Just like a woman

Fiero's Web site documents breast, head, knee, wrist, butt, hip and neck surgery; wrist repair; and crotch fill. Some doll damage is normal wear and tear -- even dolls that are stored properly and bathed regularly can develop a torn breast or "compression fractures" around the vagina. Recently Fiero "realigned" a doll's vagina and anus and sold her for $5,000 to a fellow who arrived at his house, paid cash, and hauled the doll away in the bed of his pickup truck. "That doll was worth more than the truck he drove away in," Fiero remarks.

Some of Fiero's stories are the stuff of horror films. He once got an e-mail from two garbage collectors who found a Real Doll hacked to pieces in a dumpster. One owner sent Fiero a mutilated corpse of a doll. "The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread of skin, like your bra strap," he tells me, gesturing at my shoulder.

Another time, an Asian undergraduate student at a university in California dropped his 1-year-old doll off for repairs. Fiero says the young man told him that his parents bought him the doll so that he would stay at home and study rather than go out chasing women. Fiero's photographs of the damaged doll make me cringe: Her leg was torn off, revealing the steel hardware of her hip joints; an arm hung by an inch of silicone flesh; two fingers were severed; and the cleavage between her buttocks was torn into a ragged crevasse.

"Her vagina was so blown out," Fiero told me. "I was appalled. I couldn't believe someone could fuck something like that up so quickly. It blew me away. How could somebody be so callous?

"I was offended in so many ways," he continues. "He put her feet behind her head and reamed that doll with whatever cock he's got. He fucked her violently. She was achieving positions she shouldn't achieve or be forced to try. Her vagina and anus were a giant gaping hole."

Fiero says he'll never again make repairs for the student, who he now refers to as JTR -- Jack the Ripper.

It breaks Matt McMullen's heart to hear that his art has been defiled, yet he says that whatever motivates the love-doll market -- libido, fetishism, loneliness -- ultimately it's about people indulging their secret side. "Most people go through their whole lives and keep it subdued, but everybody has a thing that gets them off," he says. "And some people use this doll as a means to explore something that otherwise they may never explore."

While he does do custom work on occasion for customers who are willing to pay the price or have legitimate needs, say a paraplegic who needs a lightweight doll he can easily move around in his lap -- McMullen does sometimes put his foot down. No lactating dolls, urinating dolls, amputees, 7-foot-tall dolls, Britney Spears replicas, or dolls with armpit hair or heartbeats. And no dogs either, as was the request of one prospective customer.

"He asked me if I could make him a silicone dog, because he was a breeder, and he didn't want to hurt his dogs anymore, he said. He talked like right out of the movie 'Deliverance.'" McMullen's surfer-dude lilt plummets into a pungent drawl, "'Aw, I don't want to hurt ma dawgs, I like ma dawgs ... kin you make me one so ah kin still use it fer the sex?' And when I realized that he was legitimate, I was shocked. And I just politely said no, I'm sorry, gotta go, click." Another prospective customer sent nude pictures of his 60-year-old mother, wanting a custom-built replica. Then there was the surgical pathologist who wanted a vagina duplicated from a specimen he had in a jar.

As for the frequent requests for child dolls, those are also flatly rejected. "I don't get into debates, scolding them, I just say I can't go there, sorry," McMullen says.

McMullen believes that, for the most part, his dolls are therapeutic transitional objects for men (female customers are few and far between). "By and large, most customers buy a doll because they just broke up or got a divorce and they don't want to go out into the dating scene, but they still have physical needs." A doll, he says, gets them through difficult times, and often they move on. Other customers have used a doll to overcome premature ejaculation.

While in reporting this article I zeroed in on the men I thought of as "the husbands" -- the Davecats and Everhards who have seemingly adopted doll love for life, rather than the fetishist/hobbyist set -- anecdotal evidence indicates that for many owners, dolls do offer stopgap love, and then they move on. "Lonely men who don't have anything in their life, they have some fun with it, then they meet the right girl, they sell the doll, and off they go," observed Mike Kelly. Jagxfan wrote to the Hello Dolly crew that he had a new, real girlfriend staying at his house, leaving him the problem of what to do with his doll Natalie, who was locked up in a closet. His Hello Dolly friends advised him to hang on to Natalie until the relationship was solid, then he could either sell her or introduce her to his girlfriend.

Next page: "This is a way to keep people happy that shouldn't be having kids anyway"