1. First off, not all dolls are created equal.

Just like human beings, sex dolls are truly diverse. Some are nothing more than glorified beach balls made of cheap vinyl that will pop and deflate the minute they’re penetrated. Others are fashioned of silicone and feature metallic skeletons that enable the earnest doll-fucker to position their joints. Some even have internal heating systems that make them feel a little bit less dead to the touch. And the manufacturers of the high-end “RealDolls”—which currently can cost up to $10,000 per doll.

2. Sex dolls will never nag you.

Granted, sex dolls are not as warm as real women. But according to some men, they aren’t nearly as cold, either. As sex-doll manufacturers Dolloza explain it:

Our dolls don’t judge you and you can do whatever you want and whenever you want with no complaining, criticism, or any pillow talk!

3. It’s illegal to fondle blowup dolls in public, so don’t do it.

Fifty-one-year-old George Bartusek of Cape Coral, FL found this out the “hard” way, pun intended—in 2009, he was arrested in the parking lot of a Publix supermarket after he was spotted kissing and “very inappropriately” touching a pair of blowup dolls.

4. There are Japanese brothels that feature sex dolls rather than living, breathing, human prostitutes.

Unlike these here United States, where lonely men enjoy meat-on-plastic relations with sex dolls in the comfort and privacy of their mothers’ basements, the Japanese boast full-on love-doll brothels where men pay top yen to carnally consort with sex dolls in virtual-reality whorehouses. Japan also briefly featured a TV show with a silicone sex doll as its main character.

5. Heartbroken men have been known to design sex dolls that resemble their lost lovers.

After being dumped by his lover in 1916, Austro-Hungarian artist Oskar Kokoschka wrote that he’d “lost all desire to go through the ordeal of love again.” Instead, he provided a dressmaker with insanely detailed instructions for building a life-sized simulacrum of the woman who kicked him to the curb. He reportedly destroyed the doll in a fit of rage during a party.

According to the owner of a sex shop in Italy, in 2010 a 50-year-old man was in tears as he showed dozens of photographs of a presumably dead blonde woman whom he commissioned shop owners to recreate as a sex doll.

6. Sex dolls are almost exclusively a guy thing.

The RealDoll company claims that male sex dolls account for a mere 10% of sales, and even those are often sold to gay males. According to human sexuality expert Cynthia Ann Moya:

In the content analysis I did of magazines and books, I don’t think any of [the examples] involved women….This is not to say that it never happened. But the mythologies that people tell each other about these sex dolls all involved men.