History of male sex doll (part1)

 The story of Pygmalion goes like this: a sculptor carves a statue in the shape of a beautiful woman. It's so beautiful that he falls in love with her, prays that she can become real, has his wish granted and lives happily ever after. The tale has been re-imagined countless times since its initial publication as part of Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses in 8 AD Pinocchio, Frankenstein, My Fair Lady and the 90s film She's All That all have their origins in this myth.

But Pygmalion's true modern heir might be Davecat, a man who lives in Southeast Michigan with three high-end silicone dolls. His first purchase, whom he named Sidore Kuroneko, he regards as his wife; the other two, named Elena and Muriel, are just close friends. Although he did not sculpt them, they are his creations. He designed their bodies before they were made and their personalities after they arrived. "There was never a time when [Sidore] - or any doll, for that matter - was just an object for me," he told me when we spoke. Last year.

 

Although Davecat is one of the most visible modern sex doll owners – with an active blog and appearances in articles, documentaries and TV spots – he is part of a community called iDollators. These owners of high-end, anatomically correct dolls use them for sex, love, art and companionship.

If Pygmalion lived in today's world, none of this would be too foreign to him. The Erotic Doll, a book by Dr Marquard Smith, Head of Doctoral Studies and Head of Research at the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Other love-statue stories can be found throughout classical antiquity. For example, the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus wrote about a man who had a physical love affair with a statue of Cupid. In a somewhat more recent example, a gardener was found attempting to do so with a replica of the Venus de Milo in 1877.

Throughout history, men without access to beautiful statues - but with a tendency to make love to things in the shape of women - have coped in various ways. Sailors often used fabric to make fornicating dolls called dame de voyage in French or dama de viaje in Spanish. In the modern, love dolls are sometimes referred to as "Dutch wives" - a reference to the hand-sewn leather masturbation puppets made by 17th-century Dutch sailors who traded with the Japanese.

Although sailor sex dolls are only generic substitutes for the female form - any female form - there are instances where men create sex dolls to replace specific females. In 1916, after the Austro-Hungarian artist Oskar Kokoschka was killed by his lover, the pianist and composer Alma Mahler, he wrote that he had "lost all desire to undergo the test of love again". (It's a refrain doll owners have repeated through the ages.) He still desired Mahler, however, so much so that he provided his seamstress with incredibly detailed instructions for a life-size replica of Mahler, specifying not just her appearance, but everything down to how her skin should feel. Historians differ on what happened after Kokoschka received the doll. One thing is certain: he was extremely hairy, covered with a "skin" more reminiscent of a stuffed animal than a human woman. One account says he was "delighted" by it all, others say he was disappointed He made several drawings of it and according to some reports finally destroyed it at a party, either by burning it, or by burying it in his garden.