When life gets in the way for you and your spouse, the spark can easily go out of your marriage. Sometimes the issue is sex after childbirth — for ladies, having a baby often lowers our sex drive, as our body heals and we wear ourselves out taking care of our newborn.
Given patience and effort on both sides, it’s always possible to fan the love in your marriage back to life. So what happens when your husband decides ‘communication’ and ‘understanding’ are too much bother for him — and brings home a sex doll?
This humiliation is what Japanese mum Riho Ozaki had to face when her husband, Masayuki, bought a silicone sex doll. The life-size doll, named Mayu, shares his bed, goes on dates with him, and is dressed in sexy lingerie when he fancies.
Image Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP
“Japanese women are cold-hearted”
According to Masayuki, their marriage fizzled out after the birth of their daughter, now teenage. “After my wife gave birth we stopped having sex and I felt a deep sense of loneliness,” he tells AFP in an interview.
Rather than attempting to reach out to his wife or considering her struggles, he claims that she is the selfish one. “Japanese women are cold-hearted,” he says.
“They’re very selfish. Men want someone to listen to them without grumbling when they get home from work.”
So when the husband saw the sex doll Mayu in the showroom, she became the pliant, passive woman of his dreams. “It was love at first sight,” he says.
Image Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP
Understandably, his wife Riho was “furious” when he brought this silicone ‘woman’ home. But she has become resigned to Masayuki’s indifference to her feelings. “These days she puts up with it, reluctantly,” her husband shrugs.
Despite her inner anguish, this mum continues to be a dutiful housewife. “I just get on with the housework,” she sniffs. “I make the dinner, I clean, I do the washing. I choose sleep over sex.”
And what about the couple’s daughter? “When my daughter realised it wasn’t a giant Barbie doll, she freaked out and said it was gross,” Masayuki admits. But he appears undeterred, adding, “But now she’s old enough to share Mayu’s clothes.”
Removable heads
Masayuki takes his silicon lover on dates in a wheelchair. They pose for pictures, go to love hotels, and take long baths together — all the romantic things a husband and wife might do.
Image Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP
Another married father of two, 62-year-old Senji Nakajima, takes his sex doll out for couple activities like surfing and picnicking. And of course, he takes her to bed.
Image Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP
Image Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP
Mayu and her counterparts in the sex doll market today boast genitals, adjustable fingers, and ultra-lifelike skin. “They look incredibly real now and it feels like you’re touching human skin,” claims Hideo Tsuchiya, managing director of doll maker Orient Industry.
The US$6,000 dolls also come with removable heads — you know, in case husbands prefer to enjoy time with their silicon girlfriend without being reminded of their pesky humanness.
Around 2,000 lifelike sex dolls are sold each year in Japan. In Singapore, one distributor says that he had 20 customers within half a year of starting up his business.
“They complain a lot less than women”
But no matter how lifelike these sex dolls become — no matter how human-soft their skin is or how realistic they look — there’s surely something irreplaceable about a real woman.
So why do these husbands leave their wives for these passive figurines? Nakajima, for example, became estranged from his wife after she banned his sex doll Saori from the family home.
The answer, at least from a woman’s perspective, seems to be good old-fashioned misogynism. Here’s how some of these men explain it.
“In the future I think more and more guys will choose relationships with dolls”, says Yoshitaka Hyodo, who has an understanding girlfriend. “It’s less stress and they complain a lot less than women.”
Nakajima adds, “Human beings are so demanding… I’ll never date a real woman again — they’re heartless.”
It seems that what these men want is a perfectly tame, compliant spouse. A wife who never gripes about her tiredness, even after a long day of caring for his children. A wife who never makes demands although she’s an individual with her own emotions and desires.
Though these husbands may accuse their wives of being tiresome and heartless, their actions hardly reflect their own sensitivity to her feelings. Difficult though marriage might be, it may be more worth fighting for than a forever with an eternally docile, fantasized being.
Mums, what’s your perspective? How would you feel if your husband brought home a sex doll? Share your thoughts in the comments below!