The Uncanny Valley of the Dolls

When I was just about old enough to actually watch tv and get stories and understand that there was no boogeyman and that there was a difference between fiction and reality, I think the thing that still unnerved me the most was the idea of the thing that should be inanimate--souless!--that wasn't. So it was that I found the trailer for "Magic" with Anthony Hopkins and a twisted-sounding dummy especially unnerving. How close is a dummy, after all, to dolls?  And being a girl, how many dolls did I have? All those smooth plastic faces, some with eyes that closed as their weirdly hollow but weighty bodies were laid horizontally--

There was a reason that stuffed animals could stay on my bed, but dolls had to be placed in the toy chest. I played with my dolls, but I could never love them. They were not "people" even if they looked like people. And perhaps the understanding--the recognition I had--of my rejection of these not quite human things made me wonder how they...saw me.

The internet is littered with images of scary dolls.  Some of them just are terribly bad fascimiles made by an inartful hand. Some are broken, reproachful, like baby zombies. And some are fashioned to be deliberately grotesque, preying upon the lurid fascinations of the unheathfully-centered mind. Their nearness to human features plays upon the sympathy we have for our fellow sentient--we inbue them with a terrifying inner life, even though they are hollow. And yet, we know there are people among us who are most alive--but are, in fact, hollow inside, as far from our understanding as what we imagine in the highly-suggestable imputed psyche of a doll.

We human beings are artificers. We capitulate our likenesses in various media, in the hopes of capturing whatever it is we think of as the human essence, from cave paintings to selfies.  One of the most unnerving of our enduring fables is the idea of the actually "made" man--the golem, the corpse-pastiche of Frankenstein, the waxwork or clockwork man. The deadly robot. The killer doll.

It's pretty kinky of us that it is the monster we create nearest to our own likeness, that has such horrors, isn't it? What does it say about us?

Breastfeeding Dolls and Being Female-bodied (Also--the U-word! And boobies!)

There's been a little interest over this baby doll that allows children to play at breastfeeding.  Some people find this a "mature" concept or just intimate or weird. I think these people are really too uptight. Female-bodied women who have given birth can feed their babies with their mammary glands. It's part of being a mammal. It's a scientific fact that this is what boobies are intended for. It's also the best way for most human babies to be fed, for many health reasons. So I'm a little flummoxed when I hear that some people find this to be a controversial toy--it's a doll. Kids like to mirror the behavior of adults, and have been playing with dolls since forever. Breastfeeding is totally natural--so it's natural for a child who is interested in family-oriented play ("house", we called it, when I was a pup), to use a doll to mimic suckling, just as they've used dolls to mimic bottle-feeding.

Is there something weird about the idea of pretending to be a mother when one is not old enough to have children--that suddenly becomes extra-weird when it means imagining one has developed functional mammaries? In other words--is it somehow normal for a child to imagine having a baby (and we adults presumably know where babies come from), and yet not appropriate to play out having the grown-woman's body required to nurture that pretend-baby?

Random out of Context meat-related picture that is on my hard drive for some reason.

Careful who you fire that at!

Okay--I have to blog about a toy spaceship.

The picture is from www.Tintoyarcade.com, which is one of the places that sells this unique item that my spouse purchased at a brick and mortar store on impulse, and has so far given him three days of actual pleasure. If not joy.

Joy. That is a rare quantity for a toy to provide, especially for an adult. But this thing is pretty neat.

Okay--it lights up and it flies like a helicopter. That is all it needs to do to be really cool. It operates by way of eight AA batteries, but it seems to hold a good charge, and if you are under the propellers, it feels like a fan on the "High" setting. It makes some noise, and there is no way to control the direction of it (there have been nail-biting moments as it drifted near the ceiling fan in the kitchen, or threatened to dip somewhere over a sink full of dishes and washing-up water) but there's something innately thrilling in that unpredictability. It behaves like a thing with personality. I haven't played with it myself: first of all, it's his toy, not mine, and second, if I played with it, it totally would get stuck behind the fridge, or end up in the sink, or get smooshed. So I just watch. But that's fun, too.

And this is just an example of the sorts of things we are doing on our summer vacation.

Where do they get these toys?

This was done with LEGO.


PVC Ping-pong ball gun:



Making robots?



Sometimes the best toys are the ones you make yourself:

Like Steampunk IronMan:



And so on.

Toys I totally remember having--

They also had guns and flashlights that were just a little too big for their hands. I don't remember mine having the night-time outfits, though.



(Back in the '70's, if commercials did not explain what kind of adventures--"She does bionic things!"--your action figure could have, you would just leave it in the box until it was worth money.)





Okay I DID NOT HAVE THIS! Okay? But I seriously remember that commercial. What I also did not have, but recall very well, was this....thing.




This is the more recent version--the '70's version of the doll didn't just eat and poop, but it also started to smell funny after a while. It scared the household animals and had to be buried in the backyard.



If I never took Princess Leia out of the box, got her naked, made new outfits for her so she could hang with the "Barbies" despite being too tall and having totally blocky feet, (which resulted in her being barefoot all the time) and then probably gave her to a younger friend or possibly cousin, that would have been cool. Also, her hair got messed up because the "buns" were hair wrapped around plastic wheels that popped off and wouldn't go back on. But I can honestly say my Princess Leia doll "lived." I never got any of the other Star Wars toys. For that matter, I never had "Kens". Luckily, my Barbies were bi.



These were absurdly popular among the small children of the block I grew up on. There was a chase game based on "Dukes of Hazzard" played with them. That lasted about a year. Then everyone had dirt bikes. Except me. I had a vintage steel-bodied hand-me-down, from I forget who, but it was very '60's with a hard seat on big springs. It was spray-painted an acceptable shade of gold. "Popping wheelies" and doing jumps with it was way aggro. Trust me. Landing the wrong way chafed!

I also had Kiss Colorforms. Also, I remember Kiss Hallowe'en costumes. I think the first album I got, when I was about six, was probably Kiss. That makes no sense. Looking back, why was one of the first record albums I received as a small child was a hard rock album featuring a grown man in makeup with blood squirting out of his mouth? (I can't recall what album it was--but here is a picture of Gene Simmons with blood coming out of his mouth--




Ew!)

Also, why did we play with stuff like glow-in-the dark slime? Can of worms--which I can't find on line, but was rubbers worms in a plastic can of slime? And how does "Slime" ever get to be a toy, anyway? Did people just take an evolutionary step--Playdoh....Silly Putty...."Hey, let's just put gooey crap in a tub and call it a toy! (And I spent hours playing with things just like that.)

Anyway, I was feeling nostalgic, and wanted to share.