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Well, Tom, although President deserves to be banned for punctuation abuse alone, the fact that *you* would find it abhorrent, and that certainly I think I and an awful lot of other people would find it deeply, deeply, icky, and I would say that the jury on whether it would increase or decrease the likelihood of abuse is so far out that you would have to be certifiably bonkers to *order* one, much less *use* one, doesn't alter the issue of whether abhorrence is a valid point for legislation.
Abhorrent, literally, means things that make you bristle. That make your hair stand on end. One potential real doll client, for example, apparently sent in large numbers of photographs of his mother for a "fitting". That is certainly deeply ick, and it is the right of the real doll maker to decline the request, as I believe he did. Other requests include blue skin or bodies covered in hair. Is this equally icky, or is it so contextless, so unrooted in anything that one could actually have sex with, that it becomes simply curious.
One of the odd things about the real doll, and the idea of synthetic sex partners in general, is that they seem to be a way, in the same way that surgical technology is allowing people to become more like their self-perception, whether that self-perception has larger breasts, horns or a penis, for the physical act of sex to be separated from the limitations of biology - so, people who fantasise about making it with women or men with wings, or 60-foot tall women or men, or manga-styled catwomen or men, could with sufficient skill and enough materials create some physical representation of that act. In those terms, it is to some extent the art and to some extent the technology that is causing problems, but is it also functional to impose absolute bans on certain forms of plastic moulding as well as the technical issues and the individual tastes of creators?
To step to one side, Jake and Dinos Chapman create statues of teenaged girls with genitals transplanted onto their faces and their limbs fused together. As far as I know, they made them themselves. But if they had had the idea but not the technical ability, as Damien Hirst did for "Hymn", would it have been a moral imperative for any skilled model maker to refuse to create them, or the state to refuse to allow Jake and Dinos Chapman to make them as outraging public decency? Does that change if the dolls are intended for sex rather than for public display? It certainly makes it a lot more *icky*, and I am pretty sure that "I make mannequins of teenaged girls with genitals transplanted onto their faces for sexual purposes" would be the end of pretty much any dinner party conversation, but people sculpt fantasies in their heads all the time. Is having sex with a doll with fur significantly more *wrong*, rather than more *icky*, than fantasising about a person with fur?
Of course, these things are adynata, desires which *could not* be satisfied by congress with any human beingm which I'm finding a far more comfortable area than children/exes/objects of unrequited love/celebrities.
Soemthing being icky and something being wrong are not necessarily the same thing, nor is either necessarily mappable to preventable or in need of prevention. Interestingly, an article on Nerve on what it is actually like to have sex with a real doll posits that a fundamental problem for the man concerned was that any thrill from any form of transgressive sexual congress with his real doll was drowned out by the enormous transgressiveness of *having sex with a lump of silicone with a jointed skeleton*. That seems to me the fundamental problem with the real doll as some sort of royal road to the real doll as fetishist skeleton key... |
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