Thursday, October 2, 2008

Weird cases of arrested development

MSNBC aired this program on women who play with lifelike dolls. There is something creepy and odd about grown women who spend a thousand dollars on a lifelike doll and then treat it like a real baby. Shira watched this segment with me and said she thought the women were "cuckcoo".


One woman in the BBC documentary, married and in her 40s, said she wanted a real baby, but was too busy to commit to caring for a real one. A reborn doll satisfies her maternal instincts, she said, without all the carrying on and mess.

Reborns, she said, “never grow out of their clothes, never soil them. It's just fabulous. The only difference, of course, is these guys don't move.”

At least one nursing home in the United Kingdom makes dolls available to female residents, who become calmer and less disruptive when “caring” for their infants.

Walsh said her husband doesn’t think it strange that his wife plays with dolls. “He likes them too,” she said. “He says when he holds the baby it makes him feel good. It reminds him of the day his daughter was born. Everybody likes to hold a baby. It makes you feel at peace. It makes you feel calm.”

None of the women apologized for their love of reborn dolls or felt they were doing anything that is unhealthy.

“I don’t really worry too much about what people think about me,” Walsh said. “I just try to make myself happy, and it makes me happy to collect dolls. I feel like a little girl that just never stopped loving dolls.”


This is just too weird for me.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

My mom had a slew of then. One for each child she cared for...except her own children.

Ladybug Mommy Maria said...

I wonder if these women had abortions and they were playing out some guilt???

Did it happen to mention anything about mommy angst or just mommy guilt (even unrelated to abortion)?

ChristineMM said...

This is really, really freaky.

I know that a lot of empty nesters and senior citizens collect fancy dolls, porcelain and such. QVC sells a lot of them.

There is something weirder about these that are so lifelike and are treated like a living baby. Weird....