True love might be hard to find, but it’s pretty easy to replicate, package and sell in today’s ever growing market.

Over in Japan, many lonely hearts are turning to dolls for love, intimacy and company. Tired of the dating game, some men have replaced living, breathing women with live-in synthetic replicas who offer them support and companionship. Yes, that’s right, they’re having loving, intimate relationships with giant dolls.

While guys are choosing to stay home and play with dolls, their female counterparts are choosing to pay for male loving—male escorts are big business in Japan. Woman pay to be wined and dined, adored, and offered some good conversation. Sex is optional; most are just looking for varying degrees of human intimacy and connection, even for just a few hours.

In the US, UK and Australia popular high-end female escorts have now added “The Girlfriend Experience” to their list of repertoires, an all-inclusive package deal that includes wining and dining, presumably engaging conversation, kissing, bare-back blow jobs, foreplay, sex and cuddles.

Ladies, if you’ve ever had the displeasure of sleeping with someone (for free) with no foreplay, no cuddles and it’s over in boom-boom-bang, I bet you’re pretty miffed that men are paying top dollar for this experience.

My question: Where’s the romance in having a plastic girlfriend or paying a person to act like one?

Having spent the better part of my formative years in a sex shop, my dad was quite the pioneer of porn in the Australian Sex Industry since the 1970s (think pre-internet and if you’re familiar with Kings Cross, pre-Wood Royal Commission and beyond), I decided to ask him the question, “Where did all the love go?”

His reply in summary: There’s a certain honestly and freedom that comes with allowing your basic primal needs to come up. Desire is one of the greatest equalizers amongst men and woman and the sex industry creates an arena where all people, no matter what their background or demographic are considered equal.

I believe that it goes further and that—romancing pornography is actually about an individual’s deepest desire to connect with another person, an idea or even a fantasy.

Delve deeper and it’s the ultimate desire to connect and feel love, no matter what that form might take. Love is meant to take you to a new level of consciousness where you go beyond separation and realize that you are one, have always been one, and will always be one no matter what. It’s the force of love helps us wake up spirituality and realize the interconnection of all life.

Love is not sex, but love can be expressed through sex.

I believe that this is key, because somewhere along the line, dealing with everyday people in a real and emotionally intimate way got too hard.

Is this the caveat that created a booming multimillion dollar industry and caused people of fall in “love” with prosthetic dolls, prefer male escort companies, and pay for “The Girlfriend Experience” instead of investing real-life partners and experiences?

To answer my own question, the love didn’t go anywhere—we just haven’t found it yet.

 

I’m a designer, a super-duper account manager, an occasional seeker of all things true, a yogi, a hippie (not a hipster), a teeny-tiny disco dancer, a sometimes-cook and an eternal optimist. I can be creative, am frequently inappropriate and I aspire for inspiration.I write about health, happiness, yoga, meditation and hangovers.I like crazy disco dancing, lazy beach days, pub trivia, big belly laughs,festivals, copious amounts of wine, and eating (a lot!)When asked for a bio I Facebook polled my friends for one word that describes me and they came up with the following: loves hearts, crazy (this was mentioned a few times!), sunshine, bubbly, meatball, mcskank (personal joke), excitable, spunky monkey, delicious, pixie and charismatically crazy (a new spin on an old favorite!). I can be found at lovetmah.com.

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Ed: Brianna Bemel