Just like a woman

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.

Next page: Newbies query old doll hands: Should I wait until my doll arrives to buy her clothes?