Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Beth and I are perplexed, and embarrassed, and we still don’t know if either of us has done it, or not, and do we want to do it? This silver-balling? Whatever it is, I notice that I like to say it, that there is some sort of erotic charge in the sound of those s’s and l’s, that hard little b rolling around on the tongue, the slippery and receptive gerund, the invocation of silver shockingly close to the tenderness of balls—ouch!—the proximity of metal to flesh, the glamour of the juxtaposition of silver and skin. I don’t know if I’ve done silver-balling, but after a few days I know that I have, at least, said and written silver-balling, and the more I say it, the hotter it gets. Beth and I say it quite a bit, and we ask nearly everyone we know about it, with the exception of Troy. We don’t ask Troy because we don’t want the silver-balling game to end yet. No one, it turns out, knows what it is, and we discover that there is a pleasure in that, too: the erotic unknown. Surprising your friends, who like to think they are sexually sophisticated, with an act they’ve never heard of and that is possibly injurious. Like Catherine Deneuve opening the buzzing box in the Buñuel film Belle du Jour, that box of erotic mystery. What’s in there? Why is it buzzing? Why does she look so happy when she opens it?

  Silver-balling. Say it a few times. See what I mean? It’s Seussian, also a bit Marie Antoinette. One can imagine they were silver-balling at Versailles. Lucky James, to be silver-balling said hot new boyfriend. It kind of turns me on that I can’t quite see what they’re doing in there, that the shadows don’t make sense to me. In my mind, the silver is molten, but also cool, which isn’t possible in reality. In my mind, silver-balling is special, dangerous, complex.

  After a week or so, Beth and I finally give in and write Troy. What is silver-balling? Oh, he writes back, I just made that up. I have no idea.

  Silver-balling. Silver-balling. Silver-balling. It rings in the mind, full of promise.

  Sex Dolls for the Twenty-First Century

  David Levy

  By the early 1980s, blow-up sex dolls were becoming quite big business in some countries but were viewed as obscene in others. In 1982 David Sullivan, a British sex entrepreneur, attempted to import from West Germany a consignment of inflatable rubber dolls. When inflated, these became life-size replicas of a woman’s body, complete with the usual three orifices to provide male customers with sexual gratification.The dolls were seized by the British Customs and Excise as “indecent or obscene articles” and their seizure was upheld in the condemnation proceedings before magistrates and on appeal to the Crown Court. But Sullivan’s company, Conegate, then appealed to the High Court in Britain, and, having lost that appeal as well, Conegate appealed yet again, this time to the European Court of Justice, where finally the company won the case in 1987. It turned out that the English law prohibiting the importation of the dolls, which dated from 1876, had been superseded by articles 30 and 36 of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the document signed when the European Economic Community was created. Under the terms of the treaty, restricting the importation of the dolls into the United Kingdom would have constituted an arbitrary barrier to free trade, and it was free trade that the treaty was specifically designed to promote. The major consequence for the British government of losing this case was that all import restrictions on “obscene or indecent” items had to be lifted!

  The paucity of published information on the history of sex dolls makes it extremely difficult to date the launch of the first products that appeared on the market in commercially interesting quantities, though the Conegate case indicates that it must have been no later than 1982. Since the mid-1990s at least, various grades of sex doll have been manufactured, ranging from inexpensive inflatable welded-vinyl models, whose looks leave much to be desired but which incorporate an artificial vagina—the main purpose of their customers—through midpriced products made of heavy latex and with convincingly molded hands and feet, imitation eyes in glass or plastic, and styled wigs adorning their mannequin-like heads; up to the top-of-the-line products that in 2006 cost in the region of $7,000, such as the market leader in this price range—RealDoll.

  It was in 1996 that Matt McMullen, a California sculptor, revolutionized the sex-toy industry when he launched Nina, the first of a line of products sold under the RealDoll brand name by his company, Abyss Creations. McMullen had previously worked in a Halloween-mask factory, making innocent sculpted female forms in his spare time as a sideline. These were mostly small figures, about twelve inches tall, made of resin and sold as models. With time he began to make larger dolls and to use materials that were softer to the touch. He also designed a skeleton in order to allow his dolls to have limbs that could move.

  When McMullen started to advertise his dolls with photographs on his website, he received several inquiries from people who believed his products to be sex dolls.When he explained to them that they were wrong, the inquiries changed to ones asking him if he would manufacture sex dolls, a group of visitors to his site offering him three thousand dollars each for ten dolls. So he quit his job at the mask factory, developed a silicone material that could be employed to make the doll’s genitalia durable and feel right, and by 1996 he was in business.

  The RealDoll products are lifelike in appearance as well as being life size and close to life weight. The nine different body sizes advertised on the RealDoll site in early 2006 ranged from five feet one inch tall to five feet ten; they weighed in at between seventy and one hundred pounds; they offered busts from 34A to 44FF, waists from twenty-two to twenty-six inches, and hips from thirty-four to thirty-eight. Other available options included fourteen different female heads, each with its own name: Amanda, Angela, Anna Mae, Brittany, Celine, et al.; seven shades of hair coloring; six different colors for the eyes; fair, medium, tanned, Asian, or African skin tones; and red, blonde, or brunette pubic hair that can come shaved, trimmed, or “natural.” The dolls are based around articulated skeletons made of steel, have artificial elastic flesh made of silicone, and they come with three functioning “pleasure portals”—vagina, oral, and anal. Each female doll is thus custom-made, with the buyer able to choose from more than 500 million permutations of these various options.

  In addition to the fourteen female models for sale early in 2006, one model of a male doll was also available. It was named Charlie—five feet ten inches tall, with a forty-four-inch chest, a thirty-two-inch waist, and a stocky body. Charlie was priced at $7,000 plus shipping charges and could be provided with “anal entry if desired, plus one size of penis attachment,” size not specified. The female RealDolls at that time were slightly less expensive, at $6,500 dollars, and the company was talking of sales in the region of 300 to 350 per year.

  RealDoll is by no means the only American brand on the market. A rival California company, CyberOrgasMatrix, uses a different body material—an elastic gel that the manufacturers claim is stronger and more realistic than silicone, as well as being less expensive. Their principal product is the Pandora Peaks model, which, like RealDoll, comes with numerous options. Customers pay according to which options they choose, so that, for example, while vaginal and oral entries are standard, anal entry costs an extra $250.Yet another California manufacturer is SuperBabe, whose doll is modeled on the porn star Vanessa Lace.

  The number of sex-doll manufacturers is increasing steadily, as are the websites that sell them.1 And not to be outdone by the growing band of American producers, companies in China, Germany, and Japan have been getting in on the act. In Nuremberg, Germany, an aircraft mechanic named Michael Harriman claims to have created the world’s most sophisticated sex doll, called Andy, with skin made from a silicone-based material employed in plastic surgery, an artificial heart that beats harder during sex, in time with the doll’s harder breathing, which stays cold just as in real life. Andy can be made to move by remote control, wiggling her hips under the sheets and making other suggestive movements, all at the touch of a button. The price is similar to that of RealDolls, but there are additional charges for special modifications
, such as extra-large breasts. Harriman claims that his dolls “are almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing, but I am still developing improvements and I will only be happy when what I have is better than the real thing.”

  A wide assortment of Chinese offerings is available online and in sex shops, at prices ranging from $50 to $250, as described by Meghan Laslocky:Sweet Spot: A Taste of Things to Come, a catalogue from Hong Kong, lists nearly 70 different models of blow-up doll, including saucy Sondrine, whose hair, nipples, and genitalia glow in the dark; Betty Fat Girl Bouncer, to satisfy the chubby chaser; Brandi Sommer, with “super vibrating LoveCline™ lips”; and the Perfect Date, which is just 36 inches tall and is equipped with a mouth and cup holder built into her head.There’s even a dairy maid doll who lactates and has short blonde braids reminiscent of Swiss Miss. Some of the blow-ups vibrate and, oddly enough, scream.

  Thus have the sexual lives of sailors, among others, been enriched with the advances in doll design and materials technology, advances that have created realistic skinlike substances such as “CyberSkin”2 and have thereby made the current generation of sex dolls more comfortable to use than earlier models. That sailors are still avid patrons of such products is of little doubt, and an interesting example of their use was described by Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi in a learned journal in 1993. This report involved the skipper of a fishing trawler from Greenland. After some three months at sea, the skipper had occasion to rouse the ship’s engineer in his cabin during the night because of engine trouble. After the engineer left his cabin to sort out the problem, the skipper observed a bump in the engineer’s bed, whereupon he found an inflatable doll with an artificial vagina and was tempted into using it in order to assuage his sexual starvation. A few days after this episode, the captain experienced a discharge from his penis, and upon the trawler’s return to port in Greenland he sought advice at a hospital in Nanortalik. There had been no women on board the trawler while it was at sea; the skipper denied having had any homosexual contacts, and there was no doubt in the minds of the doctors that the onset of the symptoms was more than two months after leaving port, which meant that the source had to have been on board the trawler. The engineer was then examined by the hospital doctors and found to have gonorrhea. He had observed a mild discharge from his own penis after the ship left port but had not been treated with antibiotics. He admitted having ejaculated into the vagina of the doll just before the skipper had called on him, without washing the doll afterward. He also admitted having sex with a girl some days before the trawler put to sea. Kleist and Moi’s account in Genitourinary Medicine3 suggests that this was the first reported case of the transmission of gonorrhea through an inflatable doll.

  The marketing of RealDolls and their cousins from other manufacturers tends to be based on the idea that they are “the perfect woman,” perfect because they’re always ready and available, because they provide all the benefits of a human female partner without any of the complications involved with human relationships, and because they make no demands on their owners, with no conversation and no foreplay required. And it is precisely because of these attributes, the doll’s lack of “complications” and demands, that they will likely appeal to many of the men who gave such explanations as to why they pay prostitutes for sex, and to others who have similar feelings about their sex lives at home. So, already, in this promotional slant, we can see the basis of the idea that men who use prostitutes should save up their dollars until they can afford a RealDoll. I believe that this will happen in a big way, and that the New York hooker who feared that robot technology would decimate her profession will be proved correct.The signs are already there, as you will soon see.

  The most successful manufacturer of sex dolls in Japan is Orient Industries, whose president, Hideo Tsuchiya, started working in the adult sex-aid business in the early 1960s, opening his own store shortly afterward. His business boomed fairly quickly, due largely to two dolls, named Antarctica 1 and Antarctica 2, that achieved media fame of a sort when some of Japan’s scientists took them as companions for the winter at Showa Base, Japan’s headquarters in Antarctica. At that time Tsuchiya’s dolls had permanently open mouths and were inflatable. Although sales were brisk, the blow-up dolls had a tendency to develop leaks and would often burst under the weight of their owners. So Tsuchiya decided that he needed a more durable product, which he achieved by using stronger materials and a design that did not need to be inflated. One of the company’s early models, called “Omokage,” was specially designed to be dismantled into lower and upper portions, for easy storage in the cramped space of Japan’s traditionally small homes.

  The growing success of the dolls manufactured by Orient Industries was reported in the Mainichi Daily News in late 2003.4 “Early on, the showroom was more like a therapy area,” recounted Tsuchiya. “We’d get old guys who had permission from their wives to buy dolls, or mothers of disabled sons searching for a partner. Nearly all of our customers had some problem related to their sex life.”

  As the popularity of sex dolls in Japan increased, the attitude of customers toward their dolls transformed, from their being “considered mere instruments in which men could ejaculate to objects of deep affection.” By late 2003, Tsuchiya’s dolls were selling so well that he was able to boast how it took only ten minutes for fifty new dolls to disappear from the shelves. Standing just under five feet tall and weighing around fifty-seven pounds, the sale of the Orient Industries dolls was beginning to become a fairly big business, increasingly attracting attention from the media. In one report by Dacapo5 journalist Mark Schreiber that appeared in a 2004 edition of Asian Sex Gazette,6 Tsuchiya revealed how “Dutch wives,”7 as they are called in Japan, have their own special place and treatment within the confines of Japanese culture, with discarded dolls having the opportunity of funeral rituals redolent of the virtual cemeteries devised for “dead” Tamagotchis.

  “A Dutch wife is not merely a doll, or an object. She can be an irreplaceable lover, who provides a sense of emotional healing.” Speaking at his showroom near JR Okachimachi Station, where some two dozen of Orient Industries’ ersatz females are displayed, Tsuchiya tells Dacapo’s reporter that for years his clientele had typically been handicapped men, or single men over forty. But from around six years ago, when he commenced sales via the Internet (www.orient-doll.com), he was mildly surprised to receive a surge of orders from men in their twenties and thirties.

  “When I ran my hand along the doll’s thighs,” confesses Dacapo’s reporter, “I felt a shiver of excitement.” After observing the painstaking effort that goes into the making of each doll at Orient Industries’ factory, the reporter came away enlightened.“Many people might be inclined to disparage sex toys,” he writes, “but these dolls truly exemplify Japan’s status as a high-tech country!”

  Jewel and her sisters are shipped to purchasers in cardboard boxes stamped kenko kigu (health apparatus), and users are assured of lifelong after-service. As the vow “Until death do us part” may be stretching things a bit, the company anticipates a time when Jewel might outlive her usefulness or her owner. “If a yome [bride] is no longer needed, we’ll disretely [sic] take her off a customer’s hands at no charge,” Tsuchiya adds. “Twice a year we also arrange for a kuyo [Buddhist memorial service] for discarded dolls at the special bodhisattva for dolls at the Shimizu Kannondeo in Ueno Park.” Founded in 1631, it’s where the “souls” of dolls are consecrated. (Kannon is the Goddess of Mercy.)

  A few months after this Asian Sex Gazette article appeared, a small group of Japanese entrepreneurs, who had previously been thinking of starting up a regular escort service, decided instead to hire out sex dolls rather than young women. In August 2004 their company, Doll no Mori (Forest of Dolls), opened its first shop in Tokyo’s Ota district, specializing in deliveries of dolls to hotels as well as to private homes. Initially Doll no Mori was renting out to around twenty customers per month, but by April 2005 their first shop had increased its custome
r base to one hundred and fifty per month, and the business had been franchised to forty other shops nationwide, with monthly turnovers averaging anywhere from $2,500 and $25,000 per shop. The company’s manager, Hajime Kimura, explained to the newspaper Nikkan Gendai that although “we expected most of the clients to be eotaku (geeky) types, as it turned out, most of them are ordinary salarymen in their 30s and 40s.” For customers who wish to dress up their dolls, there are optional extras at around $80 each, including wigs, negligees, bathing suits, and other costumes such as school uniforms and French maids’ outfits. In a follow-up article in Nikkan Gendai, sex therapist Kim Myung Gun explained, “People have been saying for a long time that men have lost their desire for real women. Rather than have sex with a woman who doesn’t fulfill their expectations, they would rather play with something that corresponds to their fantasy, even if she’s not real.”

  It quickly became clear in Japan that the fembot’s far less technologically sophisticated ancestor, the sex doll, represents a real threat to the trade of human sex workers. Ryann Connell reported on this growing trend in a 2005 article in the Mainichi Daily News: “Rent-a-Doll Blows Hooker Market Wide Open.”

  Several companies are involved in the bustling trade supplying customers looking to slip it into some silicon[e], with lifelike figurines that set back buyers something in the vicinity of 600,000 yen (almost $5,000), as opposed to the simple blow-up types with the permanently open mouths that can be bought from vending machines for a few thousand yen. Prime among the sellers of silicon[e] sex workers is Doll no Mori, which runs a 24-hour service supplying love dolls, or “Dutch wives” as the Japanese call them, to customers in southern Tokyo and neighboring Kanagawa Prefecture.