For Benjamin and Isabella, of course
‘We’re going to enter a very competitive market, a lot of players. We think we’re going to have the best product in the world. And we’re going to go for it and see if we can get 1% market share.’
Steve Jobs at the launch of the first iPhone, 9 January 2007
‘Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.’
Ramana Maharshi
Preface
What you are about to read is not science fiction.
We are on the brink of an age when technology will redefine birth, food, sex and death – the fundamental elements of our existence. Until now, human life has always meant emerging from our mother’s body, living off the flesh of dead animals and seeking out sexual relationships with other humans, until it ends with a death we can neither avoid nor control.
Over the past five years, I’ve immersed myself in the world of four different inventions that promise to deliver the perfect partner, the perfect gestation, the perfect meat, the perfect death. They aren’t perfect yet; they are still being made, in labs and garages and studios, in hospitals, workrooms and warehouses. Some of them will be on sale within a few years, others will take decades to be market ready, but they will all become an inevitable part of human life.
How much are we about to hand over to technology? And how will it change us? To answer this, we will travel across four continents and visit the darkest parts of the internet. I am going to take you to the kitchens where priceless chicken nuggets are made, the members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves, the labs where foetuses grow in bags and the discussion boards where men plan all-out war against women. We will meet scientists, humanoids, designers, ethicists, entrepreneurs and provocateurs; we will meet a fertility specialist prepared to do almost anything to satisfy his patients, a man who is married to his sex doll, a cake decorator who helped her best friend die and an artist who uses living flesh as his medium.
The men I’ll encounter who are behind these technologies (and they will pretty much all be men) are sometimes driven by principle, sometimes by passion, often by money, but always by the promise of validation and fame. They all share the belief that technology can let us have the lives we truly desire without sacrifice; that it can eliminate our problems and set us free.
But even the smartest visionaries can’t foresee where their innovations will take us. When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, he dared to hope that it would capture 1 per cent of the market; he had no idea that smartphones would take over our lives, overshadow our relationships, become the external organ we can’t function without. Radically disruptive technology always comes with aftershocks too extraordinary ever to predict.
If we can have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the ideal sexual relationship without compromise, have a perfect death without suffering, how else will human nature be changed forever?
Without us realizing it, human existence is being redefined in ways no one can determine or control.
To show you why I believe this is already happening, let me take you to a Southern California factory, where the world’s most glamorous adult toys are made.
PART ONE THE FUTURE OF SEX
The rise of the sex robot
CHAPTER ONE ‘Where the magic happens’
Abyss Creations is an unremarkable grey building off Route 78 in San Marcos, a thirty-minute drive north of San Diego, with a half-empty parking lot and a high perimeter wall. There’s no sign, no logo, no indication that a world-famous, world-leading multimillion-dollar sex toy business operates behind the tinted glass. They don’t want to attract passing customers, or fanboys, or rubberneckers.
When you pass between the sliding doors, you are greeted at reception by a seated life-size female doll in black glasses and a white shirt that strains to contain her heavy cleavage. A male doll stands beside her, dressed in a grey tie and waistcoat; his almond eyes and sharp cheekbones are unmistakably those I’ve seen in videos and photographs of Matt McMullen, Abyss Creations’ founder, chief designer and CEO. There’s a very convincing plastic orchid with sinuous fake roots creeping over onto the counter. Everything here is synthetic, but you only realize on second glance.
Abyss Creations is the home of RealDoll, the world’s most famous hyperrealistic silicone sex doll. Every year, up to 600 of them are sent out from the workshop in San Marcos to bedrooms in Florida and Texas, Germany and the UK, China and Japan and beyond, costing anything from $5,999 for a basic model to tens of thousands if the customer has unusual specifications. Vanity Fair magazine calls them ‘the Rolls Royce of sex dolls’. RealDolls have modelled in Dolce & Gabbana fashion shoots and starred in a string of movies and TV shows, from CSI: New York to My Name is Earl, and most famously opposite Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl. This is the most high-end masturbation on the market.
Dakotah Shore, Matt’s nephew and all-round helper, is going to take me on a tour of the factory. He lopes up to shake my hand, a warm smile beaming out from behind a magnificent copper beard. Dakotah works in shipping and handles the social media accounts. He’s only twenty-two, but he’s been working here since he was seventeen. He’s grown up alongside the dolls.
‘My dad worked here when I was a kid. Matt’s my mom’s brother and I’m really close with him. So it’s always been part of my life, it’s never been weird to me,’ he explains as he leads me behind reception, past a rack of dolls in lacy underwear and high heels. There is a blonde doll with porcelain-pale skin and glossy cherry-red lips, and a mixed-race doll with tumbling curls. A goth doll has studs in her nose, lip and navel, and bolts through her nipples clearly visible in her fishnet halter-neck. ‘The first time I came here I was twelve or thirteen years old and I thought it was cool,’ Dakotah continues, then checks himself. ‘I didn’t see the whole factory, I just saw the receptionist mannequins upstairs and I thought, Cool – really realistic receptionists.’ He gives me a sheepish grin.
We walk along a corridor lined with framed press cuttings and movie posters featuring RealDolls. There’s what looks like a Disney drawing, until you look closer and realize it’s Snow White being groped by all seven dwarves. Dakotah props open a door with an enormous, veiny, erect silicone penis. ‘Now that I work here and know the depth of it, it’s normal to me. It’s something that makes a lot of people happy and I take a lot of pride in it.’
We go down some steps that lead to the basement, passing underneath the giant labia of a huge doll that straddles the stairwell. She has bluish-grey skin and thick, articulated tentacles for hair; she was a prop in a minor Bruce Willis movie called Surrogates. At the bottom of the stairs is an enormous room with halogen strip lights. This is the beginning of the production line.
‘This is where the magic happens.’
A long queue of headless bodies hang on metal chains from a track in the ceiling, like carcasses in an abattoir. Their fingers and legs are splayed, their chests jut forwards and their hips are thrust back. Each one is different to the next: some have cartoonish, pendular breasts, others have athletic bodies, but they all share the same impossibly tiny waists. Because they are hanging, they are moving, dangling eerily a few feet above a floor littered with gummy silicone offcuts that look like flakes of dead skin.
‘You can touch them, no problem,’ Dakotah says. He slaps one hard on the bottom. ‘Sounds just like a human.’
It does. It makes me flinch.
The skin is the most unnerving thing of all about these headless bodies. Made of a custom blend of medical-grade platinum sil
icone, in a range of tones from fair to cocoa, it feels like human flesh, with the same friction and resistance, but it’s cold. The hands have lines, folds, wrinkles, knuckles, veins. When I intertwine the fingers of one in my hand I can feel the crunch of the skeleton underneath, with joints, just like bones.
‘Hands are the hardest thing to sculpt,’ Dakotah tells me. ‘We usually mould them off a real human’s hands.’ He stops to take a close look at a few. ‘Actually, some of these hands belong to my ex-girlfriend.’
Mike is delicately snipping excess silicone off the seams of one of the hands with some tiny scissors. Brian is filling the moulds around the skeletons, ready for casting into the thrusting, ready-for-action poses. Tony is having a sandwich. There is nothing seedy about this workplace: it’s a workroom, a factory, and for the technicians down here, the dolls are mundane. These guys might as well be assembling toasters.
Seventeen people work in the San Marcos HQ, but that is not enough to keep up with demand. From order to shipping, it can take more than three months to produce a RealDoll. The attention to detail, the skill involved in creating a doll, is undeniable. Dakotah is visibly proud of it all, and so earnest that I almost don’t want to ask my next question. Because, even though these are RealDolls, there is little that’s real about them. They have the bodies of surgically enhanced porn stars. They are caricatures.
‘Women don’t look like this, do they?’ I say.
‘We do have some that are 100 per cent modelled off real women, some are real, but yes, they are generally a little bit exaggerated,’ Dakotah concedes. ‘We like to make it the ideal female form.’
RealDolls are fully poseable, with a skeleton made of custom steel joints and PVC bones. They’re designed so that the doll has a similar range of movement to a human – except for the legs.
‘You can open them up pretty wide, and they go up pretty high,’ Dakotah says, doing some high kick gymnastics with a headless doll, pulling an ankle up to a collar bone until I wince.
‘A human can’t do that,’ I say.
‘A real human can’t do that, no. Well, some can, but not all.’
‘But the perfect woman can do that?’
‘The perfect woman could probably do that.’
The perfect woman has the waist-to-hip ratio of a Kardashian and the joints of a contortionist.
Dakotah takes me to a table covered with vaginal inserts, which are removable pink sleeves that go into the doll’s vaginal cavity, like a kind of ribbed rubber sock with labia at the opening. ‘We have fourteen different kinds of labia,’ he says with a flourish. There are mouth inserts too, all with removable tongues and perfect teeth (bad teeth is one of the few things no one asks for, Dakotah says). The teeth are soft silicone, so there’s no chance of anything pushed between them getting snagged.
In the early days, the only way to clean a used RealDoll was to take it into the shower or the bathtub. The invention of inserts was a game changer. ‘You wash it in the sink. If you want it to be nice and soft, put some baby powder into it, but you don’t need to. Then it just slides back in,’ Dakotah tells me, as if he were describing how to change the bag on a vacuum cleaner. ‘A lot of our customers have multiple inserts.’
There are male dolls, but not many. I spot one hanging on the production line, dressed in a surgical gown. His head is attached, and it’s got the Matt McMullen doppelgänger face. He’s looking down on us, with an expression that’s supposed to be dark and brooding, but comes across as a bit snooty from a foot above my head.
‘There’s a male doll over there who looks a lot like Matt,’ I say.
Dakotah looks up from the labia. ‘It might be the Matt face. It’s actually called the Nick face. He sculpted it himself, to be based on himself.’
‘He sculpted his own face so that people can buy it and have sex with something that looks exactly like him?’
Dakotah hesitates. ‘You can customize the face so it doesn’t always look like him. It’s just the structure of the face that looks like him.’ For the first time since we met, he looks embarrassed.
He whips off the surgical gown – there to protect the doll from dust, because this one has been in the workroom for a while, he says – to reveal a very boyish, slim body, with a tight six pack, in white boxer shorts. He’s far less realistic than the female dolls: instead of a wig, there’s an approximation of stubble painted across his head, which makes him look like a very weedy Action Man. I have a feeling that these male dolls aren’t designed for women at all. This model is young and skinny, what gay men might call a twink.
‘Do women actually buy these?’
‘Men and women buy them. More so men, but we do get female buyers,’ Dakotah shrugs. ‘For the dolls, I would say less than 5 per cent of the buyers are female. But we do sell accessories, all kinds of dildos, and many more women buy those. I think women are more likely to buy a toy than a full-on doll, for some reason.’
I have a hunch about what that reason might be. I try to imagine straddling one of these expensive, cold lumps of silicone. It would feel ridiculous, desperate, the opposite of erotic. Sex with anyone or anything that doesn’t have genuine desire for me would not be sexy for me, and while I can’t speak for all women, I don’t imagine this is a minority view. A dildo isn’t masquerading as a person, and you don’t have to pretend it’s really into you to enjoy using it.
‘Maybe because a full-on doll is like a replacement human being,’ I say.
‘Yeah, that could be it.’ He nods.
The male dolls have ‘man holes’ where customers can pop on the penis attachment of their choice, in a variety of sizes and states of arousal. Dakotah holds a flaccid extra large up to my nose. It’s as long as my arm and as thick as a drainpipe, with dinky, droopy testicles.
‘One hundred per cent hand sculpted. Feel free to touch it.’
He very much wants me to touch it. I don’t think it’s because he’d get a thrill out of seeing me handle a hyperrealistic penis, more that he’s bursting with pride at being part of the company that made it. But who knows? I’m not sure how to touch it, especially with him watching me so eagerly, but I do, trying to be as clinical, as journalistic, as possible. And yes, it feels pretty authentic.
‘It has a sliding skin, so it’s super realistic,’ Dakotah declares.
‘But it’s just as anatomically impossible as the female bodies. It’s good to know it goes both ways,’ I say, withdrawing my hand.
‘I agree,’ he says, putting the penis down. ‘This isn’t what the average man has to show off.’
There are two body and three face options for the male dolls, compared to seventeen bodies and thirty-four faces for the female ones. The male dolls aren’t really selling. ‘We’re revamping the male line. We’re going to come up with whole new body styles, whole new faces. At the end of the day, we are still a business, and if we had more people buying them, more people interested, we’d devote more time to them. It’s on the back burner.’
The Abyss Creations workroom is a testament to how specific and varied human kinks can be. They have made three-breasted sex dolls, sex dolls with blood-red skin, fangs and devil horns, sex dolls with elf ears, hirsute sex dolls with hair hand-punched all over their bodies. ‘We’ll do anything. It gets expensive when you get crazier: when we make a custom body, it means we have to sculpt a whole new body, build a new mould for it, a new skeleton… We’ve had people spend over $50,000 on a doll.’
Dakotah leads me back upstairs to the ‘Faces Room’, where the fine details are added. Each face comes from a prototype originally sculpted by hand in clay by Matt McMullen himself, and customers specify what make up they want, down to the thickness of the eyeliner. Katelyn, the official make up face artist, who has an ice-blue Mohawk and a spiral of black stars tattooed around her arm, is busy with a fine brush, painting eyebrows onto a delicate Asian face. There’s none of Dakotah’s enthusiasm here: she’s watching something on an iPad while she works, and doesn’t acknowl
edge us when we come into the room. There’s a rack of faces next to her, freshly made up with thick brows, smoky eyes and glossy lips that glisten as the paint dries.
One of RealDoll’s most popular features is the interchangeable faces: they snap on to the plastic skulls with magnets, and it takes seconds to swap them. That means customers can buy one body and have a variety of different sexual partners with very different looks, even different ethnicities.
‘What’s the most popular face?’ I ask.
‘What do you think is the most popular face, Katelyn?’ Dakotah asks, but she’s ignoring us. ‘This is our newest face, the Brooklyn face,’ Dakotah continues, pointing out a narrow one with plump lips and languid eyes. ‘It’s coming out really popular.’
There are forty-two different styles of nipple, in a spectrum of ten possible shades, including chestnut, red, peach, coffee. They are displayed in a matrix on what Dakotah calls the ‘Nipple Wall’, with names like Standard, Puffy and Half Dome, and range from the most popular (Perky 1 and Perky 2 : small, erect, unimaginative) to the distinctly niche (Custom 2 : an areola as large as a saucer). Customers sometimes send in pictures of their perfect nipple or labia, which Abyss will recreate, for a fee.
‘Are people’s sexual choices really that specific?’
Dakotah laughs. ‘Oh, people’s sexual choices are waaay more specific than this. Sometimes people even get down to where they want each individual freckle on the body.’
We stop next to a corkboard with swathes of synthetic pubic hair pinned to it. Unnervingly convincing acrylic eyeballs with hand-painted capillaries stare out at us from plastic tubs.
‘In theory, you could ask for the face of your ex, couldn’t you?’ I ask.
‘You’d have to send us photos, and then we’d ask, “Who is this?” and “Do you have their permission?” We definitely ask for proof of permission. We turn down a lot of requests. But if you have specific permission from the person, we can pretty much mimic anything. Almost all our business comes from customers sending us photos of what they like.’
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 1