Good Morning America on hyperreal baby dolls and their "moms"
Good Morning America introduces us to women who treat their Reborn baby dolls like real infants. "Women living with fake baby dolls treat them like real children" (jezebel.com, thanks Tara McGinley!)
the latest
latest episodes
What a horrifying picture... the mother looks less human than the doll >_>;
This is better than small dogs because...?
AIRPILLO @1, Thank you. I am proud of my screengrab.
I happened to see this story this morning. They interviewed a few people who own these babies and they carry them around in public like they are real. All were clearly complete whackjobs.
Oh well, there is so much worse and the women, in the first video, the interview on GMA, sound fairly sane. Weirdos are a great resource anyway to inspire ideas and get us out of our rot.
@#2 I don't know about better but dogs are still living creature with a will. It is not possible to project all you want into them as much as it is in an inanimated object?
creepy, then funny, up until the point where you realize she's had 7 miscarriages; then a little bit poignant
Wow, this reminds me so much of The Children of Men - the book, not the movie - where the child-less population of the earth starts doing the same kind of thing. Also with kittens.
This is very sad and scary. These women need therapy.
Let's just be thankful that these women/dingbats are using inanimate dolls to fill the void in their lives, rather than inflicting a real human child with their inadequacies.
These are exactly the people we don't want breeding, so I think this is a win/win.
I think that's creepy, but I then I think real babies can sometimes be a little creepy as well. The EYES, man. I'm not even kidding.
Suicide is wasted on creative people.
#6: Yeah, poignant. Someone should invent "knitting." Baby-crazy does nobody any good.
No puke. No diapers. No crying at 3 a.m.
What's not to love?
This is pretty creepy yeah.
Then it got me thinking... how many of these things are bought by pedophiles for sinister purposes.
That got me thinking... maybe they should give these to pedophiles to use rather than real kids.
...You know, if I was freshly hatched, and saw that my mom was The Joker, I'd crawl back into the womb :-P
@14
You'd crawl inside the Joker's womb? Are... are you sure?
The same story is about to come on 20/20. They just finished a piece on orgasmic birthing. Hot stuff!
Eh, they do it for the same reason men masturbate. They're fulfilling a biological urge for reproduction without actually reproducing. And they're probably suffering about as much social stigma as someone would for masturbating in public too.
We've been through this before on bb. There's a sadness about it, to be sure, but there's also a sympathetic response few can be free of. It's such a ... human thing these women are doing.
10 years ago I worked a brief stint in the collectible porcelain doll business...and my boss told me of women like these. This is, I think, before the Reborn dolls. She told of one woman who she met on a plane who had brought her "baby" and carried it like a real child.
We were told to treat these people with respect at the doll conventions...yet it was still a bit of an inside joke amongst us. I never got to meet any of these women.
SWEET RAPTOR JESUS NO
Also: #9 and #17
FNC:
Men masturbate for the same reason women masturbate.
This is something else, entirely.
The same BBC channel that aired a segment on this also aired a segment on men who own life-sized "love dolls"- speak to them, dress them up, take them places, have their picture taken with them, and...presumably, yes. The dolls are built for it.
Reminds me lots of toy dogs in Japan. It's now so mainstream and lucrative that the Japanese equivalent of dime stores are selling clothing and accessories (read sun glasses, caps, back packs, jewellery, shoes) to dress and accessorise that mini pooch in your life.
Anyroads I feel 'babies' or 'dolls' are two faces of the same thing, however there is a dual standard on how people react to either while the women can be viewed as victims of their emotional needs, thus victims and deserving of help or sympathy, the men tend to be viewed negatively, at the very least, as strange and slightly creepy.
Both Hans Bellmer, and more recently Simon Yotsuya, have explored the ideas of personal empowerment and control that the owner has over the doll, (or toy dog for that matter). The relationship is such that, it will never refuse it's owner, ever, for whatever reason, and that this is the overriding reason why any human would choose an inanimate or less sentient companion over an equal.
From dolls, icons and fetishes it's not so very far from distopian realities where robots, androids, automata, software constructs exist to fulfil the needs of the humans living there. Distopias induce ambivalence - fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. At a deeper level the very fact that they are always in distopias, and not utopias, which inevitably come apart in someway to become disfunctional, suggests even the authors feel it should somehow be wrong to invest our needs in inanimate objects. And yet they still laboured to create an evironment, albeit distanced and temporary, where such entities could exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bellmer
http://orchidzblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/simon-yotsuya.html
On a related note it's worthwhile mentioning the change in status that the vibrator has gone through from its Victorian inception as a cure for female hysteria, with respectable middle-class doctors inducing orgasms in decent, god-fearing, middle-class women, to the modern symbol of female empowerment.
It doesn't matter if it's creepy. They're not hurting anyone. There's no law against being creepy.
Inertia led me to watch much of the 20/20 episode that this segment was pulled from (there were others on the same theme, like women who nurse their children much longer than you'd think they should), and a woman who has had more than a handful of surrogate births.
I might not have thought so without seeing the majority of the episode -- after all, I did watch the whole BBC America hour on women and their toy babies -- but I finished the show with an odd unease.
While I do think some of the women are candidates for some therapy, I couldn't help but feel that there was a layer of misogyny in the general premise. All of these stories were lumped together and they all seemed to have the same general tone: "Look at these crazy women! They have so many hormones that if they're thwarted in some way, they just go bananas!"
There's room to pity and room to sympathize and then just room to get out of the way here. A lot of folks profiled here at Boing Boing are fringe-dwellers, and that's one of the reasons I think a lot of us come to the site: To gawp first -- but to understand, second. In general, I don't see these women, who are really just indulging in non-norm behavior, really hurting anyone. I don't own a doll, haven't done surrogate birthing and don't breastfeed a child who can ask for it. But I don't see the harm in people who do.
So what I was left with is this feeling that this is yet another way to undermine women overall. I know, I know -- but I don't go crying "misogyny" at the drop of a hat. It's similar to the feelings I had post-election. I didn't like Sarah Palin and think she was a mistaken choice. Hillary Clinton I know rubs some folks the wrong way. But there was a layer of misogynistic anger projected at them (like the criticism heaped on the women in this show) that went beyond their weaknesses and failings.
It was as if they needed to be ridiculed -- so they could be put back in their place. And that doesn't sit well with me.
The RealDoll for people who wish they could be parents.
It makes me uncomfortable. Uncanny valley much?
I'm thinking more along the lines of the movie A.I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
Gawd! I'm waiting for someone to create a Frankenstein's monster merging one of thee with a Furby O_O
Heck with rate of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence we could start with a 'Furby' level of intelligence and within 10 years have the mental equivalence of a 10 year old :p
*laughs* If someone devises a better 'input' method for data such as used in some of the various 'Bot's' such as the Alice Project, we may well see something like this in the near future anyhow.
This is very creepy, but also extremely sad especially for the woman who had 7 miscarriages. I'd probably lose a bit of my sanity if I'd gone through what she must have emotionally.
This also reminds me of the Czech film "Little Otik" where the husband of a barren woman makes a "baby" out of a tree trunk and she cares for it as if it were real.
Japan isolationist-culture has hit American housewives!
> creepy, then funny, up until the point where you realize she's had 7 miscarriages; then a little bit poignant
This *is* a form of mental illness, but the grief that 7 miscarriages brings would take its toll on anyone ... we all do what we need to to cope
> This is very sad and scary. These women need therapy.
These dolls *are* therapy.
talking of creepy
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=UKkk07t-iC4
One of the main problems is, like the babies, the lady robot looks real up to a point, but the devil is in the detail, the small details like the rigor mortis fingers and jerky movement.
Boston robotics Big Dog on the other hand gets the movement right
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww
yet it is so obviously a machine we relax our judgement and accept it at face value.
Currently technology isn't advanced enough and neither is our understanding of how to advance it to make things look really real as opposed to virtually real.
This problem is also faced by game designers and CG film animators, no matter how good the 3d models look, or how well animated, the lack of small details, particularly facial expressions, mean any realistic human anything creates feelings of unease as it appears to be human yet clearly isn't.
Most FPS games get round this by having aliens, zombies, people in space suits, or in some other way heavily stylised, and I wonder if there would be half as many zombie themed games around, were there to be a significant jump in understanding how to really fake reality.
CG films have similar choices to make, The Polar Express ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338348/ ) for example tried to be hyper real and got close, but you are still aware it's CG. Pixar and Dreamworks, opted for heavy stylisation, where like with Big Dog, your brain stops trying to tell you why it's strange.
Two films where the plot centred around the limits of technology and featuring exclusively computer generated protagonists appearing in monitors: MaxHeadroom ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092402/ )and S1m0ne ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/ ). They're about 20 years apart on the tech tree but the directors both faced the same fundamental problem of having computer generated characters that viewers needed care about to carry the story and solved it by using a real actor to play the software generated entities.
Jesus. Look at that smile.
Scary still shot.
Reminds me of clowns.
Nasty, disgusting clowns that want to eat me.
There's plenty of folks out there who think that steampunk, goth, sci-fi, video games, psychedelic art, body piercing, vegetarianism, cricket, D&D, WoW, etc. are creepy and abby-normal.
Think of it as a role playing game with really nice, 1-to-1 scale playing pieces.
They aren't hurting anybody. If it gives them joy or helps them cope... mazal tov.
My mother had seven miscarriages, then surgery to correct a tipped uterus, then me. She probably would have been happier with the doll.
but you ~are~ a doll antinous ♥
You found our home movies.
I have studied the welsh
"They're not hurting anyone."
Ask the families, the husbands. I didn't watch this version, but the one shown on channel 4, in the UK last year, clearly showed the strains this had on their relationships.
@ A USER- Thanks for all of the thoughtful remarks! Are you a fan of the GHOST IN THE SHELL movies and shows? They are always exploring the gray areas between humans, cyborgs, and dolls. Very smart stuff. Cheers
What in the... holy... I have no idea what to say to this. I'm just terrified.
Check out Faux Baby in Strike TV. It's so funny and creepy. Reborns are everywhere!! http://www.strike.tv/show/faux-baby
And at least they're still sane enough to identify with facsimiles of their own species, which puts them a step above the furries.