Django REST Framework - Fake objects for unit tests

I'm writing unit tests for my Django app. Currently I'm using factory_boy to make fake objects for testing. This works fine for most of my tests, but I'm having the following problem: My factory_boy objects aren't showing up in {model}.objects. For example, I'm trying to test the following method in my serializer:

def get_can_edit(self, obj):
    request = self.context.get('request')
    user = request.user
    admin = SimpleLazyObject(obj.admin)
    user = User.objects.get(username=request.user)
    return user == obj.admin

Going through it with a debugger, I've determined that request.user correctly has my fake user, but User.objects does not have my fake user.

I'm wondering if there's a simple alternative to factory_boy that will actually add my fake objects to {model}.objects or if I'm just using factory_boy incorrectly? Or maybe there's a whole different approach... who knows.

Here's the code:

The serializer

The test