Read Best Sex Writing 2009 Online
Authors: Rachel Kramer Bussel
Best Sex Writing 2009 (18 page)
Orient Industries dolls was beginning to become a fairly big busi- ness, increasingly attracting attention from the media. In one report by
Dacapo
5
journalist Mark Schreiber that appeared in a 2004 edi- tion of
Asian Sex Gazette,
6
Tsuchiya revealed how “Dutch wives,”
7
as they are called in Japan, have their own special place and treat- ment within the confines of Japanese culture, with discarded dolls having the opportunity of funeral rituals redolent of the virtual cemeteries devised for “dead” Tamagotchis.
“A Dutch wife is not merely a doll, or an object. She can be an irreplaceable lover, who provides a sense of emotional healing.” Speaking at his showroom near JR Okachimachi Station, where some two dozen of Orient Industries’ ersatz females are displayed, Tsuchiya tells
Dacapo
’s reporter that for years his clientele had typi- cally been handicapped men, or single men over forty. But from around six years ago, when he commenced sales via the Internet (www.orient-doll.com), he was mildly surprised to receive a surge of orders from men in their twenties and thirties.
“When I ran my hand along the doll’s thighs,” confesses
Dacapo
’s reporter,“I felt a shiver of excitement.” After observing the pains- taking effort that goes into the making of each doll at Orient In- dustries’ factory, the reporter came away enlightened.“Many people might be inclined to disparage sex toys,” he writes,“but these dolls truly exemplify Japan’s status as a high-tech country!”
Jewel and her sisters are shipped to purchasers in cardboard boxes stamped
kenko kigu
(health apparatus), and users are assured of lifelong after-service. As the vow “Until death do us part” may be stretching things a bit, the company anticipates a time when Jewel might outlive her usefulness or her owner.“If a
yome
[bride] is no longer needed, we’ll disretely [
sic
] take her off a customer’s hands at no charge,” Tsuchiya adds. “Twice a year we also arrange for a
kuyo
[Buddhist memorial service] for discarded dolls at the special bodhisattva for dolls at the Shimizu Kannondeo in Ueno Park.” Founded in 1631, it’s where the “souls” of dolls are consecrated. (Kannon is the Goddess of Mercy.)
A few months after this
Asian Sex Gazette
article appeared, a small group of Japanese entrepreneurs, who had previously been think- ing of starting up a regular escort service, decided instead to hire out sex dolls rather than young women. In August 2004 their com- pany,
Doll no Mori
(Forest of Dolls), opened its first shop in Tokyo’s Ota district, specializing in deliveries of dolls to hotels as well as to private homes. Initially
Doll no Mori
was renting out to around twenty customers per month, but by April 2005 their first shop had increased its customer base to one hundred and fifty per month, and the business had been franchised to forty other shops nation- wide, with monthly turnovers averaging anywhere from $2,500 and $25,000 per shop. The company’s manager, Hajime Kimura, explained to the newspaper
Nikkan Gendai
that although “we ex- pected most of the clients to be
eotaku
(geeky) types, as it turned out, most of them are ordinary salarymen in their 30s and 40s.” For customers who wish to dress up their dolls, there are optional extras at around $80 each, including wigs, negligees, bathing suits, and other costumes such as school uniforms and French maids’ outfits. In a follow-up article in
Nikkan Gendai,
sex therapist Kim Myung Gun explained,“People have been saying for a long time that men have lost their desire for real women. Rather than have sex with a woman who doesn’t fulfill their expectations, they would rather play with something that corresponds to their fantasy, even if she’s not real.”
It quickly became clear in Japan that the fembot’s far less tech- nologically sophisticated ancestor, the sex doll, represents a real
threat to the trade of human sex workers. Ryann Connell reported on this growing trend in a 2005 article in the
Mainichi Daily News:
“Rent-a-Doll Blows Hooker Market Wide Open.”
Several companies are involved in the bustling trade sup- plying customers looking to slip it into some silicon[e], with lifelike figurines that set back buyers something in the vicinity of 600,000 yen (almost $5,000), as opposed to the simple blow-up types with the permanently open mouths that can be bought from vending machines for a few thousand yen. Prime among the sellers of silicon[e] sex workers is
Doll no Mori,
which runs a 24-hour service supplying love dolls,or“Dutch wives”as the Japanese call them, to customers in southern Tokyo and neighboring Kanagawa Prefecture.
“We opened for business in July this year,” said Ha- jime Kimura, owner of
Doll no Mori.
“Originally, we were going to run a regular call girl service, but one day while we were surfing the Net we found this business offering love doll deliveries.We decided the labor costs would be cheaper and changed our line of business.”
Outlays are low, with the doll’s initial cost the major investment and wages never a problem for employers. “We’ve got four dolls working for us at the moment.We get at least one job a day, even on weekdays, so we made back our initial investment in the first month,” Kimura says. “Unlike employing people, everything we make becomes a profit and we never have to worry about the girls not turning up for work.”
Doll no Mori
charges start at 13,000 yen (around
$110) for a 70-minute session with the dolls, which is
about the same price as a regular call girl service. The company boasts of many repeat customers and a mem- bership clientele topping 200.“Nearly all our customers choose our two-hour option.”
Within little more than a year after the doll-for-hire idea took root in Japan, sex entrepreneurs in South Korea also started to cash in. Upmarket sex dolls were introduced to the Korean public at the Sexpo exhibition, held in the Seoul Trade Exhibition Center in August 2005.They were seen as a possible antidote to Korea’s Spe- cial Law on Prostitution that had been placed on the statute books in 2004, and before long, Korean hotels were hiring out “doll ex- perience rooms” for around 25,000 won per hour (around $25), a fee that included a bed, a computer to enable the customer to visit pornographic sites, and the use of a doll.This initiative quickly be- came so successful at plugging the gap created by the antiprostitu- tion law that soon some establishments opened that were devoted solely to the use of sex dolls, including at least four in the city of Suwon.The owners of these hotels assumed, quite reasonably, that there was no question of their running foul of the law, since the dolls were not human. But the Korean police were not so sure. The news website Chosun.com reported, in October 2006, that the police in Gyeonggi province had confirmed that they were “look- ing into whether these businesses violate the law…Since the sex acts are occurring with a doll and not a human being, it is unclear whether the Special Law on Prostitution applies.”
Although the idea of hiring out these dolls appears to be at- tracting interest from entrepreneurs, the sex-doll industry is still in its infancy and still very much catering to the desires of men, as demonstrated by the fact that of the fifteen models offered on the RealDoll website, fourteen are made in the likeness of women and
intended for sale to men, while only one is modeled on a man. A likely reason for this disparity—though not the only reason, I’m sure—is that RealDoll’s Charlie typically sells for $7,000, and there are far fewer women than men who have thousands of dollars of readily disposable income. But an alternative explanation that has been put forward for the disparity is one with which I strongly disagree—the suggestion that far fewer women than men are in- terested in using artificial means for getting some or all of their sexual stimulation and for achieving orgasm. Many women claim that the use of sex dolls is very much a “guy thing,” but surely such a claim is easily refuted by the widespread use of vibrators among modern women.
Notes:
CyberSkin is a natural-feeling material that mimics human flesh. It is formed by combining silicone and latex.
The branch of medicine dealing with the reproductive and excretory organs.
December 11, 2003.
Dacapo
is a Japanese news digest with a focus on current event feature stories. 6. April 21, 2004.
7. The most authoritative explanation for the origin of the term “Dutch wives” is found in Alan Pate’s 2005 book
Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll.
They were originally leather dolls carried aboard Dutch merchant ships, beginning in the seventeenth century; and through their interaction with the Dutch on the trade island of Deshima, established by the Dutch East India company in 1641, the Japanese became familiar with the practice. Pate’s own source for this origin was Mitamura Engyo’s book
Takeda Hachidai—Eight Generations of the Takeda Family.
s usannah Br eslin
As a journalist I’ve covered the sex beat for over a decade. I’ve interviewed call girls and johns, adult film stars and dominatrices, strippers and pimps. I’ve seen a side of America that most Americans don’t see. In the movies there are heart-of-gold hookers like Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman,
falling in love with a john who happens to be a sensitive guy capable of overlooking her profession. But in reality we don’t know much about johns or the complicated rea- sons they pay for sex. So when New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a zealous former prosecutor of prostitution rings, was accused of using one himself, many people questioned how such a smart man could have put his family and his career on the line.
A research project I’m working on may yield some answers to that perplexing question. Earlier this year I posted an online call for letters from johns, asking men to send me anonymous letters about their experiences soliciting sex. In most cases the johns came
across Letters from Johns while surfing the Internet. I’d considered soliciting johns from sites like Craigslist, but I decided to let them seek me out. Most of the letters, I believe, are real; in some cases the men sent them from their personal email accounts, signed their real names, and included links to their professional websites. The fake letters are for the most part easy to identify; they lack detail—and frequently end with scenes in which the sex worker returns the money because the sex was so good.
Thus far I’ve received letters from nearly two dozen johns about why they did it.The men come from all walks of life, ranging in age and across socioeconomic classes. In many cases, like Spitzer, they’re married. Many report they are in relationships with women who are no longer interested in sex. Some of the men are in long-term relationships; some are single. Some seek out streetwalkers, while others solicit high-end escorts as Spitzer is alleged to have done. The men find the women in bars, on Craigslist, in adult ads in the backs of their local weeklies.
Often these guys aren’t just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in con- trast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as “a normal and charming guy.” Other men recalled youthful sexcapades in the military while deployed overseas, from a German brothel called Crazy Sexy to a barbershop in Asia where women performed oral sex on men getting haircuts.An “overeducated” twenty-eight-year- old went through a bad breakup, a death in the family, and the loss of his job. Online he found a “courtesan” who taught him what he wanted in a relationship and gave him his confidence back. “I’m really grateful to her,” he reported.
One letter in particular may offer a window into the mind-set
of a man like Spitzer. It came in the form of an encrypted email from a state investigator. Professionally, he was dedicated to en- forcing the law. Personally, he was in a relationship with a woman with whom he hadn’t had sex in years. He’d been seeing prostitutes since 1991. In his encoded diary he recorded his encounters. “1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good or bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week.” For him, sex for money was sex without strings, attachment, or guilt—a transaction.
But for some it’s the financial transaction itself that is alluring. In the first letter I received I heard from a successful twentysomething who described himself as “attractive and ambitious.” He had a girl- friend—”a wonderful woman”—but there was something about the act of paying for sex, he confessed, that turned him on.“I find the idea of paying for sexual acts to be erotic,” he confided. For some men, especially those who are seen as particularly moral or righteous in their public lives (think of all those fallen preachers), part of the appeal is the fact that it is illegal and a moral transgres- sion in their eyes.
