Sexbots
Real Dolls
-
Matt McMullen’s ‘love dolls’ can cost $50,000, are hyperrealistic – and are selling faster than he can make them. Is this the future of sex?
The man who meets me at his office in San Marcos, a scenic beach town just north of San Diego, is slight, unassuming, with gentle manners and a sleeve tattoo. His headquarters, on the other hand, are far more arresting. Heads on shelves. Disembodied sculptured limbs. Naked torsos. Otherworldly blank looks. There are full-size dolls everywhere – smooth, toned, unblemished. Both a fantasy of what women look like, and strangely real at the same time.
Matt McMullen didn’t set out to invent “the World’s Finest Love Doll” (he prefers the term “love doll” to “sex doll”). It began as a hobby, something he did when he wasn’t working at a factory making Hallowe’en masks or playing in grunge bands. He decided to use moulding techniques in his garage to make figurines about a foot or two tall. The result was a series of exotic dancers. When they sold well he graduated on to a one-off, life-size model.
In the past he has said the project was more of a “joke” or “funky art piece”, and only became something he could make money from because people started asking him to make more of his silicone dolls with their completely accurate, fully articulated skeletons.
Traditionally, the sex doll has had a cheap, rather ludicrous image. The main problem has been that even the most sophisticated versions are still made up of separate parts – a visible seam between the upper and lower leg – and can only be propped up like a GI Joe. McMullen changed that. Early on, their creator gave the dolls replaceable faces – attachable by Velcro at first, and now magnets. Next, the bodies became lighter and had more points of articulation in the spine, neck and shoulders. In their most recent incarnation, they are strangely lifelike, weighing 100lb and priced around $6,000 (£4,000) or more. McMullen’s so-called love dolls have begun to acquire a knowing, super-real glamour, like photoshopped models in a glossy magazine.
They have been featured on HBO and Howard Stern. The quirky, charming Lars and the Real Girl starred Ryan Gosling and a doll called Bianca, made by McMullen. His dolls have appeared on mainstream television shows including CSI: New York and House.
Eight years after starting his company – Abyss Creations, so called to be at the top of the alphabetical list at conventions – McMullen’s business has grown to a team of 12 and a 8,800sq ft facility (albeit one without a sign, to prevent nosey visitors). This year is shaping up to be one of his best yet. The company estimates up to 400 dolls will be shipped out – which means roughly one a day. Sales have been helped by curious customers being able to do all their doll shopping in private and online. When we take a tour of the production floor, McMullen asks me to refrain from taking photos of anything inside the moulds. “Those are trade secrets,” he says. “I’ve had people come from other doll manufacturers under the guise of someone who just wants a tour. And then they go back and try to rip us off.”
His success has inspired rivals. He now has competitors in Asia, like Candy Girl in Japan and MicDoll in China. But American companies are in it, too – such as Private Island Beauties, and Sinthetics, which is run by a former employee of McMullen’s.
The production floor is a hive of activity. It’s a rugged workspace of sprockets and lathes and 50-gallon drums. And while it thoroughly destroys any illusion behind the dolls, McMullen says that customers enjoy a tour – “It reassures them to see how they’re made.” For the uninitiated, though, it’s an unholy sight. A recent visitor from Vanity Fair vividly described it as “a mass slaughter at a dry cleaner or meatpacking plant”. Bodies everywhere, in various states of completion. Headless torsos – because not all customers need the whole body. At one end of the room are the metal skeletons, set into moulds. “Key parts are stainless steel and titanium. The pipes are high-grade PVC,” says McMullen. He sounds like a building contractor. And at the other end is an abattoir scene, of bodies hanging from hooks on a carousel. One of the RealDoll craftsmen is among them, whistling and gluing on nipples.
Customers can choose between 11 different body types and 31 faces. They are invited to build the rubber woman of their dreams, right down to the freckles and eyebrows (real human hair available) and whether she has capillaries (wisps of red thread) on her eyeballs or not. Some customers even demand an entirely unique body type, just for them – no one else is allowed that mould. Those go for $50,000 and take up to six months. The average customer waits three months.
That said, he has his limits. No children and no animals. “I have been asked,” he says. And no real people lookalikes, although he’ll customise a doll to suggest a celebrity likeness.
His customers are not all like the shy loner character played by Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl. McMullen maintains that there is no stereotype of the typical client, although fewer than ten per cent are female. His clientele includes sheikhs, truck drivers, scientists, housewives, a Nobel prizewinner, couples hoping to pep up their sex lives, a nursing association, a dental school, wounded veterans, men recovering from prostate cancer. The US Department of Defense has purchased dolls (without genitalia) for war games. Psychiatrists use them in therapy sessions. Parents have ordered them for their autistic grown-up children. According to Vanity Fair, there are rumours that an actor with “anger management issues” bought five, and was seen sunbathing with them on his yacht.
McMullen has attempted to introduce robotic enhancements along the way. They’ve seldom worked, though. He has tried internal heating, to get past that cold, sticky feel of the rubber. “We had three different versions of a heater, but we haven’t released any of them. Either it’s not completely safe, or it didn’t get warm enough, or it got too hot.”
He even got his dolls to gyrate at one time – a step into the animatronic arena. He installed a motor in the chest cavity. There were various speeds and sequences. “I won’t say she’s fully twerking, but that kind of thing,” he says. “But the downside is the noise factor. You hear this rrr-rrr, rrr-rrr.” He sounds like an old windscreen wiper. “It’s just not a turn-on.”
When it comes to robotics, McMullen is torn. “Sometimes I just want the doll to be a doll, you know? There’s a reason they’re timeless. They inspire the imagination. What we’ve found is that doll owners really don’t want a high level of robotics. But you should ask them yourself.”
It’s a big day for Ben (not his real name) tomorrow. He’s taking his wife to her very first “doll meet”. He read about it on dollforum.com – some 60 doll owners meeting up in Pennsylvania, and bringing their dolls. These meets happen often, all over the world. Ben went to one last year. He was new to the subculture; he’d only just bought his first doll. And he confessed to the other doll owners that he hadn’t told his wife yet.
“They were like, ‘What?’ ” He laughs. “ ‘You better hope she doesn’t find out on her own.’ ”
This is not a lonely single man who’s been wounded by his relationships with women or lacking in social skills. Ben, 53, is a successful painting contractor from New Jersey. He’s married, with a 25-year-old daughter, and he lives a gregarious, active life – he has nine antique Harley-Davidsons, he goes kite surfing, plays the drums in a Pink Floyd tribute band, and he owns four parrots.
“Four parrots and four sex dolls!” He laughs. “You see, my wife’s menopausal. The frequency of intimacy isn’t there any more. So last year I bought a doll. And wow – I was blown away.”
\ When he told his wife, he says she was more perturbed that he’d kept it from her than anything else. (She declined to comment.) What smoothed the transition was his wife’s interest in photography, which is a huge part of the doll scene. The dolls often look stunning in photos – the sculpted bodies, the unblemished skin. In the hands of a practised photographer, they can be hard to separate from the real thing. But the spell is broken in the “flesh”, if that’s the word. The dolls can look still and cold. So the illusion of photography is critical to the fantasy. And on dollforum.com there are frequent photography competitions.
“As soon as I bought Grace – that’s what I call my first doll – she was like a muse,” Ben says. “I was doing these shots that were like eye candy for men. It was so inspiring. And now my wife is posing and shooting the dolls, too.”
The sex part is private. Some couples reportedly bring the dolls into bed with them as part of their fantasy life. But Ben keeps it quite separate. “It’s like a guy watching porn,” he says. “She knows it goes on, but she doesn’t want to know.”
In posing the dolls, he ascribes them personalities. Grace, his first, did all the things he does – play the drums, fix motorbikes. Roxanne, his second, however, was distinct. “She’s like a vagabond gypsy,” he says. Ben isn’t in the least bit inspired by the predicted dawn of the sexbots. “I’d rather infuse personality myself,” he says.
At doll meets, owners pose their dolls in nature, and take photos. But the rest of the time, it’s just a get-together. Benita Marcussen is a Danish photographer whose exhibition of men and their dolls opens soon in Copenhagen. She shot the photos at doll meets in the UK and the US.
“It’s quite sweet, really,” she says. “They’re very kind to each other. Very respectful of each other’s dolls, always asking permission. ‘Can I touch her hair?’ I never saw any doll swapping or anything like that. Most of the time, the dolls just stay in one room, while the men go and drink beer and have barbecues. It’s just a weekend away.”
There are all kinds of men in this culture, apparently. McMullen says his customers range from their twenties to their seventies. Marcussen has seen wealthy attorneys and business owners at these meets, as well as men who had to save for months to get one doll. And the sex isn’t even that prevalent.
“They don’t just have sex with them whenever they want,” she says. “They’re cold, they’re heavy. They need to be moved to the bedroom, posed and heated with an electric blanket … It’s quite an operation.”
And some of the stories are extreme. Men who have lost their wives to cancer and bought a doll in her stead. Men who treat their dolls like life partners. Davecat is a public doll owner who has invited documentary crews to film him watch TV with his doll, talk to her, eat with her. Some doll owners have married their dolls and sent the pictures to RealDoll.
Ben’s Harley-Davidson collection has been neglected lately. The dolls are taking over. And for McMullen, this is exactly the analogy. “It’s a subculture just like bikes or cars,” he says. “They’re collectors. Some people have 10 or 15 dolls, and they look after them as if they’re Rembrandts. This is what people forget – these are pieces of art. Forget that it’s anatomically correct.”
“Anatomically correct” is code for “you can have sex with it”. And this disconnect between the art of RealDoll and its sexual function has been a source of irritation for McMullen over the years. “This is way more than just porn,” he says. “My whole career, I’ve pushed really hard against that. This is my art. If I were doing sculptures out of marble, no one would question it.”
In 2006, Dr Henrik Christensen, the chairman of the European Robotics Research Network at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, predicted that humans would be having sex with robots in the next five years. He told The Economist, “Because people are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so anything that moves will be an improvement.”
“It would be great to give the face 45 points of articulation, and all these subtle points of expression,” says McMullen. “But it’s prohibitively expensive and it’s prone to breaking down, which just becomes an ordeal. Those robots at trade shows that interact with people? That’s because there’s a team there. When the cable breaks on the left eye blink, a man just opens up the back of the head and re-attaches it. But when it’s in your house and one eye’s stuck shut? Not a happy customer.”
The movie reference that most closely resembles McMullen’s ideal future is the Spike Jonze film Her, starring Scarlett Johansson – she voices the character of a hyper-advanced talking smartphone app, which steals Joaquin Phoenix’s heart. “Siri [the equivalent of Her, on Apple’s iPhone] proves that it’s possible to talk to your devices,” McMullen says. “And if the processor can learn from its interactions, then it can learn what you like or don’t like. I see these dolls as a peripheral for your smartphone. That’s attainable. So instead of your phone reminding you of something, the voice comes out of the doll. And you get the perception that the doll is your girlfriend.”
This is the sex-doll vision he’s talking about. One of his RealDolls is set up in a customer’s home, sitting in a chair, or lying on the sofa. The doll, by its GPS, knows where it is. It could call the owner to come downstairs. “Come and sit with me and watch TV.”
“When you’re away, maybe she texts you,” he says. “Maybe you see her in your phone, as you would if you were facetiming with someone. She says, ‘I miss you. I can’t wait till Friday when you get back from your business trip.’ ” He smiles. “That’s where we’re headed.”
McMullen says he feels grateful for his good fortune. He has four children, he’s happily married to wife number two, and he’s doing something he loves for a living. “I’ve come full circle,” he says. “There were times over the past 20 years when I felt I was working at McDonald’s; I just had to keep pumping stuff out. But I’ve grown older now. And I’m having a second wind. I’ve always thought of this as my claim to fame, kind of. And I have all these ideas.”