In the main GC sub, there's a post about this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/oct/19/what-i-learned-about-male-desire-in-a-sex-doll-factory

Since this is the guy's sub, I think we can assume we know what our sex drive is like (you pigs!), and I want to think about a larger topic: ranting vs dialogue, or isolation vs relationships. I think gender issues, as separate from reality-based sex and sexuality issues, are tied into this so I think a broader look at the article's subject matter is central to this sub.

The article tries to put a positive spin on sex dolls, and points to less shallow version of men's sexuality than an article about sex dolls would seem to suggest. But I think both the spin and the hidden depths of our desires skirt around a bigger, societal, problem. The article mentions the idea that sex dolls primarily are or were for guys who can't get laid. But most guys can't get laid over at least portions of their lives, so then by implication the article is saying sex dolls are for every guy for their children to find after they die (I have a friend who found her dad's sex stuff after he died. The rude awakening took her years to sort out. Maybe somethings are better left in our heads, or more specifically between our ears). What's the problem? I should just loosen up, right?

The thing is, this is not like a pair of crutches in a closet in everyone's home for that time you sprain an ankle or break a bone in your leg. Or maybe it is. The thing about crutches is not just learning how to use them, but how to build up the muscles that atrophy when you must use them and while the broken part of the body heals. Failure to do that can allow the use of crutches to create other problems in the body, not unlike bad posture over years can create problems or tension in muscles both can reflect unaddressed stress-related problems and create newer physical ones. Fact of the matter is we don't need a sex doll to beat off. Any 14 year old can write a doctoral thesis proving that, but the pages might stick together and I wouldn't want to touch that paper.

What then is gained by using a doll to beat off? The article talks about having something in a chair across from you, something physical to play with besides yourself, the article even mentions a guy who wanted a doll made to have the face of his now deceased ex-wife. Perhaps we should be glad the article didn't go into whose body he wanted on that doll. This is sort of where things start to go wrong though, not just with dolls but with anything-- not counting the guy missing his deceased wife, but plenty of people go to the grave to commune with their deceased loved ones and hopefully not to beat off over the grave. Maybe he really needs that doll and maybe we should be grateful he didn't go for that alternative. You have to talk to real people, dolls will never equal that and the will probably make it tougher to make happen.

A real person has their own beauty unique to themselves even if they have similarities to other people. I have seen so many women think they were ugly where if you just look at them you start to see so many beautiful things about them, even before a single word is spoken. Everyone can be attractive, to someone and not repulsive to everyone, if they aren't completely self-loathing and self-sabotaging. And we can see something attractive and beautiful in everyone if we look and get to know them. We just aren't often willing to, or don't need to really, try. There are after all other fish in the sea as they say. But looking at a doll, or porn, or photoshopped instagram models, creates a fake image in one's mind of what someone looks like. Too many guys like fake boobs over real ones, fake lips over real ones, and they are worse for it. It is ridiculous to think that could be possible, but it creates an obstacle to seeing a real person for what they are because that which is fake is preferred.

But this is not just about hooking up with someone that is human vs just retreating to the masturbation cave with or without a doll every single night, and afternoon, and upon waking up in the morning, or waking in the middle of the night. or on lunch break. or as soon as your guests leave. dude stop already.

Subs like this exist primarily as a response to the fact that there are people who have lived so deeply in a fantasy world that they confuse their biological sex with what ever they are imagining and they now want the world to indulge their fantasy. But gender is not the only place such fantasies exist. Social media has pushed people into smaller and smaller pens where any disagreement or actual thinking or questioning leads to being cast out or 'cancelled' if the person thinks for themselves too loudly. You don't even have to try, and it happens. Just like something, have an opinion, and you've triggered the algorithms that will build the Black Iron Prison, as I think William Blake called it, around you. The echo chamber of bots and trolls and parody accounts and the occasional poor sucker like you is not much different than the dolls some guys fuck.

Most online discussions are just people creating straw-men out of things people say, rather than engage with each other what anyone specifically says. Look at people going back and forth on twitter or facebook or any social media. If they agree it is all just empty virtue signalling. If they disagree, they almost always start off arguing against strawmen instead of directly addressing what is said-- that is when they aren't just flinging insults or pejoratives at each other. We've lost the ability to talk with each other. We virtue signal the same way a guy might tell his doll she's pretty and he might imagine she asks if he's been working out. That is so much easier than figuring out what movie two humans might want to see or resisting the urge to say "I told you so" when the movie sucks. Dolls create an out when people should be getting back in, to each other or someone, the same way social media creates an out for people where their head drops and their thumbs type while they would otherwise be with the people they might actually be sitting there with.

Our inability to talk to each other though is part of a larger problem. Who in the US remember "Hannity and Combs"? Yes, they both really do suck. But they had their fox news show and anyone on the left would look at Combs and say "he is not making any argument we'd make. He's a punching bag." That was meant to look like real dialogue or conversation, but it was really dumbing down the audience by presenting a fake debate much like the Harlem Globetrotters would play the Washington Generals. And in the absence of that fake dialogue, audiences would get instead hour after hour of monologues on talk radio or on the news. To stay informed people would be indoctrinated by panels of like-minded people hardly disagreeing on anything and if they did disagree then being put in their place by the host in ways that would never work in real life. Even reading an essay or a news article is to be fed a single narrative by a single individual, even when conflicting opinions are presented, that wraps it all up in one single coherent article. To then go and have a real discussion about what one has read would lead us far astray from the article and onto what we ourselves know and experience directly-- otherwise we're just nodding in agreement and virtue signalling. But, the skill of conversation is learned through practice, and on line culture is killing that skill the same way young men can't seem to have sex with a woman without choking her or spitting or trying to ram it up her ass because porn hub makes it look normal the way hannity and combs made stupidity look normal, or how any news show today makes one person ranting on and on with no push back look normal.

So, I won't be buying a sex doll any time soon but I think it is not out of place in a world where we lost the ability to have dialogue with each other not just to meet someone who we might get it on consensually with but to talk with in any real and substantive way. Am I wrong? Are sex dolls better than I imagine, or are they not right at home in the world kinda gone wrong?