this model doesn't exactly strike me as being above the age of consent
Would be in a lot of the South.
There was a pretty amusing horror/comedy made about Real Dolls a few years back called Love Object. I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival and the director Q&A session got pretty rowdy. Most of the audience was made up of your typical film festival types but some Real Doll devotees got word of the film and were not very pleased with how they were portrayed.
That "not quite at the age of consent" model is one of the only pictures my work has ever *not* blocked that I really, reeeally wish it had.
I'm in a crowded office with a very visible computer. And I'm getting some awfully nasty glares right now.
Sometimes the back button simply cannot be hit fast enough.
The comments over at Pandagon are a piece of work. They are divided into four main groups:
1) Expressing the opinion that the squickiness of the 'iDollators' is not that they're getting off with a doll, but that they've deluded themselves into thinking they have a relationships with a doll, and it's better than a real woman, who might have feelings or desires that they'd have to take into account.
2) Expressing the opinion that there is no misogyny involved, it's just guys that can't deal with real women because they're not submissive, have needs, and might reject them.
3) Very angry men missing the point of group 1) entirely, and thinking it's unfair that women get sex toys and men don't, and that Amanda is a feminazi wanting to take away men's sex toys. Also one confused guy that seems to think that 'bringing sex toys into the bedroom' means he has to watch his girlfriend use a dildo while she berates him for being an inadequate lover.
4) A curious group that seems to think that Mr. Universe's robot girlfriend in Serenity somehow makes it totally okay to prefer a Real Doll to a person. (One wonders if they think that untreated schizophrenia is okay because River is soooo kickass cool.)
Also one confused guy that seems to think that 'bringing sex toys into the bedroom' means he has to watch his girlfriend use a dildo while she berates him for being an inadequate lover.
I'm almost certain there's a fetish site devoted to this exact activity.
I'm curious about all this, but already got burned once this morning by my office filter (unlike Urple, I was spared the picture). Is the comments thread at Pandagon going to raise a flag?
Yes, but that's not what is normally meant by suggesting that a woman who has a hard time reaching orgasm with her lover bring in a sex toy to help.
a fetish site devoted to this exact activity
Indeed, but the women are berating the fellows while using the dildo on them.
it's unfair that women get sex toys and men don't
Nah, what's unfair is the price differential.
Finally, can we all agree that having to douche out the orifices afterwards can't be a big self-esteem booster?
Maybe the torsos are dishwasher-safe.
Your hand isn't free?
No, it's pretty much my sex slave.
I see a truckload of comments in this thread's future.
Maybe the torsos are dishwasher-safe.
Is anyone retroactively creeped out by memories of CPR classes? Wondering what the gym teachers were doing with RecusiAnnie after hours?
Just trying to make everyone's day a little more disturbing.
Yeah, I'm with Alameida. Why not make dolls for people wanting to satisfy their unheathy (and illegal) urges? It's better than them going out and doing the real thing.
A curious group that seems to think that Mr. Universe's robot girlfriend in Serenity somehow makes it totally okay to prefer a Real Doll to a person.
Gawd. Don't they realize, like, Mr. Universe is a total geek. He just sits in his room all day, monitoring all these information channels, and broadcasting stuff to the world, like anyone cares what he has to say.... Um, I have to go now.
There was a "Buffybot" in that other Whedon series--a replica of Buffy that another character who was in love with her tried to use as a substitute. Only in that case, the point was how poor a substitute it was. Or at least it seemed to be; perhaps the point is that Whedon is obsessed with Real Dolls.
And isn't half of Being and Nothingness basically a discussion of Real Dolls?:
In the seeming exhaustiveness of Being and Nothingness, (1966) Sartre anxiously but incompletely expressed approach and recoil from the feminine as Other. While he described the phenomenology of love in terms of engagement with the free subjectivity of the beloved, he addressed the (masculine) subject's relation to female embodiment as the movement of the for-itself's encounter with the facticity, in which one attempts aggressively to appropriate the autonomy of the Other, then, in recoil, one flies from the obscenely intimate entanglements of other-being.
gym teachers were doing with RecusiAnnie
I remember that you aways had to start by shaking ResusciAnnie and loudly asking, "Annie, Annie, are you awake?"
Now I'm hearing the followup. "No? Well then you won't mind if I just slip into something more comfortable here. Ah, that's better. Get ready to get your ass kicked in Madden NFL 06, byatch!"
Also one confused guy that seems to think that 'bringing sex toys into the bedroom' means he has to watch his girlfriend use a dildo while she berates him for being an inadequate lover.
Cry, cry, masturbate.
And may I say that I'm a little disappointed in the blogosphere for not collectively renaming Mr. Universe as Instapundit.
I swear this is true: during my college years, I walked into a mannequin store, and when the proprieter appeared it really looked as though he had been doing something nasty in the back room. Creep-o-rama.
Out mannequin shopping, were you?
The reason that it's not okay to make child and/or dog dolls for people to "get it out of our system" is that our society views the desire itself as criminal, whether it's acted upon or not. (I'm not saying that that's what the law says or that's what people would answer if asked, I'm just saying that's what seems to me to be going on below the surface.)
I'll try to come up with a funny comment later.
Wow, this has so many of the same issues that fantasy role-playing games have.
Is it cheating if it is not with a 'real' person?
For single people who have 'problems' (with either forming normal attachments of creepy stuff like kids and dog) are they better off with a substitute?
I can't really give a blanket answer to these questions.
You know how we control some insects by using pheremones and faking out all the males so they mate with, like, sticks and leaves?
I wonder if . . . nah! It couldn't be.
I think comment 26 is right. The idea that there are some desires that are intrinsically bad is behind a lot of our intuitive reactions. That is separate from a matter of law, but it might not be separate from a matter of advice. (Do we tell the racist that it's okay to be racist as long as he doesn't act on those beliefs, or do we hope that he eventually becomes a person who doesn't have those impulses?)
Well, in a sense, a desire or prejudice like pedophilia or racism *is* intrinsicly bad, in that it predisposes one to break the law or act immorally. So it can sometimes make sense to make things illegal whose only harm is to substantially increase the chance that someone with those predilictions will commit a truly harmful act. (Whether a real doll of a young child would do this for a pedophile is another question.) But I agree that it's puzzling whether we should consider the desires themselves as wrong.
My first thought is that we shouldn't, insofar as the desires aren't consciously chosen. And, let's face it: they rarely are. Very few of our idiosyncratic desires, healthy or unhealthy, are under our personal control. So I think treating them as an illness is right, but making sure that no unnecessary stigma is associated with the illness. It's a shame that so many mental problems are associated with such social stigma, but I think the situation might be changing. It seems like younger people more readily talk about mental problems and treatment.
I don't think it's moving in the direction you describe in terms of pedophiles or any other type of sex criminal -- they are marked for life under our system, they have to alert all their neighbors when they move into a new neighborhood, etc. Some states specify that sex offenders have to be evacuated to a prison in case of a natural disaster -- that is, they can't go to the normal shelters with everyone else, and there's a real chance that they'd be left behind to fend for themselves entirely. It's a real witch-hunt atmosphere.
And I'm also afraid of saying things like this (vaguely at least), because then people might think I'm a pedophile-lover or a pedophile myself, or that I don't think that child sexual abuse is bad, or whatever.
Not all of our desires are under our conscious control, but certainly they are malleable. And while I don't want a witch-hunt atmosphere to surround people who (say) struggle with desires to molest children, I also don't think it's okay to say that the desire itself is neutral. It's out of order. It would be better not to have this desire.
I'm not sure how to draw this distinction in the case of child molesting tendencies, but we manage it reasonably okay with depression patients. If you're having suicidal thoughts, it's not enough for your therapist just to make sure you never kill yourself; ideally you get the help you need so you don't want to kill yourself any more.
It also doesn't help that our culture has so thoroughly sexualized children, especially girls in their young teens.
32: Yes, I sort of switched gears and started talking more generally about things like depression and bipolar and things without saying so. I didn't really have pedophilia in mind when I was writing the last sentence.
And probably, a certain amount of stigma is probably good for mental problems that make one dangerous to others, as opposed to things like depression.
33: I think desires are really only bad insofar as their consequences are harmful, and never in themselves. We can still say that we would be better of without the desire, whether or not we ever act on it, because the presence of the desire makes it more likely that we will act on it, consciously or unconsciously, and we can't say for sure beforehand that we won't act on the desire. (Racism can affect our interactions with other races without our awareness.)
On what basis can a desire that really couldn't lead to one harming someone else, like say dog-loving (discounting possible harm to the dog), really be said to be wrong? One could imagine a relationship being ruined by a one discovering that one's partner is into bestiality, but that harm is due more to one's extreme distate for that sort of thing than problems with the partner's desire itself. For instance, the same thing could happen if one were to discover one's partner were bisexual, but we don't say their bisexuality is at fault, but the other's homophobia.
Very angry men missing the point of group ... thinking it's unfair that women get sex toys and men don't, and that Amanda is a feminazi wanting to take away men's sex toys.
Questions of morality aside, what's with the sex toy disparity? Women use fake penises; men use fake people. Why isn't there a female equivalent to the real doll, and why isn't there a male equivalent to the vibrator?
D, the equivalents exist. I'd provide links, but I'm at work.
Yeah, I'm with Alameida. Why not make dolls for people wanting to satisfy their unheathy (and illegal) urges? It's better than them going out and doing the real thing.
Relatedly, how does everyone feel about cartoon child porn?
Male Real doll. (Worksafe.) Nothing says it's for women though.
On the other hand, I think that certain desires can be antisocial, insofar as they interfere with a person's ability to have healthy relationships, without them necessarily being immoral. I think a clear case of this is narcissism. I would group bestiality in with this. Just because something is extremely icky doesn't make it wrong, just sick (sometimes).
The Real Doll site offers 15 dolls, 14 female. Of those 14, 3 are asian, one half-asiany, and the other looks like an anime chick. They seem to be targeting a certain demographic.
Short answer: I think that more than just consequences matter. I'll agree that certainly, the bad consequences of Doll-Love are probably quite trivial; these guys are social recluses, really unlikely to hurt any real women, and are removing themselves from the gene pool. Plus, now they can win at video games! A worthy goal.
But on balance, I think it would be better not to have the desires than to just have those desires and never act on them; this requires abandoning most forms of consequentialism, but I don't have a lot of particularly strong consequentialist intuitions.
Not much of an answer, I'm afraid.
"this requires abandoning most forms of consequentialism"
What about when you take into account things that are antisocial but not immoral? (I know, probably a cross-post, but I want to ask.)
I imagine, if you accept that men aren't really an Oppressed Underclass, that there isn't as much of a sex toy market for men because it isn't as necessary. I thought it was easier for guys to achieve orgasm.
Flea over at One Good Thing runs a sex-toy shop, and one of her readers asked why there weren't as many aids for men. (Implying some sort of 'reverse sex1sm!!1!') She pointed out a couple plastic vagina models and noted that his hand would probably work okay.
I'm not sure if 'anti-social' counts as a negative on a consequentialist scale or not, pdf. (Are you really portable AND downloadable?) Maybe in some sense where if you were social you'd lead to more good so by being anti-social, you're not maximizing good, but there's some people I think would improve the world by withdrawing from it, soooo.
I'm not good at ethics.
This conversation has gotten way too serious. Which is boring. Can we go back to just making fun of people who like to fuck dolls?
also don't think it's okay to say that the desire itself is neutral. It's out of order. It would be better not to have this desire.
I heard a discussion on this once on NPR between the moderator and a psychologist guest. The psychologist said we don't like to admit it, but part of our reaction to pedophiles is because many of us have fleeting sexual desires for those under the age of consent. What seperates us from the pedophiles isn't simply the desire. It may be a degree of desire. Definately the choice to act on or to restrain the desire makes a difference. And, given then percentage of molested children in this country, it seems to me that the psychologist has a fairly strong position.
Oh, about the anime thing; I'd be interested to see um, sales data on the Dolls. I know too many well-adjusted anime fans to believe that there's a strong correlation between liking anime and being a true weirdo - were there requests for anime Dolls? Did the designer just expect that his target audience would be lonely, anti-social anime fiends?
(Anti-farberesque liability statement: I am not saying all anime and sci-fi fans are maladjusted weirdos who like to screw dolls.)
many of us have fleeting sexual desires for those under the age of consent.
This seems to blur the issue unnecessarily. Fleeting sexual desire for a mature-looking fifteen-year-old seems to me to be psychologically quite distinct from pedophelia -- a difference in kind, not degree. While there are normal sexual desires (those for the physically mature but underage) that we are properly restrained by law from indulging, that doesn't put people with those desires on a continuum with those who desire physically immature children.
As long as the age of consent is 18, "fleeting" is going to be the wrong word.
On the anime thing -- there's a lot of anime fans out there. While I don't know that it's true, it is, I would guess possible for a significant percentage of severe weirdos to be anime fans , while only an insignificant percentage of anime fans are severe weirdos, because there are so many more anime fans than weirdos. The designer doesn't have to be stereotyping anime fans as weirdos, he just has to be sterotyping weirdos as anime fans.
As long as the age of consent is 18,
I think it's younger in most states. I'm pretty sure 16 year olds are legal in NY, and I don't think there's a state where 17 year olds aren't legal. (could be wrong, but I've discussed this before and done some googling to support.)
Cartoon child pornography (or CGI child porn, as the example usually goes) strikes me as failing acceptability on the same grounds as photo or videographic child porn. The fact that a child is not actually harmed in making the product doesn't change the way that it is received (assuming here that the viewer's interest is in seeing children and not photographic realism). I think the same objection (or observation) could be raised about a legal form of pornography, in which young girls play even younger girls.
I don't know that it's possible to create a harmless placebo supplement for a harmful behavioral disorder. To the extent that inputs determine our behavior at the neurological level, doesn't placebo porn run the risk of nursing that undesirable instinct, not satisficing it?
sexual desire for a mature-looking fifteen-year-old seems to me to be psychologically quite distinct
Yes, that is quite distinct psychologically. Attraction to pre-pubescent minors is pedophilia. Once they hit puberty, it's ephebophilia. Or, as it was known for the vast majority of human history, business as usual.
56, in which young women play very young girls is what I intended there.
Damn, I wish I could spell. Pedophilia just doesn't come up that often.
You hear that, w-lfs-n? Stay out of Utah.
run the risk of nursing that undesirable instinct
LB, some googling shows that in 2002 there were 90,000 reported instances of sexual abuse of a child. As the officials say, however, this is only "the tip of the iceberg." I'm trying to find some estimates, but I've read before that up to 1 in 3 girl children are in some form sexually abused. I was being a little coy above, but I didn't mean to refer to a "maturelooking 15 year old." I do in fact mean to imply that there is good evidence that many, many people have sexual desire for young-looking youngins.
http://www.actwin.com/eatonohio/gay/consent.htm
Attraction to pre-pubescent minors is pedophilia. Once they hit puberty, it's ephebophilia. Or, as it was known for the vast majority of human history, business as usual.
See, this is the distinction I wish I could make with all these numbers. Since everyone under 16 is grouped together, it's hard to figure this out for sure.
Wow, I was way off. I thought 16 or 17 was nearly universal.
this is the distinction I wish I could make
Well, there's the legal distinction, and there's the psychological distinction.
Yeah, I'm not sure what statistics you're looking at, but statistics relating to sex crimes against underage minors are going to include a lot of crimes not committed by pedophiles. (Still, generally, bad bad people, but not pedophiles.)
"Childhood", defined as the period before people are considered adults by society, keeps getting longer and longer because of the increasing complexity of the world, requiring longer education among other things. This causes all sorts of problems, including sexual maladjustment, leading to a demand for real dolls and the like.
(I don't mean to excuse sexual abuse or anything like that. I meant the comment outside the context of the previous ones.)
This page attempts some estimates:
Surveys of college-aged women show that 20% to 30% have had a negative sexual experience. However, most of these experiences are relatively minor, such as a man exposing his genitals to an unsuspecting woman. These types of experiences are less likely to have a significant psychologial impact. The best estimate is that about 10% to 12% of women have been significantly abused.
Estimating the rates of significant abuse in males is even more difficult for a few reasons. The secrecy around this issues is usually greater, and males rarely reveal abuse before age 16. The rate of significant abuse of males is about 6% to 8%, somewhat lower than that for females.
What I'm interested in is whether most people are naturally not sexually interested in the young, or whether most people are conditioned to have no sexual interest for the young. Sadly, I am not a psychology student. However, if this desire is truly widespread, it would seem to be evidence that one cannot say that *not* have sexual desire for the young is in keeping with the natural order of things.
69, right, without being able to distinguish in those estimates between pedophilia and ephebophilia, it's fuzzy. But, there's also not a clear line between those 2 philias. Most girls hit puberty now at what, 10?
"if this desire is truly widespread"
How widespread would it have to be? More than homosexuality?
Let me clear up one other thing, I'm not suspicious that real child-desire was widespread. That would surprise me. I think there is a good case there that that is a different kind of desire. However, there does seem to be another category, where the desire is more of a slight difference in type or degree, but not kind.
I'm not a psychologist (or a biologist) either, but I feel pretty confident asserting that what is "natural" for all branches of the animal kingdom is sexual attraction to others of your species when they mature to the point of reproductive capability. That we have re-defined adulthood to nearly the end of the teenage years is social conditioning.
The odd twist in this is the receding age of puberty for girls, possibly due to growth hormones in food products.
How widespread would it have to be? More than homosexuality?
There seems to be good evidence that heterosexuality is mostly a social construct.
On the off chance you were responding to me, Michael, when I said 'out of order' I didn't mean psychologically disordered. I don't know whether we have predilections to want to sleep with prepubescent children or not; I do know that it's generally frowned on, though.
70 reminded me of this odd USA Today story I saw today, about how more oral sex among teens (Cl33n1ss!!!) is leading to some future "crisis in intimacy", based on the evidence of "back in my day".
Re 73: I think it starts around ten or 11. I'm not sure how long it takes to get to the "physically mature" marker though. Five years?
I think I'm having trouble being clear today. I should stick to cock jokes until I get a big cup of coffee.
Growth hormones and/or nutrition have dropped the onset of menses considerably, but I don't know if that corresponds to earlier overall maturity, too. (Having a baby at 11 is a lot more dangerous than at 16, in most cases.)
Since it wasn't clear, my earlier link casts doubt" on the hormone/puberty onset connection.
And my 77, was wrong, too. What I meant was that it certainly seems possible that, absent social conditioning, bisexuality would be prevalent. In which case heterosexuality would likely be seen as a deviation similar to homosexuality, and, therefore, no less acceptable.
Except of course, for way back when when the average life expectancy was 23. 8 year olds had to be starting families; if you waited till you were sixteen, you'd be menopausal!
85, you mean "no more acceptable", right? Go get some coffee, man.
Good point, Cala!
One of my early years of elementary school, the teacher thought that Egyptians usually died in their early 20s. I had a lot of dumb teachers.
87: right, that problem came from re-ordering the sentence. Anyway, I'm going to get coffee.
On a completely different note, anyone here seen the anime Chobits?
On another unrelated note, am I the only one who doesn't understand the "update" in the least? Is it a joke? I just don't get it...
The other day I was talking to a philosopher I had just met who lives in a neighborhood called "Los Feliz," which he said was untranslatably ungrammatical--plural article + adjectival form. I tried to tell him it could be translated "Teh Happy." Remind me not to do that again.
Wow. After reading about a third of the way through those pandagon comments, they started to get unbearably repetitive. (And my tolerance is pretty high, as that goes.) Has anyone read through the rest, and does it get any better?
why isn't there a male equivalent to the vibrator?
'Cause guys are squeamish about penetration.
'Cause guys are squeamish about penetration.
Hello, welcome to the Mineshaft. First time here?
There seems to be good evidence that heterosexuality is mostly a social construct.
I'm going to be about the eightieth person in this thread to preface a comment with, "I'm not a psychologist, but..."
I'm not a psychologist, but this seems wrong to me. The concept of your sexual acts constituting an identity is definitely a social construct, and certainly more people would have same gender sex if there weren't any taboo. But from what I recall from my reading about the issue in college, evidence isn't trending towards the "everyone is bisexual" line. Plenty o' people are categorically gay or straight in arousal patterns and they find lots of significant hormonal and structural differences between the two populations. (Matters are generally starker and clearer for men than women.) Consistent preferences for other-sex partners exist and are innate, according to my understanding. In an ultra free society people with those preferences might experiment more, but they'd probably trend back towards their biological orientation.
Also, there are male vibrators with little cups that feel awesome to the touch and make me wish I had a penis.
Vibrators just don't do it for this male.
It just feels buzzy.
Show me a small boat sailor, and I'll show you a woman with penis envy.
Buckets suck. (Particularly when people put rubber spiders in them. There are few things more annoying than realizing that one has pissed all over said spider and now is faced with the choice of retrieving it (unappealing) or tossing it overboard (littering).) (I littered.)
Show me a small boat sailor, and I'll show you a woman with penis envy.
At first I thought this was some kind of reference to the "little man in the boat," and the buckets were some sort of reference to the device Tia mentioned in 99. Then I reread.
I still think "small boat sailor" makes a great euphemism.
Re 99: Tia, please don't leave us hanging. Can you give us more info, or a link? Maybe you can get a commission out of this.
98. I think what I meant is that, in said free society, it might be the case that more people than not will have sex with members of both genders.
104: Michael -- more people than not??? You are batshit crazy. You really think that many people are holding back solely because of social taboos? Come on...
Social taboos from the first week of life? Yeah, I do.
Look at it this way, I see nothing wrong with dating guys, and I can recognize that some guys are quite attractive. However, I really doubt if I'll ever date or even as much as make out with a guy. There's a lot of interior resistence, and, moreover, simple preference. Not just sexual preference, but a preference based upon cultural ideas and past experience.
I'm not certain about this, because it's really hard, perhaps impossible to be so. What would it be like in a society where sexual relations were equal? If we grew up seeing them, listening to songs about them, seeing them in movies. I mean in a more free and realxed manner than now, when most things are hetero with a definate undercurrent of homo, but very little acceptance or popularization of simply not having a distinct preference.
And didn't Kinsey report that only a minority expressed exclusive sexual interest in a single gender?
I think the Kinsey report is considered to be less than reliable now, specifically in terms of the inflated percentage that would consider themselves 'bi'. I don't have a source for that, though, but I remember reading about it when the movie came out.
That said, while it's probably not an overwhelming number, it seems that there's be a significant increase in the number of people who would demonstrate an interest in both sexes if there were no social norms reinforcing heterosexuality.
Maybe. There's just so much bad criticisim of Kinsey that I'm skeptical of all criticisim unless presented with a sound argument.
it seems that there's be a significant increase in the number of people who would demonstrate an interest in both sexes if there were no social norms reinforcing heterosexuality.
or enough booze is involved.
Show me a small boat sailor, and I'll show you a woman with penis envy.
So ... you're talking about lesbians here, right? "I'd sail her small boat any day!", eh?
Wouldn't lesbians be the least likely to exhibit penis envy? (Other than, of course, in the purely eliminiatory context I was referencing?)
Wouldn't lesbians be the least likely to exhibit penis envy?
Re: 106, there's at least an attempt to describe this kind of society, iirc, in Arthur C. Clarke's Tricentennial. Something not entirely different in Robert Silverberg's The World Inside. No relation at all, but too good a title to pass on in this context is Ted Sturgeon's short story, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"
http://www.i5net.net/~i5pages/i5pagesnonaccount/ilosaki/incestmovies/2916897/photo.html clothinggamessickening
