Just like a woman

By the end of my reporting, though, I just saw the men as pathetic and the conversations so packed with false bravado as to be ludicrous. During one visit to the chat room, the men were bragging about their success getting "pussy" using strategies from the likes of Seduce and Conquer and Speed Seduction. In my generous moments, I thought of Hello Dolly as a safe house where the range of iDollators -- from the merely eccentric to the perhaps deeply disturbed -- could meet and talk doll. As one iDollator wrote to the group, "You are truly a family of open-minded people and it's so great to know I'm not alone." Hello Dolly also functions as an interactive handbook for doll owners. Newbies query old doll hands: Should I wait until my doll arrives to buy her clothes? Is the sex really that good? And old doll hands swap tips: where to buy fake chest hair that can be trimmed and glued on as pubic hair or how to recycle one's own strays, gathered from the bathroom floor. Or how to rig an aquarium heater and a dimmer switch to heat your doll's vagina if you don't have time to warm her whole body with an electric blanket.

Hello Dolly is also a parade where men can show off their girlfriends. Nineteen thousand photographs have been posted, usually with doll after doll in various stages of lingerie dishabille. Some dolls are quite attractive, say with the lovely aquiline nose of an H5. Others -- even with exactly the same head-body combination, peeled from the same molds -- are ugly enough to scare the Teflon off a frying pan, victims of coral lipstick and green eye shadow. Many photos are relatively innocent -- Mari in a pink and red Valentine's Day corset -- and some aren't innocent at all -- Anita Dickens-Hyde fellating a real man in a Jacuzzi style bathtub, the image viewed nearly 30,000 times.

As with Davecat, I spoke and e-mailed many times with Everhard, who is 49 years old and lives in Britain. I learned that his doll Rebecca is old in doll years -- her nipple paint has long since worn off and her freckles need touch-ups -- but to Everhard, Rebecca is young, the 18-year-old daughter of his second doll, Caroline, who he imagines as about 34. In one photograph, the two sit together, both in hats, dressed as if for an English wedding and enjoying flutes of sparking water garnished with lemon. Some of Everhard's other photographic vignettes are downright peculiar: When was the last time you saw a naked 18-year-old girl straddling her naked mother in a pillow fight? Last winter, Louise, Caroline's sister, joined Caroline and Rebecca to round out what Everhard calls his harem. He thought of just ordering an extra face for Caroline's body -- it would have been much less expensive, just $500 -- but ultimately rejected the idea because without a third body, sisters Caroline and Louise would never meet except when disembodied.

As with Davecat, relationships have eluded Everhard. "You see boys and girls walking around together, but how they get together is a huge mystery to me," he says. "I just want to know, how does it happen?" he asks me, not, I think, entirely rhetorically.

So for Everhard, his harem offered a solution: He says he's driven to impress women, but he's a failure at it, and since he's had his dolls, he worries less about not having a real girlfriend. "Real dolls are imitation women. They are only an approximation to the real thing. To the best of the real thing," he emphasizes. Hello Dolly gives him his only chance to squire a beautiful woman. "With Real Dolls, you can't walk down the street and make everyone envious," he says. "[Hello Dolly] is an equivalent."

Hello Dolly also functions as a clubhouse, and a clearinghouse of Real Doll information, where owners share their travails, as Everhard does of his repeated surgeries on Caroline's floppy left ankle. Last winter, Everhard shared with the group the latest setback. "Caroline's back is broken," he wrote. "The first symptom was when I lifted her out of bed this morning. Her body seemed 'stretchy' ... In retrospect I am certain it was broken when we were having sex in bed this morning."

Everhard set to work repairing Caroline, documenting the process in photographs and mechanical drawings he posted for the group -- the propping up of her hips, the cut into the small of her back, a belt hoisting her backbone close to the surface. Then a photograph shows the belt striking her bare buttocks. "And this for all the trouble you've caused me ...(whack)," the caption reads.

While Everhard is a fix-her-yourself kinda guy, he also lives too far from the master doll healer and dealer, Slade Fiero, to ship his girls for repair even if he wanted to. Fiero, aka "the Real Doll Doctor," lives in Davis, Calif., and is a part-time tattoo artist and the sculptor of Charlie, the only male Real Doll. He scoops up used dolls off eBay or from owners who know of him and want to dump their dolls, repairs them if they are worse for the wear (most are), and resells them.

Next page: McMullen does custom work, but he won't make dolls that lactate, urinate, have underarm hair, or look like Britney Spears