Most women aren’t very good at pretending to be sex dolls. Scrolling through videos titled “Real Doll” on Pornhub, I can usually tell from the thumbnails whether they contain a product or a fantasy. This is not a complaint. A few years ago, while working on a poetry book, I became briefly obsessed with the RealDoll brand of life-size sex dolls. The book’s keywords might have been Asian, sex, and robot, and doing what I called “research” often left me feeling like I’d been torn into slimy quarters and thrown into a well. It was on one of these nights, trawling those depths, that I found the video.
She had blue hair: anime hair. Like most dolls, she had enormous tits and a sweet, placid face. I was impressed by the timing of her blinks. Then I doubted: Was she real? Something about her seemed different from the other dolls, but how could a person lie so still while this was happening—as if the body were cut off from the head? It had to be a machine. Was it? Was she?
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