About a month ago, I witnessed a documentary which I found highly disturbing, It was a documentary entitled ’Guys and Dolls’ which ultimately proved very shocking. The valley of the dolls responsible for such latex love was situated in California, with the manufacturers shipping around seven dolls a week worldwide. (http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/reviews/2006/guysanddolls.htm)
The program was based upon a handful of men mostly from America who had brought life sized dolls from an internet company. Creator of which stated he was ‘flattered his creations were able to fill such an emotional space in the lives of his customers, considering them to function like insoles do in shoes. For those guys incapable of talking to girls, “sex with a rubber doll [was apparently] better than never having sex at all”.
These dolls were scarily life like, specifically made to weigh and feel like a real women, there limbs could be shaped into any position so the dolls could sit, kneel or stand. The real fright however came when I saw actually how life like the dolls really were, they were physically perfect and epitomised that of the ideal curvaceous women, with extremely large and perfect breasts the dolls embodied that of the idolised female form. The issue that these men were using and abusing the dolls as sex slaves really sickened me. The fact that the men could buy the ideal, dress them in any manner of clothing put them in any position and then do what they wanted with them sexually, actually made me feel quite nauseous. The dolls were merely used as inanimate objects for sexual debauchery an issue which really made me wonder if this was the ideal woman males fantasised about. The men could do as they liked with these dolls whenever they pleased, the dolls were merely created to be looked upon and abused, harbouring no voice could these dolls be the women of the future?
Laura Mulvey once stated that women were the ‘bearer of the image’ to men. Her theory seems to compliment the issue of the dolls quite well as she implants the notion of the male gaze and talks about the way men prey upon and view women as merely figures of sexual attraction. Is this really the case? After viewing the documentary Guys and dolls I am inclined to believe her!
The question stands are these men buying and abusing such dolls for serious power trips, maybe the feeling of being in total control of the doll makes them feel a sense of dominance over a submissive female figure that cannot speak. Or are all four of these rather peculiar men merely harboring an emotional space, wishing to deny themselves the morbid fear of being alone, nursing worried fears about real women being unfaithful to them, are they just afraid of being perceived incapable by real women.
http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/reviews/2006/guysanddolls.htm
Mulvey, Laura, (1992) ‘Visual Pleasures and narrative cinema’
rachelgibbs Said:
on January 10, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I saw that documetary too Fran, it was very disturbing!! I agree about Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and I think there is a certain image of beauty which men are ’supposedly’ attracted to, which magazines and advertisements are promoting day after day. Although I think with that program men could choose the type of woman they wanted down to the very fine details.
I saw a similar program on channel 4 about a woman who made life-like looking babies and sold them on ebay… what is wrong with the world?!