If I were to tell you I’m an excellent masturbator – not just a good jerker, but an artist of onanism and truly gifted wanker – would this make you envious?

I’m guessing hearing about my advanced jacking techniques wouldn’t make most people envious, primarily because no matter how well one jerks off, it’s not really something to crow about.

Boasting about masturbation skills would be a bit like bragging about your ability to beat the computer in a FIFA videogame: mastery of something that merely simulates a real activity. In soccer’s case, it’s an activity for which you can get paid ridiculous sums of money, but only if you’re extremely good at the real game, not its distant videogame cousin.

Along those same lines, whatever The Mirror may think, I’m not inclined to be envious of a man just because he fucks a somewhat real-looking sex doll with regularity.

“James is a 58-year-old engineer who has been married for 36 years and has a sex life which would be the envy of many men a fraction of his age,” The Mirror’s Steve Myall proclaimed in a recent article.

Why would many men a fraction of James’ age so envy his sex life, you ask?

“Four times a week he slips between the sheets for sex sessions with blonde April, who looks like she is only just out of her teens,” Myall continues. “But April isn’t his wife, and she isn’t an extra marital affair. She is 153cm tall with a ‘number 36’ head, and one of three chesty latex sex dolls costing £2,000 each who James shares his life and body with – even taking them on ‘dates’.”

Uh, no. I don’t envy a grown-ass man whose sex life amounts to fucking a giant Barbie doll, and I especially don’t envy the part where he takes the doll with him on dates. I don’t envy James any more than I envy men who fuck warm loaves of bread or throw pillows or even the old-school sex dolls with the little round mouths that never close.

Honestly, as happy as James claims to be with his not-women sexual partners, he’s clearly not entirely satisfied with his current sex-doll life. If he were, he wouldn’t be saving up his hard-earned pounds for a planned upgrade.

“Now he’s saving for a £8,000 robotic sex doll called Harmony who can smile, talk back to him and who will be responsive during sex,” Myall reports.

Here’s an idea, James: Instead of spending that money on Harmony, consider spending it on something nice for your wife, as an expression of your appreciation for her putting up with you taking a fucking doll on dates.

And what of James’ wife, “Tine,” anyway? How does she tolerate this shit?

“If he really wanted to, he could have gone out and found someone else,” she said, “but he didn’t do that, he was true to me.”

Not to be a dick, but I’m not sure it’s true James could have gone out and found someone else. For starters, a lot of other women might not want to share the bed with a simulated teenager with literally and comprehensively fake breasts.

Maybe I’m too quick to judge here, though. While I can’t see myself taking a doll out to dinner under any circumstances, I suppose a truly interactive sex robot might be another story. For that matter, if we could agree where to eat in under an hour, I must admit this would be a measurable improvement in date-night efficiency, if nothing else.

“My original intention was to create a unique piece of art, something that looks so convincingly real that people stop and look at it,” Matt McMullen of the RealDoll Company said of his creations. “Potential clients were saying, ‘I love your work and the way this doll looks, but can I have sex with it?’ It made me realize that this was going to be a business venture, not an art project.”

Just like James, McMullen doesn’t seem to be fully satisfied with the fruits of his business venture, saying these dolls won’t be complete until they’re kitted out with proper electronics.

“We want to bring this experience to a whole new level for people, making them move and talk,” McMullen said. “We are looking at robotics and artificial intelligence and ways of integrating them into our dolls to make them come to life.”

Sure, that’s one option. Alternatively, your clients could try another revolutionary idea: talking to, dating and having sex with actual women.

It’s a radical suggestion, I know, but real women have several advantages over sex dolls, and even sex robots, strange as this may sound. These advantages include built-in interactivity and highly advanced batteries that run on food. Best of all, unlike James’ doll-dates, human women can feed themselves the food in question. Amazing, no?

Plus, if they play their cards right, sex doll/robot customers like James might even find themselves with a sex life young men would envy… one that doesn’t involve repeatedly sticking their dicks into a bunch of increasingly sticky molded silicon which they’re pretending is an attractive young human woman.

Image: RealDoll