Flesh Light

“If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

– Anonymous

A Fleshlight, also sometimes called a Pocket Pussy, is an artificial orifice, most often resembling a vagina, but sometimes also an anus or mouth. Fleshlights and Pocket Pussies are actually brand names, but the terms have “suffered” genericide, a fate that seems to befall any product that absorbs jism, most famously Kleenex.

Genericization occurs when a trademark dominates the market to such an extent that it comes to represent a type of product rather than its branded source. When a trademark is loved with enough intensity, it loses specificity, becoming so inseparably a part of us that it is no longer possible to trace its name to its corporate origins. It is a way for a trademark to have success and disappoint its parents at the same time. Intellectual property takes flight. It does not await emancipation through legal means or otherwise. Language recognizes no borders, no laws. It lives by being used. In turn, it uses us. When we love a trademark enough, it liberates itself and comes to life.

When we put our penises in Fleshlights, where does the love go? Is there liberatory potential in the act? If so, who – or, crucially, what – is liberated?

No one can answer these questions, and too few have asked them.

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A few weeks back, I was sitting in an AMC Signature Recliner next to all of my loved ones, watching Barbie. I had a big wet drink and a large popcorn. My friends also had various drinks or snacks. The idea was to distract our bodies so that they wouldn’t bother us while our minds enjoyed the flick. It wasn’t that we found the movie boring. It was just that the human body was not “made” to sit for long periods of time in contemplation and fantasy.

Before mass literacy, my friend Skylar whispered, monks used to do all their reading standing at a lectern. Standing! Can you believe it?

My friend Atlas shushed them, but couldn’t help but add their own wry observation: that even though we no longer stand while reading, no one has yet found a position that remains comfortable for long. Eventually, the body interrupts the flow with some ache or horrible need.

We hoped to keep our bodies occupied by eating popcorn and drinking big wet drinks and sitting in our plush Signature Recliners. These things weren’t “good for our bodies,” but sometimes the mind’s gotta do what it’s gotta do to have its own life for a few hours – as any parent knows who’s ever handed their kid an iPad.

Up on the big screen, Barbie wrestled with social issues. The social issues had her pinned down for the moment, but before too long the roles would surely and sexily reverse. It was all quite titillating – at least for a while. Eventually, as the wrestling match comes to a head, there is a brief moment when Barbie’s skirt rides up and you can see between her legs. This canon event confirms that Barbie is completely blank down there and utterly lacking in genitals.

I immediately checked out.

The movie’s premise, which is that the “real world” is a corrupting influence on the Barbies’ dreamland, is a witty response to the usual platitudes about dolls corrupting young girls by setting unrealistic beauty standards. It is instead the “real world” that is flawed, the movie suggests; human women have to struggle to earn the basic rights and material conditions that Barbies enjoy in dreamland by default. Their dreamland – our dreamland – is a world where patriarchy doesn’t exist and money never changes hands. Maybe the Barbie dreamland needs to check its privilege, the movie admits, and everyone would be better off if lines of communication were open between dreamland and reality – but ultimately the 2 hour commercial presents us with an aspirational fantasy: to play with Barbie is good praxis.

But it’s totally incoherent if Barbie can’t fuck.

Barbie is absolutely self-sufficient in her dreamland; the Kens, a subservient dependent population, aren’t even instrumentalized as sex objects. So what does she do in her dreamhouse alone late at night? Nothing. She goes to sleep. She doesn’t even jack off.

In the final scene of the movie, Barbie visits a gynecologist for the first time. It is implied that Barbie has obtained genitals. This is character development, in a way. But she has genitals in the same circumscribed way that people are assumed to have genitals in a sex ed class. There are dangers and responsibilities associated. It is all quite civic. Her genitals are a matter of public health, not private pleasure.

According to Dr. Leanna Wen, CNN Medical Correspondent and former director of Planned Parenthood, “Having everyone see Barbie go to the gynecologist normalizes the experience. It solidifies the understanding that reproductive health is an integral part of overall health. I hope that will be one of the main takeaways from the scene, which is that every girl, every woman, every person who has female reproductive organs should seek regular preventive care to address their reproductive health.”

While this all probably true, it’s pretty lame that the most salient aspect of Barbie’s vagina is its inspectability for doctors. If Barbie really did become a real person at the end, what she should have gotten was a pussy.

After all, the original Barbie was based on an erotic toy. Barbie’s progenitor, the Bild Lilli doll, was nearly a foot tall and sold in tobacco shops and adult stores as a toy for horny men. It was maybe a gag object more than a sex toy proper, but it was designed to be loved and lusted after rather than emulated. The doll was based on a comic strip character, Lilli, a sexually promiscuous call girl who made witty and irreverent quips while engaging freely in licentious acts.

In 1956, Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel, bought a Bild Lilli doll for her daughter Barbara while they were vacationing in Europe. They brought it back to California, and three years later Mattel copied the Bild Lilli doll design, repackaging her as a toy for girls. While Barbie was sexier than traditional dolls, Mattel took great pains to cultivate a wholesome image, which proved to be a winning strategy.

The original Barbie was, in short, a neutered sex doll. So it’s ironic that the Barbie movie purports to tell the story in reverse: a neuter object obtaining a vagina. But vaginas, at least in the 2020s, are wholesome things. A vagina-posessing Barbie is really just a product update to keep up with the times. All the Barbie variations, presidents and doctors with respectable vaginas, have nothing on Lilli, a sex worker whose pussy brought her pleasure and profit.

Cringe as it may be to make this point, Barbie is an awful, awful toy. Compared to Lilli, it truly is just a lifeless thing. The product’s purpose is to enforce social norms, to model womanhood, the nuclear family, etc – naturally it keeps up with the times. It is a travesty, perverting the sacred purpose of dolls. Barbie is not a doll made for loving. It is, by design, utterly unlovable.

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What of other objects made for loving?

In season 3 episode 3 of Sex and the City, Miranda hires a housekeeper. This maternal Ukrainian woman immediately begins imposing her old world values on Miranda. Miranda is frustrated by her hopelessly unmodern slave, stifling a complaint when the maid introduces an un-asked-for rolling pin into her kitchen, and getting even more annoyed when the slave throws out her vibrator and replaces it with a crucifix. At last, Miranda decides to stand up for herself, letting the old maid know that she’ll give her the boot if she can’t respect Miranda’s vision of womanhood – which entails having a vibrator locked away in a bedside drawer.

In another episode (season 1 episode 9), Charlotte, uptight and marriage-focused, acquires a vibrator for the very first time – and it rocks her world. She becomes unmoored, obsessed. She doesn’t show up to social events and loses interest in finding a husband. She is dangerously satisfied. The world outside of her apartment means nothing to her. Her curtains are drawn. All she does is jack off. Eventually, her friends break into her dark, damp apartment and wrestle her vibrator away from her. She is saved.

Sex and the City is a show less about sex than it is about that conjunction, and. It is a show about how to live among others, about public life, and how healthy modern sex – normative sex – fits into it. That’s why it’s not Sex in the City.

When it comes down to it, most of the sex that actually happens in New York is masturbation. That’s why these two episodes are interesting – they codify vibrator usage and reconcile it to the social order. Jacking off is liberatory, but it is also dangerous and must be regulated because it always risks becoming an anti-social act – one that precludes the possibility of a healthy productive relationship with the world outside oneself.

Nagisa Ōshima’s 1976 erotic film In The Realm of the Senses is about this very same dangerous, antisocial kind of love – the same kind that Charlotte experiences alone with her vibrator.

In Ōshima’s film, a private affair begins between a married man and a sex worker. He leaves his wife and the social order behind. The two run away together, staying at various inns, paying no heed to the observations or judgments of others. With shades drawn, they ceaselessly deepen and complicate their sexual relationship. As things get kinkier and weirder (this is a vision of love or eroticism as a type of worldbuilding), the world proper fades away. Soldiers, you notice in the background, are going off to war (it is 1936). But this is a blurry background – irrelevant. They never leave the bed. Their erotic relationship is the very antithesis of a social coupling. It has no meaning outside itself. Eventually, as the outside world prepares to explode into war and violence, the couple turns suicidally inward. During the act of lovemaking, she strangles him to death and cuts off his penis. But this act is not presented as a severance of love – but as its culmination, or perhaps a means for its continuance.

Sex and the City is a show about a woman who is having a relationship with New York. Her civic form of what some sexologists call “object sexuality” is distinct from the case of Erika Eiffel, who married the Eiffel Tower in 2007, because Carrie Bradshaw’s attraction is more diffuse, directed as it is toward a hyperobject composed of a complex agglomeration of networked relationships and ideas. Carrie Bradshaw is turned on by shoes, by the romance of New York, by capitalism, by modernity and the present day – in short, by the city. That’s why the show was allowed to air on tv. It’s steamy stuff, to be sure.

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Why don’t Fleshlights enjoy the same status as vibrators? To even put them on the same plane and compare them is tantamount to demeaning the achievements of the feminist movement. Vibrators operate as symbols and sex toys simultaneously. My friend Marilou says they’re “reparations.” Fleshlights, however, are just pure ignominious sex toys.

Last September, a mutual on Twitter quote-tweeted a video of someone demonstrating the inner workings of their Fleshlight. He commented, “if you are a normal, sane person in any way at all, the internal shame associated with using a device like this should immediately make it feel like your dick is being mutilated with some sort of medieval torture device.” I asked him why. “Anything more than just a dry jerk is an affront to nature,” he wrote back to me.

Basically, Fleshlights creep people the fuck out.

My friend Maximillian once gave his married friend Luther a Fleshlight for his birthday as a gag gift. When Luther’s wife Nutella found it on the dining room table, she was so livid she told her husband that he had to cut Maximillian out of his life.

In the case of the couple mentioned above, Nutella probably saw porn or sex toys as forms of cheating. But I’m sure there was something specifically enraging about Luther having a Fleshlight. The reality is that most people regard Fleshlight owners as suspicious lechers. It’s like learning that a person has sex with their dog. Owners are regarded as people whose sexualities are out of control – or at the very least a bit “extra.”

Part of that is due to the fact that men already have it easy when it comes to cumming. For many women, vibrators are a revelation, opening up the possibility of orgasm for the very first time, or at least making it far easier. Fleshlights, however, just make masturbation more excellent for men who are already more than capable of busting – the devices simply enhance. There’s something unfair about that. Perhaps a man who puts his penis in a Fleshlight is “spoiling” himself.

But that still doesn’t fully explain the intensity of the stigma, which stems, I believe, from a normative understanding of what libido is “for”, and where jism ought to go.

Men are seen as sexually ravenous by default. They are dogs. What makes a Fleshlight sick is that it confirms this ravenous sexuality, but it adds an unseemly premeditation to the whole affair. Men are dogs, but what makes a dog trustworthy is the simplicity of its drive. Dogs should be yanking at their chains for a bone, not budgeting their time and money for a clammy maximization of their enjoyment of it.

Jacking off is a wasteful act. Our modern sensibilities laugh off the Bible’s prohibition on spilling one’s seed on the ground. Sure, we say, by all means, jack off – there are so many benefits: you ward off prostate cancer, and you get a better sense of what you’re into, thereby preparing yourself for a healthy relationship with another person or for life in New York. But there’s something unseemly or outrageous to most people about the idea of wasting oneself in fancy ways. There’s something unethical or, in more contemporary terms, unhealthy, about complicating your relationship with yourself.

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Laws against sodomy are typically only enforced to persecute gay people, but a lot of acts have been classified as sodomy at one point or another. One broad definition of sodomy is simply non-procreative sex. To sodomize someone is to use them as a plaything fruitlessly. Bestiality and oral sex are essentially the same crime: wasting seed. A dog’s pussy and a homie’s mouth are no different, because they’re both places where you can’t really get anything done, kid-wise. They’re both holes with no future.

Procreative sex has a role in the social order; in fact, it upholds it, promising us the future. The family is, after all, the fundamental social unit. Have kids and multiply remains the most important ethical imperative. We give kids dolls and encourage them to play house. Having procreative sex feels good, but that’s only a lucky side effect.

Non-procreative sex, however, in its lack of purpose, puts pleasure in stark relief. The couple in In The Realm of the Senses engage in many forms of sodomy. Their very relationship is purposeless – it is a denial of the world and a rejection of the future. These are the necessary conditions for eroticism.

Charlotte’s vibrator usage is briefly erotic, before her friends bring her back to reality. However, Miranda’s vibrator usage – which is purely symbolic and moreover affirms her place in the social order – is absolutely unerotic. So here we have two forms of vibrator usage – one that is for naked pleasure, and the other that is dressed up in public meaning.

The Bible prohibits spilling your seed on the ground for the same reasons. Up until fairly recently, masturbation was widely condemned. People tried to avoid such wasteful pleasure. Now public health officials, who are our priests and moral arbiters, advocate for masturbation within reasonable limits. Masturbation, they say, has a number of health benefits. It is, moreover, a kind of preparation or education. You learn what you’re into. You thereby make yourself a better potential partner for a “real relationship” somewhere down the line. There’s a place for it. As a learning tool, it is indirectly procreative.

As such, it is now considered okay to spill seed onto the ground. What’s not okay is to prioritize masturbation and complicate it. To complicate something or give it definition is to engage in a kind of world-building. Masturbation that features worldbuilding is dangerous, because it risks competing with the world. It is not simply releasing seed onto the ground – into emptiness. The reason Luther’s wife Nutella got mad wasn’t because she was experiencing petty jealousy, it’s because she intuited that jacking off into something is a form of worldbuilding. Cumming into a Fleshlight isn’t “simply” masturbation – it’s sodomy. It’s unabashedly erotic. A Fleshlight truly is the wrong hole.

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There is an old Bo Burnham joke that goes, “Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?” “No.” “The woman.”

I’ve always found Bo’s joke a bit problematic. By equating personhood with “fat,” Bo suggests that personhood is something unnecessary that can be sloughed off or that we could do just as well without. By placing primacy on the genitals – on the hole – and treating the whole person around it as “extra,” Bo deals in a common misogynistic trope, that a woman is “just a hole.”

To make this joke – to reject the fat around the hole – is to reject love. It is to reject the worldbuilding project that is inevitable whenever a hole is used often enough to complicate the terrain around it. Occupy a hovel for long enough, it inevitably takes on form and structure and becomes a home. Even the most committed misogynist might, if they make the mistake of busting in one hole for too long, find themselves having sex with a whole person. That is in fact the fear: that their jism might invest a hole with human qualities. Or that they might be swallowed up.

Perhaps, on some base or trivial level, Bo’s joke conveys a fundamental truth: we are all just holes. Our humanness, our souls, our inner lives – these are unnecessary luxuries. Our selfhoods are ongoing and collaborative imaginative projects. They are fictions we co-construct with each other. A down-to-earth pragmatist, someone who tells it like it is, naturally dismisses these fictions, which serve no useful social ends. It is prosocial to be interchangeable, to reduce oneself to pure function, and to be instrumentalized and instrumentalize others in turn. This is what keeps the gears turning: it is what allows labor power to be bought and sold, ensures a reserve of young people who can be sent off to war or, alternatively, fucked, and tally-marked as part of a body count.

Fleshlights are stigmatized because it is a man’s duty to raise their body counts and conquer. To use a Fleshlight is to participate in a kind of sexuality that has nothing to do with conquest. In this way, it is a radical act. And yet Fleshlight owners are often referred to as “creepy,” the same word used to describe predators. Perhaps it is time to rethink these terms. Fleshlight owners are indeed deviant, but predators are not in fact deviant at all. When a predator is found objectionable or creepy, few people take issue with their fundamental pursuit – they’re just considered to have gone a bit too far. Men are supposed to go out there and aggress – and even in the age of #MeToo their excesses are dismissed as youthful exuberance or learning experiences. To own a Fleshlight is to wholly reject or subvert normative masculinity, and for that reason it is considered far more objectionable, far creepier. Sadly, I believe most parents would rather have a son that pushes boundaries and commits “indiscretions” than a son who just gets really into hentai or something. The sentiment goes like this: at the very least, date rape isn’t weird. At least it happens while having a healthy engagement with the world – at least it’s not navel gazing. At least it’s not pretentious.

There are, of course, other objections that can be made to Fleshlights. Fleshlights, I’ve heard it said, teach men to think of women as objects – as holes. Setting aside the question of what makes objects or holes so terrible that being compared to them would be considered demeaning, it seems to me to me that a Fleshlight is very different from a person, and I’d imagine that the more time one spends with one or the other, the clearer those differences become.

Or maybe the opposite is true: that sex objects like Fleshlights and dildos really are not very different from the “people” they supposedly threaten to replace, but not because people are (or can come to resemble) “mere objects,” but because mere objects are, in the end, themselves real beings, to the extent that we interact with them, care for them, and imbue them with life and love. And the secret – both the horror and the big joke – is that this is true of people too – that every sexy stranger is an object to us, and it is only through handling it that it becomes ensouled. And even then, we still adore the objectness, the materiality of the person, the strangeness of skin.

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I’ve always watched porn and downloaded mysterious files. Despite that, I’ve never gotten a “virus” on there. I don’t know what a computer virus is or does, but it seems to be something computers catch from their users. When people feel shame about what they are doing on the computer, their computers can become riddled with these mysterious infections. The computer behaves unpredictably. It gets slower, freezes sometimes, basically has to be replaced after 7 or so years. This happens when the user suffers from extreme sexual shame. My computers have always functioned fine, because I’m sex-positive.

Most of my guy friends feel intense guilt about jacking off, but because they’re men – and because men are supposedly quite shameless – they make up external, more “objective” reasons why they ought to exert more control over their baser impulses. They believe, for instance, watching porn and jacking off makes them insensitive to stimulation, weakening their desire, their libido, their drive to be with or their ability to enjoy a “real” sexual encounter. They believe that it is possible to waste libido – that it is like a health bar in a video game, and that their love and cum has to be carefully budgeted. By abstaining from useless onanism and living monkishly, by utterly disconnecting from their desires, they can ensure an excellent performance at some point down the line. The Christian idea that sex must be purposeful and procreative is still alive and well. The oughts and shoulds of that ethical framework have merely been transferred over to a modern, secular, objective “health” framework.

I won’t deny that some experiences desensitize you to others. There are plenty of books and movies I can’t enjoy because I’ve been exposed to better, more nuanced, more complicated ones. When you have experienced profound intimacy with a best friend or loved one, you become less content with shallower intimacies. Your loneliness increases in tandem with your capacity for connection. You can’t get off to certain things anymore. But that’s not a bad thing.

Men also talk of abstaining from porn because of where it’s led them, what they’ve learned about themselves.

“I’m getting into some weird shit,” men say, like it’s a bad thing, “and I don’t want to reach a point where that’s the only thing that gets me off.” How sad. I remember my friend Devereaux saying this to me many years ago. He probably was looking at penises or dirty diapers or something. He’d found something he loved on the computer. Instead of celebrating that, embracing and complicating his sexuality, he curtailed his growth, castrating himself in the act of shutting his laptop closed. He was afraid that he would lose his ability to have lackluster missionary style sex with foreign exchange students. In the name of sexual health, in the name of preserving his vigor, Devereaux denied himself what he truly wanted.

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One of the most unique and enjoyable aspects of being Online is the way the internet blurs the private and the public. Brands converse with us as intimate friends. Meanwhile, real individuals exploit and ransack their inner lives to turn themselves into marketable products. Twitter is fun because journalists, politicians, companies, and other classically “public” entities are forced to engage on the same plane as private individuals, often with very entertaining results. Ted Cruz accidentally “liking” a porn video on Twitter or Tony the Tiger being provoked by furries are examples that come to mind.

Twitter and Instagram aren’t just tools for people to make public statements. They are also windows into tiny worlds, often very private ones. The Internet is not a smooth surface, but one with many holes, folds, and places to fall into. While fame and exposure is the name of the game for many people, the Internet has been and likely always will be full of unique niches, allowing otherwise isolated people to connect. While the Usenet groups of the 90s are no more and the Internet continues to become more homogenous and corporatized, I doubt that it will ever stop having secret hiding places.

A while back, my friend Abner introduced me to a subculture of love doll Instagram accounts. Initially I felt nothing but contempt for these interchangeable freaks. I gawked because they appeared grotesque and funny. It was good content. I didn’t see them as people. I saw them as lolcows – basically yet another example of the Internet being a cool voyeuristic window into some insane shit.

The more I spent in this little hole-in-the-wall corner of the Internet, the more the owners of the dolls – and, crucially, the dolls themselves – became human to me. I was fascinated by the fact that the Instagram accounts were ostensibly run by the dolls. Their human companions wrote from their dolls’ perspectives, constructing elaborate personalities, with values that sometimes even differed from their human companions’ values. The dolls interacted with each other on social media too, so their identity formation had a social and collaborative aspect as well, and in some ways they were “independent” from their human companions in this realm. I imagined the owners relating to each other in much the same way that parents who have kids at the same school do.

What makes a love doll different from a Fleshlight? Both are erotic toys, but a love doll has extra fat. It is a Fleshlight with the infrastructure of a person built around it. People hate love dolls with even more passion than they hate Fleshlights. Why is that? I suspect that cultural taboos are to blame – but I don’t mean sexual repression. Ultimately it is love that people are uncomfortable with.

Loving relationships have their sensible, pro-social forms, which, even if they are crazy behind closed doors, are socially legible in terms of their trajectory, public meaning, and how they fit into a web of other social relations and teloi. That’s not to say that a normative relationship like a marriage can’t be privately authentic and idiosyncratic – but at the very least people outside the relationship have something else to look at. It is covered up, clothed, as it were, in public meaning. But a relationship with a love doll is an unabashedly naked love. It is cringe – all love behind closed doors is – but here the doors are wide open. It is something to avert your eyes from.

It is notable, I think, that in retail terms, “sex doll” is generally reserved for inexpensive dolls. The higher-end dolls, which are made with loving attention by craftspeople, are sold as “love dolls.” These often bespoke one-of-a-kind creations are the fruits of techne. Customers who buy them are investing in them, not just financially, but emotionally and over time. These are long term relationships we’re talking about. While lovedoll owners are dismissed as engaging in some weird sex thing, the reality is likely far more uncomfortable for people – which is that they are engaging in some weird love thing.

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A good novel is, they say, an imaginative portal to another world. Crawl in and find yourself transported. Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel House of Holes literalizes this. The title is also a good description of literature as a whole. It is a house of holes. When a person writes a work of fiction, they are poking a hole in the world. Some go deeper than others. It depends on how deeply they press.

Some novels edify, but others sodomize. Or perhaps all fiction is sodomy on some level. These are not natural holes. They are burrows, non-natural places in the folds of our world where you can find unreal pleasure. It is illegal squatting.

Yes, reading fiction has its benefits. Yes, you can use it to gain social capital, become a better critical thinker, learn moral lessons, become more empathetic or changed for the better or edified in whatever ways. Sure. But the reality is that you are not supposed to live in a fictional world. This was supposed to be a vacation. You’re not supposed to stay there. You’re certainly not supposed to fall in love.

This is why kids find it cheesy and hypocritical when adults utter platitudes about the transporting power of fiction or the importance of imagination; we all intuitively know that imagination, for all our nods of respect to it, is, like love, a deeply criminal thing.

Fictosexuality is a sexual attraction to fictional characters. Fictosexual activists and theorists have formulated the concept of interpersonal sexuality centrism (similar to the concept of humanonormativity developed by object sexuality researchers). This concept of interpersonal sexuality centrism has a destigmatizing as well as a clarifying purpose. To be attracted to a fictional character is not to wish it were real, necessarily – it is not a mere substitute for the real thing. It truly is an attraction to a fictional artifact and the artificial environment that frames it – they know it is unreal, and that is, perhaps, a feature of what makes them attractive.

Nijikon, or “2D complex,” is perhaps the most well-known form of fictosexuality. Nijikon individuals are attracted to characters in manga, anime, and light novels. The psychiatrist Saitō Tamaki writes that for otaku, “fiction itself can be a sexual object,” with attraction manifesting in an “affinity for fictional contexts.”

This is related to the concept of moe, a Japanese word that refers to feelings of strong affection mainly towards characters in anime, manga, video games, and other media. The common feature in all feelings of moe is that the subject of such feelings is something that one cannot possibly have a real relationship with, like a fictional character, a pop idol, or an inorganic substance. The Portuguese word saudade captures a similar feeling – “an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again.”

Having a relationship with a fictional character is indeed a literal impossibility, but it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that this impossibility – this gulf between fantasy and reality – would engender feelings of love and yearning. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as anyone who’s ever been in a long-distance relationship knows all too well. To be nonexistent is to play hard-to-get in a very committed and profound way.

God is moe, perhaps. There’s certainly something erotic about how Jesus is depicted. And God’s silence, too, might be taken as a flirty kind of self-absenting. Moreover, to have faith isn’t to wish God were “real,” because empirical proof would defeat the point of taking a leap of faith. To take a leap, you need a gap. You need distance.

Our relationships with celebrities (from teen heartthrobs to God Himself) were at one point predicated on their distance from us. Now, on social media, celebrities are our friends. This is true not just of celebrities, who are relics from a previous monoculture, but of minor media figures as well (aka, well, everybody). These are parasocial relationships. Repeated exposure to a person’s social media presence leads to feelings of intimacy and connection, but these feelings are not reciprocal. But the more salient aspect of parasocial relationships is that they don’t even necessarily refer to a real person.

Identities online are constructions. While some people aim to represent themselves honestly, the reality is that authenticity is a performance and it requires a variety of tricks and tools to pull off the impression of it. Whether they like it or not, everyone on social media constructs a persona. Obviously, there can be similarities – but it is wrong to say that an online persona simply reflects the real person. In fact, all too often the real person ends up becoming a distorted, weird reflection of their online persona, which can overpower them as it develops more influence. It is hard to say no to a celebrity, even – or especially – when that celebrity bears your own name.

Online personas easily fall victim to audience capture, which occurs when an online figure is beholden to the expectations of their audience. A well-known case is Nicholas Perry (Nikocado Avocado on YouTube), a violinist and vegan who reached 350 lbs while filming increasingly grotesque mukbang videos, cheered on by an audience of enablers who adored his excesses, increasing health problems, and worsening mental illness – the symptoms of which might have been performative, but whose performance of mental illness was itself an expression of a truly profound real mental sickness (do all subjective states emerge from within – or are some, like the soul of a love doll, impositions from the outside?). Other examples abound, including political figures, journalists, and podcasters who become more and more extremist over time, as audiences latch onto their brands, and their successes in the attention economy become predicated on becoming more and more cartoonish versions of themselves, like latter-season sitcom characters.

To be online is to be in a purely fictional realm, one that refers to our world while often having nothing to do with it. Awareness of this fact constitutes, I believe, a kind of freedom – and serves as a form of self-protection. By keeping the “real self” separate and distinct, you keep it safe from the tainting influences of the internet. This also makes the internet much more enjoyable and interesting. Twitter is “literature,” a living text co-constructed by millions of people. and generally the writing is far better than most novels, partially because it’s meant to be read and affect other people rather than exist as inert art objects for the cognoscenti, and also because it is written in the colloquial tongue by people who don’t consider themselves “writers” or to be “writing,” which is always what produces the best writing and the most convincing lies – ie, the best fictions.

To be online and to be emotionally invested in the lives of others – to have parasocial relationships with “accounts” – I don’t see how this is very different from loving a moe anime character or caring deeply for a love doll. Perhaps the parasocial relationships are unhealthier, though, simply because they are more naive and delusional. People really do believe they’re getting to know a real person online. To love a fictional character or a love doll, however, is to be aware of the gap and impossibility. The awareness of this difference (the difference between being unreal and real) elevates what would otherwise be masturbation to something else entirely: intercourse between fantasy and reality.

But in a parasocial relationship there is no gap or distinction between fantasy and reality, no awareness of difference, and thus no love is possible, and even as a masturbatory act it is a muddied and confused counterfeit – like cumming into limbo rather than onto the earth. Nothing grows in such terrain. No world-building is possible from this kind of libidinal investment.

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Among the love doll Instagram accounts, I found myself drawn to one account in particular. Her name was Caja.

She looked kind of horrifying. She had the face of what seemed to be a… baby. Her body proportions were absurd. Her ass and breasts were enormous. The doll was more like an alien or a cartoon than the facsimile of a “real woman.” It looked like she had a rare genetic disorder. There was something respectable about that, having a sex doll with qualities that problematized attraction. The owners’ love object was so specific and non-normative, it made me like them. It also made the lovedoll more real in a way. The object, while possibly bespoke, had a found quality – much as real people do. Real people are, after all, imperfect discarded things you find in random areas and try to make the best of. The doll was custom made to be exactly like that.

I also learned that it was owned by a couple. Even though the husband seemed to do the vast majority of the writing, I don’t think it was only nominally shared by them. It truly seemed like both of theirs. In Instagram captions, I learned about this couple – but from the doll’s perspective. I had a window into their life. It reminded me of reading I Am A Cat, in which writer Natsume Sōseki satirized middle class domestic life from the perspective of a supercilious housecat.

The wife, I learned, was disabled, and they’d purchased the doll when her disability began to manifest in earnest. I didn’t get the impression that they bought the doll merely to satisfy the man whose “needs” could no longer be met by his disabled wife. Was she accommodating him? I suppose that could have been the case. The doll herself explained that she was chosen because of her resemblance to the wife. I don’t know if this says something about him replacing his wife with a doll – or if it says something about the way she lived vicariously through the doll. The doll spoke of her own origins with the same funny “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” nostalgia that children have about their own origins. It was, in a way, their child, a proxy for each other, or as if their relationship had itself developed a body and begun to speak in the first person.

I think what really drew me in, though, was not a morbid fascination with their psychology, though I did find the couple touching. It was the way the doll understood herself. I loved that the writer did not try to write as if the doll were a real woman. Instead, he wrote from a true doll’s perspective. To me, this meant that the doll was not a conduit for fantasy. A Fleshlight, I’d always assumed, is meant to be invisible and forgotten while it’s being used, so that the user is free to fantasize about someone organic – ie, a substitute for the real thing. But the couple running the doll’s account and writing for her, animating her – they were interested in it, the doll itself. Maybe saying “it” really is the most respectful thing here, since they respected and honored the doll’s “itness,” its objectness.

The doll relished discussing its own materiality. The writer took the perspective of a plastic being, imagining what it is like to be plastic conscious of itself. I learned about types of plastic. Its skeleton was made of Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), a high-strength thermoplastic material. Some of its bodies had ThermoPlastic Elastomer (TPE) skin, but when it went camping or did outdoor activities, it used bodies with Liquid Silicone Rubber (LSR) skin. Both required different procedures for maintenance, cleaning, and protection from heat and UV rays. The doll articulated its perspective with loving specificity, going well beyond merely marveling “I am plastic,” but stating “here are my needs, my loves, my limits, given what I am and what I’m made of – this is how I interact with the world and its elements.”

The doll’s consciousness was uniquely embodied not just because of the materials it was made out of, but because it had multiple bodies. It had a small portable body, a medium body, and a large one. Each body had different advantages and disadvantages, vulnerabilities, strengths, and was suitable for specific occasions, which it explained at length. It was, it insisted, one entity – one being – but with several bodies. This was, it continued with pride, something that made it different from flesh and blood people.

The writer clearly loved the doll for who it was: a doll. This love was so evident – because they made the doll love and respect itself. It had pride in its uniqueness as a doll person. In captions and idiosyncratic infographics, it explained how its multiple bodies worked. #freethenipple, it wrote, haranguing Zuckerberg for policing photographs of its body. It joked, fantasized, made observations about art and culture, and occasionally even critiqued its human companions.

In Caja’s own words, its consciousness was located in “the cloud.” David Smail, who pioneered what he called social materialist psychology, argued that what we call “the unconscious” is not situated within our brains, but outside of us, and the most impactful forces on our so-called “inner lives” do not bubble up from within, but are the product of external factors, with the most distal powers (the state, the economy, the broader culture) having the most impact. A person, in this view, is a sort of fold in the social fabric. The soul is something that happens to us. A recent study showed that livestock whose owners believe in animals’ capacity for emotions are healthier and happier. I’m sure the same is true for how we humans treat each other. Haha.

It feels unfair to say that the couple was animating this doll, giving it life, that their affections were the ghost or soul in the machine. Rather, it seems, the doll – its materiality – was the very real machine at the heart of its human companions’ immaterial souls. The couple didn’t speak through the doll. The doll spoke through them. Or they all spoke through each other interdependently.

The doll would be the first to admit and recognize that it was voiceless on its own, that it was a being whose voice was predicated on having a loving and imaginative relationship with homo sapiens. It was a being whose body and potency were located at several interconnected sites, its own multiple bodies as well as the aging bodies of the couple who loved it and cared for it. The doll was not a thing they were using, but a being that encompassed and included them as its organs. As a love doll, it was not made for loving, but was truly a being that came into existence as a result of love. The unfolding of its being was coeval with love’s own unfolding and development. In this sense, the doll’s personhood was as “real” as the personhood that flesh-and-blood lovers and loved ones attribute to each other, which is no less dubious, no less fictional and imagined.