Money, we believe, and perhaps not even that much of it, buys the freedom to think freely, to pursue hobbies, to sit in cafes philosophizing for hours and then perhaps years… to self-actualize. But what lies at the other end of this process of self-actualization so glorified in the West? What if we self-actualize into monsters or fools, and finally mental ill people? In some sense it isn’t possible. For the wealthy are hardly ever considered mentally ill, merely eccentric. Apparently, we are all now rich enough to be crazy while everyone else nods along.
Consider dolls. As a child I conceived of dolls as something one should be rid of by the time of adolescence. It is now adults who are the most extreme doll lovers. Men buy life sized doll lovers. Women buy realistic doll babies complete with baby smell perfume. Perhaps the concept of buying love has only been democratized and customized to different market segments. The “customers” willing to spend the most can buy a live wife or baby from the third world, or with a little more money, even the first. Perhaps in the fantastical future the uber-wealthy will grow other humans on petri dishes while performing eugenic euthanasia on discontent lower class idiots like myself. At this point many have moved the production of life to the wombs of surrogates worlds away in class and geography. Is it more unhuman and depressing to consider the idea of exploiting and trafficking people or the idea of men fucking plastic women while women holds plastic baby dolls to their breasts? Those who love plastic hurt no one, yet in reality they also love no one. They are completely alone yet unable to conceptualize of themselves as such.
The phenomenon of those attached to plastic has become such a common theme that it appears in movies and other literature. Lars and the Real Girl was a 2007 American-Canadian comedy-drama film written by Nancy Oliver and in every year since dolls have become more anatomically correct, more life-like. At the same time real women seem to be transforming into something more plastic than ever. Every year seems to bring more cosmetic surgery and more Botox… It’s now nearly impossible to view something produced for mass media in which the women are not “done” even if it is about a war or humanitarian crisis. Looking a certain way, which was once a professional responsibility for models, seems to have creeped towards being the duty of almost any woman who wants to pick up a paycheck. NOW the national organization of women opposed taxing cosmetic surgery on the logic that women by virtue of being women “need” the “work”; they need to do everything up to and including having knives stuck into their faces to keep looking good so they can feed and shelter themselves.
While technology may keep women looking around 30, reality marches onward with the ticks of biological time. Thus enter the new baby dolls. These are baby dolls that even cry and cough. There are several companies making such dolls. One company, Reborn Babies, was profiled in more than one documentary. One documentary features a couple in which the woman predictably has no children but bought several dolls. The customer dressed her dolls twice a day. She admitted they helped her let out her maternal desires. But no one called a psychiatrist as someone did in the fictional scenario of Lars and the Real World…In reality we have become more delusional than even what happens in the fantastic world of movies. We have become so delusional that we need to hope for the day life begins to imitate art because art can now nearly perfectly imitate life.
Yet, if there has ever been a time to put down our toys, it is now. Every day even the primped and eerily frozen faced lady newscasters must touch upon what happens in reality. How many refugees? How many people made homeless? How many children will go hungry tonight? The world does not lack people we should be caring about: real people who need love. They need not the abstracted “maternal” love a baby doll could elicit, but the real parent like love that worries about children…children who desperately need help and action. What an absurd insult to our humanity that our ‘system’ hands us plastic dolls, while we forget real children starving.
Consider dolls. As a child I conceived of dolls as something one should be rid of by the time of adolescence. It is now adults who are the most extreme doll lovers. Men buy life sized doll lovers. Women buy realistic doll babies complete with baby smell perfume. Perhaps the concept of buying love has only been democratized and customized to different market segments. The “customers” willing to spend the most can buy a live wife or baby from the third world, or with a little more money, even the first. Perhaps in the fantastical future the uber-wealthy will grow other humans on petri dishes while performing eugenic euthanasia on discontent lower class idiots like myself. At this point many have moved the production of life to the wombs of surrogates worlds away in class and geography. Is it more unhuman and depressing to consider the idea of exploiting and trafficking people or the idea of men fucking plastic women while women holds plastic baby dolls to their breasts? Those who love plastic hurt no one, yet in reality they also love no one. They are completely alone yet unable to conceptualize of themselves as such.
The phenomenon of those attached to plastic has become such a common theme that it appears in movies and other literature. Lars and the Real Girl was a 2007 American-Canadian comedy-drama film written by Nancy Oliver and in every year since dolls have become more anatomically correct, more life-like. At the same time real women seem to be transforming into something more plastic than ever. Every year seems to bring more cosmetic surgery and more Botox… It’s now nearly impossible to view something produced for mass media in which the women are not “done” even if it is about a war or humanitarian crisis. Looking a certain way, which was once a professional responsibility for models, seems to have creeped towards being the duty of almost any woman who wants to pick up a paycheck. NOW the national organization of women opposed taxing cosmetic surgery on the logic that women by virtue of being women “need” the “work”; they need to do everything up to and including having knives stuck into their faces to keep looking good so they can feed and shelter themselves.
While technology may keep women looking around 30, reality marches onward with the ticks of biological time. Thus enter the new baby dolls. These are baby dolls that even cry and cough. There are several companies making such dolls. One company, Reborn Babies, was profiled in more than one documentary. One documentary features a couple in which the woman predictably has no children but bought several dolls. The customer dressed her dolls twice a day. She admitted they helped her let out her maternal desires. But no one called a psychiatrist as someone did in the fictional scenario of Lars and the Real World…In reality we have become more delusional than even what happens in the fantastic world of movies. We have become so delusional that we need to hope for the day life begins to imitate art because art can now nearly perfectly imitate life.
Yet, if there has ever been a time to put down our toys, it is now. Every day even the primped and eerily frozen faced lady newscasters must touch upon what happens in reality. How many refugees? How many people made homeless? How many children will go hungry tonight? The world does not lack people we should be caring about: real people who need love. They need not the abstracted “maternal” love a baby doll could elicit, but the real parent like love that worries about children…children who desperately need help and action. What an absurd insult to our humanity that our ‘system’ hands us plastic dolls, while we forget real children starving.
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