"Just like a woman" - "Real Dolls"

I wanted to post this piece on Real Dolls and "their owners" when it first appeared in Salon this time around. (There was an article 4 or 5 years earlier.) Blackademic prompted me to post it now because she has an interesting post about women of color and pornography. She writes about the numerous hits her site gets for people looking for porn by using keywords like "nubian booty," "ghetto black lesbians," etc.

"Just like a woman"

"Davecat keeps a picture of his girlfriend in his wallet. She's pretty, with long black hair, an alluring mole under her left eye, and glossy red lipstick. Her sheer tank top shows off her full breasts and the hoop through her left nipple. [...] When Davecat was a child in a department store, his mother emerged from a dressing room to find him talking to a mannequin who was wearing a short tennis skirt. "I was trying to chat her up," he says. "I remember the beauty of her stillness." With Sidore, he's gotten past just chatting: "I like having her in bed beside me, holding her, cuddling her," he tells me. "I like to sleep with my doll. I'll be blunt: She's a girlfriend." (more)

How do these fantasies function? How do they tie people together?

For more on this see "The Intersection of Race and Gender: Feminism of Colour" at (reappropriate)