A visit to a sex doll factory taught me a lot on male desires.

My first impression when I entered the factory Real Doll It was to be in a hunting shed, Except that these trophies had a strong layer of lip gloss and cotton hair. Their static eyes were fixed on an intermediate distance, except a pair, Inserted in a face that seemed Angelina Jolie, who seemed to look at me straight. I smiled with embarrassment, as if to say “ciao”, Then I quickly moved away from her inanimate gaze.

I was in Realdoll's hall, a manufacturer of sexy doll, Next to a couple of prosperous natural size models supported by metal supports. This was more or less what I expected from my visit to the company headquarters in San Diego: unlikely physicists unable to stand up alone.

As a teenager in the late 1990s, I hid from the night episodes of the HBO Real Sex provocative documentary series and I had taken one with the founder of Realdoll, Matt McMullen, and his fantasy factory. Realdol offered sculpted silicone perfection, proportions to the barbie and lips discussed as in a perpetual moan. The fourteen year old I was then saw McMullen with confidence with confidence: “We can build the girl of your dreams for you”. I thought this was what heterosexual men wanted.

Almost twenty years later, My visit as Reporter to Realdoll looked like a personal pilgrimage. It was January 2017 And Donald Trump had just been appointed president after boasting his ability to “take” gives it “for the passers”. It seemed to me that the market of these inanimate bodies was the reflection of a similar type of Sense of sexual entitlement and indifferent objectification of women. Realdoll sells mainly so -called dolls “feminine” to men, with its models “male” which represent only the 10% of his sales. Every year, The company sells about 350-400 dolls starting from about $ 6.000 moon.

But then my guide to the tour, A woman with hot eyes and a kind smile, caught me by surprise. Sometimes, he said, Customers require tailor -made faces based on the face of a deceased spouse. He promptly nodded to continue, But I stopped on the spot, looking at the heads. Widowed you in mourning was not something I expected to find here. Maybe I should have known it better.

I am a journalist who writes of sex and my work regularly complicates the stereotyped assumptions about the sexuality of heterosexual men. Right, I came across many of the predictable tropoi that I expected from teenagers watching HBO, But I have more often discovered that men challenge the cliché of a superficial and ineemative desire. Whether it is to interview men on their intimate life or to answer readers' questions for a section of sexual advice, I regularly met tenderness, vulnerability and anxiety.