Life with a sex doll
Realistic expectations: the tragicomedy of living with a sex doll. Photos by Lara Verheijden
Realistic Expectations
Dutch Original here
The sex doll is fairly impenetrable. Fucking her is a struggle. She has a very tight cunt and it is difficult to get your fingers inside because the heavy silicone body presses the labia together. Mick has to arm himself with his tumescent organ in order to penetrate her. When he fucks her, the toes, which have very little rigidity in them, tremble. They are the neglected extremities of the doll, escaping his field of vision.
He keeps his hand around his gigantic cock and looks at the doll, with somewhat flat, unseeing eyes. Those eyes reflect the awareness that he is being watched. How he fucks her when he is alone, nobody knows. That knowledge is lost to her lifeless gaze.
He is kneeling on the bed, tilting his head and looking at her little torso, the stomach of which is slightly creased, giving the impression that her shoulders might be able to turn. When you squeeze the thighs, they feel firm, like real muscles. But the hands are somewhat corpse-like, because they are softer than the body, yet swollen, like slender fingers retaining fluid.
He lifts her up and places her on his hips, so that she balances on top of him. Lifting her requires a great deal of strength. Her legs stick out sideways at Z-shaped angles. He presses his chin against his neck in concentration and holds her by the waist, so that she leans on him with slightly less weight, creating room to fuck her.
Mick has a big imagination. That is also the reason he has been able to go without sex for a long time. He watches a bit of porn and imagines that the woman on his screen pushes her head into his lap and takes his gigantic cock into her mouth. That mouth is performed by his hand, which he can move subtly and elegantly over his foreskin. He needs very little in order to summon a scene in his mind. In the years since puberty, that fantasy has become his daily practice, a habit; you could even call it a skill. He is practised in masturbating effectively: not staring neurotically at the ceiling and tugging at his dick hastily or shamefully, but truly getting satisfaction from it, surrendering himself to an erotic game of thought… in any case, he has overcome all sexual shame toward himself…
Mick is trained in being completely alone. In this, he has a kind of tenderness toward himself. With the little money he has, he buys extremely expensive bags and clothes, which he folds around his body. He says that he learned to be alone during the COVID crisis, when he could not go to the bar. He then decided to drink by himself, at home, and he has kept that habit. ‘You can also just party alone, when you need that break… that anaesthesia…’ Through the doll, that skill has become visible to the outside world, because he has posted photographs of her in which he shows her to the world. Like a trophy, not of his sexual conquest, but of his victory over the sexlessness of his generation, a victory over his boredom and his isolation, which he wants to ridicule with the doll.
And yet a new sadness appears on his face while he is busy fucking her. He has recently fallen in love with a real woman. He has fallen in love before with women he could not have, but this time it is different, because this woman is also in love with him. They spent a horny night together in Berlin, but she could not fuck him because she had a boyfriend.
During our interview, I took IPhone pictures of him (not the ones included in this article) with his erect penis beside the sex doll, which he sent to her as a thirst trap. She later confided in him that she had masturbated to them for an entire day. After that, he spent another night with her, during which they pressed their genitals, wrapped in underwear, against each other. They keep fucking each other virtually… Their affair is a kind of orgasmic, spiritual masturbation gathering, but what Mick wants most is to embrace her, to sit opposite her in a café and stare at her. Or perhaps he wants her to embrace him, because your fantasies cannot caress you. Always being alone makes you stiff. Your body becomes more and more like a coat rack with your head hanging from it.
When he briefly leaves to get drinks, I see an imprint of him in everything in the house. The interior is bare, and therefore every object stands out: the crocheted tablecloth on the tall, spider-like table he assembled himself out of rubbish; the books from the literary-historical canon standing in small groups on the shelves; two empty cans on the counter in the twilight falling in through the kitchen door.
Three paintings of deer hang on the walls in the living room: they are illustrations, like drawings from a picture book. His mother made them, the first one when he was still a small child. With them, she wanted to depict him, her son. She has always seen him as a deer because he was born with large brown deer eyes. In one of the paintings, he is depicted as a deer dandy: it is an oval painting in a broad oval frame - as though you were looking through a ship’s window into a cupboard or cabinet in which the clothed deer, seated on a chair with wooden curls, is put on display.
‘Do you know the sexual fantasy in which you are invisible?’ he asks in a half-serious tone as, post-coitus, he smokes a cigarette on the balcony in the deprived neighbourhood where he lives, and from where you can see the car park with rubbish drifting around, where people are busy moving their belongings. ‘No…? The idea is that you are invisible, so that you can do whatever you want, with any woman, and get away with it. That is what it feels like to make love with the doll, because you really are invisible when you fuck her, and you can do anything, absolutely anything you want to her…
Before I had sex with her for the first time, I dressed her. That was a very intimate process. Imagine having to dress someone who does not cooperate at all. Who does everything to work against you. That was what it was like. So I had to touch her a great deal while doing it. And then I started touching her, at first partly as a joke. And I thought: “Oh, actually this is quite nice.” And I also found it horny that it was so wrong, that I had the feeling it really was not allowed… so that was actually amazing. Eventually I carried her to bed, and we lay down spooning. But spooning often escalates, you know…
The other things I do with her are very vanilla, though… grabbing her throat a little and pulling her hair… that is the most extreme, yes. And sometimes I slap her on the buttocks when I need to be near my bed and she is lying there like that. But all of that is foreplay too, right? When I am not fucking her, I sometimes give her little slaps. You do that with your girlfriend too, when you have one.’
His ‘platonic female friends’ advised him to talk to her, because otherwise he would objectify her too much. Those female friends treat him as a kind of ‘gay best friend’ to whom they can say anything, without sex ever being in the air. In their interference, I read the fear of being replaced by the doll. Moreover, I imagine that they benefit from Mick’s sexual frustration: when they spend time with him, they can always cherish the feeling that they are withholding something from him. They probably talk to him constantly about sex and his lack of it, about what is horny and what is not, and whom and how they themselves fuck. But they always leave him alone and give him nothing of that kind. He serves them as a spectator of their female existence.
There is something perverse in that form of friendship; the women feel cruel without it ever becoming explicit. They cherish that cruelty as a silent private pleasure. Mick does not beg them for anything, and the rejection remains unspoken. After all, both sides have devoted themselves to the belief that he falls outside the sexual market a priori. But their pleasure lies precisely in that vagueness… they relate to him with a subtle sense of possession, which only truly takes shape when it is under pressure. In other words: they want the final word in the carousel of his desires.
But this has always been clear to me. Women love Mick; they even become a little aroused by him. But mainly because he loves women so much; they find it horny to think about the power their figure has over him. In that sense, he is a very generous heterosexual and, moreover, a sovereign. Mick makes sure he cums, all by himself.
