Channel 4 Doc Explores the Men Who Turn Themselves into Living Dolls

Tonight, Channel 4 in the UK will premiere an hour long documentary, Secrets of the Living Dolls, about female maskers and the men behind them.

Female maskers/dolls are a community of men who use latex rubber suits to recreate and exaggerate the female form. Also, they wear full face masks often with heavy drag makeup—literally objectifying themselves by becoming dolls. Fantasy/fetish maskers have lots of crossover with trans, exhibitionist, and BDSM communities.

The doc — which comes to us from Jezebel alum Luke Malone — explores maskers’ alter egos, ranging from a 70-year-old man who has had trouble getting back into the dating game to a bartender who’s decided to open up and share his fetish with his friends. We also meet ‘Dominique,’ a black former track athlete from the Bronx who (despite having several different color masks) chooses to mask as a white woman as a way to deal with the racial microaggressions he has been subject to:

You gotta admire that commitment to rubber not only as a meticulous transformative art in itself, but also because that shit looks like it would get real hot and sweaty real fast. I don’t think I could smell my own breath for that long.