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“Just as a butterfly emerges to new life, our artists bring life to a world of dolls known as reborns” This is one manufacturer's exquisite prose regarding their various nurseries, such as Heaven's Garden of Angels nursery, Peaches and Cream nursery and the bluntly named They Never Grow Up nursery, filled with sleepy, wrinkled, red baby dolls.
“It fills a spot in your heart,” says a defensive woman, speaking on the Today show, about her “reborn,” a life-like, very expensive (the most precious cost about $4,000) hand-crafted baby doll, so realistic, that thousands of British and North American women collect and play with them.
By “play” I mean that they dress them and push them around in strollers or carriages. They tuck them into their cribs at night, and rock and hold and cherish them.
The “reborns” are something like inventor Le Trung's perfect android wife, Aiko. Yet men have always had different reasons than women for simulating human beings. They make these models, no matter how advanced, synthetically intelligent or scientifically dazzling, to have sex with them. For all of Aiko's linguistic cunning and indefatigable labour, she is still, merely, a series of penetrable spaces.
Yet women have not been able to shake what one reborn mommy calls, repulsively, “that female instinct.”
We do not have blow-up men. Those that exist are for other men: I looked at the gallery of inflatable latex companions on sextoy.com, and among the sheep, the aliens, “Fatty Patty” and a “Fat Angry Mom” doll, was “Gladiator,” an open-mouthed creature, designed for “the thrills of Greek love.” There is even a gaping-mouthed, three-foot blonde girl doll with a dent in her head shaped to hold a can of beer: Yes, men are quite clear about what spots need filling (and the heart isn't one of them).
When woman collect and nurture, even change the diapers of a hyper-real doll, is that, as one blog posits, “cute or creepy?” (A surprising amount of people answered “cute.”)
What if we tuck this baby in bed, while our living child watches from the sidelines, morosely, as one child was seen doing on the Today show?
What is happening? Are we sublimating our sexuality, then deforming it to suit a more conventional feminine role? Mother, after all, always trumps sex-starved, latex-toy tramp.
And the story gets worse.
Recently, I noticed that the advertisements in the National Enquirer, a constant in that mirror of lowdown pop, for life-like dollies have been replaced by ads for tiny, life-like, sweetly attired monkeys.
Yes. Monkeys.
Little Umi, the tiny orangutan, to be precise, who is “beautifully crafted” out of “collector-quality silicone that recreates every realistic detail of her face, hands and feet,” including a layer of “hand-rooted wispy red hair” that covers her body and who wears a little white bow on her skull, a diaper and a pink T-shirt that says, in tremulous script, “sweetheart,” over a pink heart appliqué.
Umi's limbs move and that is because she is “so truly real.” She comes with a free pink pacifier and costs $139.99 (U.S.), with a portion of this sum going to “rainforest preservation.” Is staring into Umi's “gentle eyes,” with their “thick dark lashes” not enough to get one's maternal heart pounding?
Here's what some women are doing now, according to this week's Enquirer: They, and their poor husbands, inside their “empty nests,” are buying Capuchin monkeys – native to Central and South America and long-tortured in laboratories because of their unusual intelligence and manageable size – and raising them as children.
Dream children, because, as one of the 15,000 “monkey moms,” Lori Johnson, a 60-year-old mother of six grown children in the U.S. states of her Jessica: “She isn't going to graduate, she won't go to college and she won't get married. She'll be my baby forever”
Little Jessica is photographed eating an ice cream cone, walking a dog and laughing in a family photograph.
Laughing, screaming, what difference does it make? She is curing Johnson's mental state: When her children moved away, she “got so depressed” and Jessica has “filled an aching void of loneliness” in the doting monkey mom, who spends a fortune on toys and outfits.
“I know she's never going to grow up and leave me,” Johnson asserts. And because Capuchin monkeys live to be 45 or so, she has set up a trust fund for her “daughter,” who eats and sleeps with her, and has makeup and nail polish applied when Mommy does.
This February, the now deceased maniac known as the Stanford Chimp, a 200 pound chimpanzee named Travis, who also slept and ate with Mommy, woke up one day and tore the face and hands off of Mommy's best friend. Mommy, Sandra Herold, stabbed him herself.
Is it “creepy” to anthropomorphize and nurture an artificial or real simian-child? To want to preserve a child's intimacy forever, in the reverse manner of Norman Bates or the subject of Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily ?
Is it creepy to fill those empty spaces with feces-slinging, screeching animals or baby-replicants instead of a hand or a tongue or, well, you get the point.
Not creepy. Not cute. Crazy – and bad news for the endangered species who could use much more than a portion of the money spent on their likenesses or selves. Monkey moms and Umi-owners: Work tirelessly to save animals from extinction, that should fill at least one empty hole.
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i was wondering that too. "o, is not a real baby" then the funny looks.
Somebody must have dropped that doll what's that big red spot on it's leg? 
Or is it a bite of some sort. 
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