Scanner : real dolls

More Than a Woman: Real Dolls Galore

Emily Farris — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:41:00 GMT

Calling all real doll fans in the tri-state area: today Becky Yee's photo exhibit, More Than A Woman, opens at the HPGRP Gallery in New York City. The show focuses on a middle-aged computer engineer in Tokyo who is the self-procliamed 'world's largest collector of Dutch wives'—a nice term for sex dolls. The exhibit runs through March 15 and if you're free tonight, you can catch the opening reception from 6-8.

If we were still in New York, we'd certainly go see it even though—we know this is probably a very unpopular opinion around these parts—we've always been sort-of creeped out by real dolls. They might actually make sense for people with social anxiety, but it seems like a sad way to have the perfect woman who will never get fat, will fuck whenever you want and will never tell you that you need to clean that junk out from under your ball sack. Maybe we'd feel better if there were male real dolls (they'd always be hard and never have junk under their ball sacks!). But to each his (or her own). And in the spirit of that, we've compiled some of our favorite real doll shots after the jump.

[Image]

Related:

Scanner Nicole Interviews Artist and Real Doll Owner Amber Hawk Swanson

Sex Doll Crimes Of Passion: One Man Just Can't Get Enough

Tickle Me Emo: Male Rocker RealDoll

Say "Hello" to "Emily" and Kiss Actual Women Goodbye

Nicole Pasulka — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:22:00 GMT

This is Emily. Although she's not real, she seems pretty damn lifelike. As she'll happily tell you, she's a creation of Image Metrics Technology and made by the same computer technology used in video games like Vice City.

First the sex doll looked real. Then the sex robot looked real (and was a sex robot, for people to have sex with, instead of having sex with other, actual people). Now the computer generated woman looks real. Real women -- we are totally done for. Why do these creepy android technologies never build lifelike dudes?

So this leads us to the million dollar question-- would you have sex with Emily? I mean, thankfully, you can't, but if you could do it with the unreal thing, would you?

[via YesButNoButYes]

Scanner Nicole Interviews Artist and Real Doll Owner Amber Hawk Swanson

Nicole Pasulka — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:33:00 GMT

Photo: To Have, Cake Cut, 2007

Fresh out of grad school, Artist Amber Hawk Swanson was looking for love and a new project--so she had a RealDoll made to look just like her. The result—Amber Doll—would become her collaborator and companion. Since then, Amber Hawk Swanson and Amber Doll have traveled the country documenting public response to their complex and controversial relationship. AHS emailed with Scanner’s Nicole Pasulka about her show at Locust Gallery through June 28, why she was after a sex-doll double in the first place and the surprising, sometimes violent, reactions people have to her work.

Nicole: You commissioned a look-alike RealDoll who is now featured in your photography and video work. What made you want a doll?

Amber Hawk Swanson: After completing a project that involved imaging myself in a sexual way and afterward receiving responses that involved stories of sexual assault, I began reading about sexual assault and the compulsion to reenact trauma. I kept reading the words victim and victimizer and they seemed to exist on two ends of a spectrum that described violence. I found myself more interested in the way those two words potentially overlap. On a conceptual level I was interested in merging them, and as a performer I wanted to embody them simultaneously.

At the same time, I was lonely and found myself longing for companionship. I happened to read a Salon.com article "Just like a woman" by Meghan Laslocky on the subject of RealDoll owners and something clicked. I started "lurking" on Doll Forum, a meeting place site that I linked to from the article, and felt a real affinity to the community of primarily men who own or desire RealDolls. From there I contacted Abyss Corporation, the company that produces RealDolls and began inquiring about a custom order. After a few weeks of negotiating the process, I made arrangements to fly to Los Angeles on my 26th birthday (so Amber Doll and I could share birthdays) to get digitally scanned. From the scan, a Styrofoam printout was produced and the first mold was made. After a few months of waiting for Amber Doll to arrive, I flew to San Marcos, California, where Abyss Corporation is located, to shoot a four-day "Making-of Amber Doll" documentary.

NP: Are you and Amber Doll collaborators?

AHS: At one time I thought of my work with Amber Doll as a collaboration, because I was wrapped up, in a heartfelt way, with the lived performance of experiencing her as a romantic partner and as one of the subjects in my/our work. I was also, at one time, thinking of her as an extension of self and as a negotiation of self. Lately, I've been thinking about Amber Doll as my sexually available silicone replica, which is how she ultimately appears in my work. I take her to ritualized spaces such as wedding receptions, tailgating parties, sorority houses, and theme parks and observe, without intervening, the way that she interrupts the social codes of the space. I still seem to embody victim and victimizer simultaneously in that I abandon Amber Doll to what often ends up as aggressive groups of people "exploring" her. I've been interested in the way Amber Doll is also interpreted as a proxy for me, in seemingly safe or jovial settings like the football tailgating party that I usually describe as having the potential to "take a turn."

NP: Is your relationship still personal and professional?

AHS: While waiting for her arrival, I certainly imagined what Amber Doll and I might do for each other emotionally. After we were finally united, I spent time trying to understand the major impact she'd had on my life. Now, however, while there may be leftover feelings and expectations over our potential personal relationship, we've landed in a space that's much more professional. Just as soon as I profess our professional and not personal relationship, however, I'm sure I'll start missing her (she's currently still in Miami for an exhibition) but I can safely say that for the past six months of production work for To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll we've been strictly business. We've traveled together, posed together, and met an amazing number of people interested in touching one or both of us, but all for the artwork.

NP: What kind of response have you gotten to your current solo show at Locust Projects in Miami?

AHS: For the show, Amber Doll is participating what I'm calling a "funerary installation," where she is laid out in a casket, surrounded by fresh flowers. A surveillance camera that corresponds to a live feed of viewers' actions with the doll records her casket, along with the area surrounding it. The viewers interacting with Amber Doll are separated from the viewers watching them on the surveillance monitor by a freestanding wall, so after people finish exploring her in the funerary installation, they walk around the wall to discover the monitor and a crowd of onlookers.

NP: How did people react to being so close to Amber Doll in a funeral and gallery space?

AHS: I witnessed perhaps the most aggressive response to Amber Doll's presence at the opening reception for the exhibition while joining the crowd of people watching the live feed monitor. A man wound up and forcefully punched Amber Doll in the face, which ultimately tore her silicone from mouth to jaw. The mediated experience of watching her get punched on the surveillance monitor somehow made it all the more surprising—despite having watched countless other aggressive acts towards Amber Doll throughout the past year and a half.

Baby Wee Wee's Wee Pee Erection

Emily Farris — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:33:00 GMT

(Forgive us if you've seen this before, it's rather old. But it's too good — or maybe just too creepy — not to share)

When we first started watching this commercial, we thought it was like all the doll ads we saw as kids. We had the dolls that would "pee" the water that you "fed" them if you squeezed them hard enough. We did not, however, have a baby doll with a little baby ween that moved up and down and squirted pee high up into the air, or into this poor father's face, as it were.

Click through for some stills of the potty trained Baby Wee Wee.

Apparently this doll is no longer available. And that's probably a good thing.

How To Have Sex With Random, Beautiful Women: Establish a Totalitarian Regime

Emily Farris — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:55:00 GMT

We hope this guy was joking when he asked, via Google Answers, "How can I get random, beautiful women to sleep with me immediately, for free, with no commitment, no questions asked, all the time?"

While he only offered $2.00 for the answer, we think the one he got was priceless.

The best way to get random, beautiful women to sleep with you immediately for free, with no commitment, no questions asked, all of the time, is to establish totalitarian control over a country, while building a cultlike following around yourself. Establishing a simple cult is not enough, since you would have to get the women to subscribe to your ideology before being able to brainwash them to the level where they immedately sleep with you for free. You will also need a strong military to crack down on desent and free will among your people, to keep anybody from opposing your own desires.

The best example of this is the impoverished country of North Korea. Kim Jong Il in particular is reaping the rewards of his father's efforts to establish total control over the North Korean people. As a result of this totalitorian regime build around support for The Dear Leader, son of The Great Leader, here is an article which details how Kim Jong Il established his own "pleasure team":

http://www.freenorthkorea.net/archives/freenorthkorea/000714.html

Although Kim Jong Il requires his women to have several months of training before they may service him, if you achieve the proper level of brainwashing and control over your people, you should be able to just walk up to any woman and bed them within minutes if you so choose.

The answer of how best to establish such a totalitarian regime is beyond the scope of this question, but for an overview on the history and founding of North Korea, I recommend "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding North Korea" by Dr. C. Kenneth Quinones and Joseph Tragert (ISBN 1-59257-169-7), from which you may be able to learn some helpful techniques.

Now, if he wasn't joking, he should probably invest in a real doll because with an attitude like that, no woman in her right mind would sleep with him.

[Google Answers]

One Man's Sex Doll Exhibition is Another Man's Speed Dating

Emily Farris — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:38:00 GMT

Hey, we're not here to judge, only to alert you of the fact that there's a sex doll exhibition going on in New York through the end of may. And it sounds pretty fucking cool.

Lynn Hershman Leeson's solo exhibit Found Objects "features assembly-line produced female sex dolls to examine issues of projected fantasies and the mythology of artificial women."s

Scanner field trip? We can take the short bus.

Found Objects
April 26-May 31
Bitforms Gallery

Scanner Highs and Lows: It's All About You, And Boobs

Emily Farris — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:13:00 GMT

We like to think that in addition to showing you pictures of boobs, we're doing a public service here at Scanner. We want you to get dates and have sex and look at great pictures... of many things.

Highs:

The UCLA Undie Run, of course.

Helen Mirren "promotes healthy nudity." Yes she does.

We found out you'd rather watch Kristen Davis' sex tape than Lindsay Lohan's.

And you'd probably still do Jamie Lee Curtis, even at 50.

Scanner Emily found her reason for living. And yes, it has a beard.

We learned what angels sound like when they masturbate.

We learned we're pretty great at Photoshopping. Don't you think?

We want you to draw pictures of prostitutes.

We tried to help Internet geeks get women in the real world, too.

We found out we might be totally normal for liking to sniff our partners' underarms.

Lows:

We experienced some weddings from Hell.

We don't really dig Miss Bimbo. Which probably makes us feminazis.

We admitted to loving Julia Allison and "Men in Trees."

We're a little ashamed that these kids who celebrated the end of their term with a giant orgy are our heroes.

Live Links commercial: a low for Evangeline Lilly, a high for those of us hating on Kate right now.

South Park just didn't come through with the boobage.

They did, however, kill Britney Spears. And we laughed at it.

Amy Winehouse's face scared us. Almost as much as this baby doll did.

Image via pacificdave.com

"This Lifelike Baby Doll Has a Surprise Just For You!"

Emily Farris — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:19:00 GMT

"When you first meet 'Charlie,' dreaming away in his soft blue knitted outfit, you won't be able to resist cuddling him close. But get set for a real surprise when you go to change his diaper!"

That's right, Charlie apparently has a very life-like wee peen, among other things:

"Charlie" is handcrafted entirely of RealTouch™ vinyl skin, capturing every nuance of Linda Webb's original sculpture - every wrinkle, every crease, even a realistic "outtie" belly button.

The realism of this lifelike baby doll is enhanced by joints at the neck, shoulders, and hips, armatures in his arms for natural posing options, hand-applied hair, delicate eyelashes, and carefully applied finger and toenails.

And he can be yours for just five easy installments of $30.

[Linda Webb: Charlie Anatomically Correct So Truly Real Lifelike Baby Doll]

Charlie Sheen Just As Pervy, Nutso as You Thought

sarahhepola — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:46:00 GMT

Okay, people, are you ready for this? Charlie Sheen apparently had a real doll. It cost $6,000 and was dressed like a cheerleader. When he eventually got embarrassed by it, he took a meat cleaver, chopped it up, and disposed of it in a Dumpster. Which is, come to think of it, exactly what we’d like to do to Two and Half Men. Now, we haven’t seen Lars and the Real Girl yet, but we’re assuming this isn’t how it ends.