it funny that because it’s a sexually usable thing, it’s disqualified as art in the higher sense in a lot of people’s minds. They go, ‘Oh that’s not art, that’s just nasty'”, says McMullen. “And what’s funny about that is now we’re doing this serious engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics and now people aren’t so quick to dismiss it.”
Realbotix is the natural evolution of Abyss Creations, the company McMullen started in 1997 (in fact, Abyss Creations made the doll for Lars and the Real Girl). What began as just “real dolls” now has a robotic component, an AI team and an app.
McMullen talks about how he’s always wanted to break free of the sex toy stigma. “Yes people use them sexually, but they also get this huge sense of companionship from having a doll and a robot.”
Skateboards look like fun, but I won’t ride one.
Comment by Monty James — November 18, 2019 @ 12:30
Agreed. But I try not to get in the way of others who do.
Comment by Nicholas — November 18, 2019 @ 12:56