It feels a bit crowded - and undeniably eerie - as Dakotah leads us around. The production floor is smaller than I'd expected, hardly bigger than a basketball court. Abyss built her as a prop for the Bruce Willis sci-fi flick "Surrogates" - we pass beneath her spread stance like it's a gateway into the uncanny valley. Many on that slick-soled team of designers have backgrounds in Hollywood special effects, and sure enough, a custom-built, alien-looking doll with gray skin and robotic, tentacle-like hair stands watch over the stairwell. He cautions us to cling to the rail - workers can't help but track liquid silicone on their shoes, and that makes things slippery. I'm sending these out every day."ĭakotah leads us down a flight of stairs to the RealDolls production floor. "A man can wear these and he will basically be as close to a woman as you're going to get without surgery. "We call these girl shorts," he says, holding up a $1,500 wearable female midsection that's just as realistic-looking as any of the dolls. Abyss products are also popular among transgender customers, Dakotah tells me. Today, more than 20 years later, he says his company has sold several thousand RealDolls at a current pace of a few hundred per year, along with a variety of partial-body dolls and wearable prosthetics, like a vest with silicone breasts the company sells to mastectomy patients. Soon, visitors to his site offered to pay him to make anatomically correct versions of his work. "It was more of a high-end mannequin."Īs a young artist looking to make a name for himself, McMullen posted photos of his mannequins on the web. "My original creation, in terms of what a RealDoll is today, was not intended to be a sex toy in any way," he says. Tan, lean and tattooed, he looks every bit the California dreamer, and his fixation on re-creating the human form spans decades. The source of that artistry is undoubtedly McMullen, a sculptor who started Abyss Creations in his garage in 1997. From their painstakingly hand-painted irises to the creases on the backs of their feet, each one is stunningly lifelike up close. Tom described them to me as functional works of art, and he's right. They look great on camera and they never complain about long hours.Įven the most glamorous of these photos don't do the dolls justice. Photographers love using RealDolls as models, he tells me with a smile. He catches me taking in the imagery on the walls. Our guide for the day is Dakotah Shore, McMullen's nephew and Abyss' head of shipping, operations and media relations. But the company draws the line at animals, children and re-creations of people who haven't given their permission to be replicated, celebrity or otherwise. McMullen says his team can make just about anything to order for the right price. Watch this: Touring a factory where sexbots come alive Should customers choose, they'll be able to swap one in for their RealDoll's original head for a cool $10,000. The talking, animatronic head with AI built in goes on sale at the end of this year. Preconfigured models start at a few thousand dollars, while the highly customized doll Tom purchased cost nearly $17,000. Any one of them - the dolls, and the fantasies they inspire - can be yours for the right price. The rest of the walls, meanwhile, are lined with framed, posterized photos of RealDolls in a variety of imaginative settings and inviting poses - a sexy librarian reaching for a tome on the top shelf, for example, or an Amazonian bombshell sprawled out seductively on a chaise lounge. Each has a look of its own, but with eyes half open and lips parted, all bear the same vague, vacant stare of frozen arousal, as if they'll wait as long as it takes to experience a partner's touch. Behind them is a makeshift showroom featuring a squad of scantily uniformed dolls and a corner lined with rows of doll heads that showcase the available hairstyles and facial designs.
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