Naked as a doll

I've been enthralled with the doll art of Marina Bychkova for a number of years now. Every so often I get into a photo-collecting binge - I have whole files of them, and have even made some "fan art", having no visual talent whatsoever. Photos of her disturbingly beautiful Enchanted Doll creations are all over the internet now, along with lots of strong reaction.

Today I got partway through a comments section that seemed to go on forever. It dismayed me how little understanding there was of what - I think - Bychkova is trying to do here. Certain people seem to be shocked that she's making these vulnerable-looking pubescent dolls, often posing nude or semi-nude. Porn! they assume. Exploitation of little girls: shocking!

But could it be that the dolls are deliberately provocative - not in the usual sense (though they can be that, too) - but in the manner of "provoking" us, provoking the viewer into uneasiness and disquiet? And don't these hair-prickling, sometimes unsettling sensations lie pretty close to a sense of awe?





I could barely scratch the surface here in trying to sum up the flavour of the comments. A few seem to get it and are deeply affected, if a bit disoriented, as if lost in the enchanted tangle. But the rest are squabbling over whether or not the artist should be portraying vulnerable, "sexualized" young girls, either pre- or post-pubescent, and whether the whole thing is just "creepy" and "weird".

I think they're missing the point. Just skimming the top off the meaning of "enchanted", you come up with words like this:

bewitched, magic, possessed, charmed, fascinated, absorbed, entranced, captivated, enthralled, beguiled, smitten, engrossed, spellbound, infatuated, hypnotized, under a spell

Here be faeries, not to mention the dragons of deception. Along with threads of captivity, a state that's eroticized by a disturbing number of people, there are definite echoes of sexual thrall. Beguiled (guile meaning cunning). Smitten (ouch!). Infatuated. These mysterious juju-girls express all these haunted, hunted layers, and more. Bychkova's figures are like three-dimensional illustrations of very ancient, primal stories, what we innocently call "fairy tales". Some of them seem to have stepped directly out of the dream state. Others have heroic, aggressive or even macabre aspects which I believe are entirely intentional. These dolls practically scream story to me, and I can't look at them without dark tales multiplying wildly in my head.

But don't forget that these are enchanted dolls (not enchanting), with an alarming habit of doing what they wish. This means that they refuse to stay glued to the pedestal of myth. What grabs people's guts is the immediacy, the living-breathing quality in the waxen, porcelain beauty: we don't want to see the haunted faces of real little girls reflected here, enclosed in glass cases, mutilated and shamed, their value and and passion stunted by a culture that doesn't care about them, except perhaps to commodify them. Nor do we want to see little girls with antlers and spikes and gigantic fly wings sprouting from their heads. It bespeaks a spooky power which might actually be there, perhaps only visible to those with a peculiar kind of night vision.

The purpose of art is not just to please or entertain, but to unsettle, even disturb. I am reminded of Frida Kahlo and her skulls and dead babies and knives through the flesh. These dolls say all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and on many different levels. They command tens of thousands of dollars each, are internationally celebrated, and appear in lavish magazine spreads for expensive perfumes. In some cases, stores have insisted their "anatomical correctness" (realistic genitals complete with pubic hair) be covered up in window displays.

All these so-called conflicting dynamics are happening at once. Wealth, display, prestige, exposure (more than one kind of exposure), nakedness, tears, vulnerability, creepiness, pain, damage, mythology, bravery, exploits, exploitation, total mystery. It's all here. I think if I ever got to touch one of these dolls, my hair would stand on end.

Are they fetish objects? Depends on what you mean by fetish. In some cases, people are undoubtedly buying them as one more ridiculously expensive item to add to their doll collection. The average person has to make do with photos on the internet and can't even attend  an exhibit in places like Moscow and Paris and Rome.

The comments I've reproduced here are examples of the endless argument over whether Bychkova "should" be creating emotionally-laden objects like this. Dolls have always had a spooky power, and the idea of a doll coming to life and talking is a tired old saw worn out completely by too many bad books and movies. But these creatures don't even need to speak. Seeing a picture of one is enough to get you upset, or make you marvel, or even make you want one. I will admit I have thought of it, and Bychkova's new resin line (only a few thousand dollars rather than $10,000.00 or more) makes me realize the Enchanted Doll is beginning to go into mass-production.

These are absolutely slaying me. They look so real that it is triggering my stupid empathy and my brain just can't handle it. I just start tearing up. Damn she's good.

I don't even like dolls, but I would proudly display these in my home. That's insane.

Utterly stunning - the beauty of design and the soul of each doll is beyond amazing. I'm not a doll collector, but these would add magic to my home.

The fact that these dolls made all these people feel all these things prove that it is actual art.

Hideous. A selection of abused little girls. Maybe I'm a weirdo but I don't think a child (or adult for that matter) naked and crying is beautiful.





i wouldnt call yourself a weirdo. but id say you do have a problem with knowing a difference between fantasy and reality. probably one of those bland people with no imagination whos mind is too small to understand the reason behind art. when people like you see art that depicts the truth of your very own society you get offended. mostly because you choose to ignore the sadness of the world and pretend that everything is ok.

My gut instinct was not 'wow these are beautiful' but 'wow these look so realistically scared and how amazingly detailed is that girl's pubic region.' Are they more attractive to you because they're crying? I have enough imagination to know how these characters would feel and can see the sadness of the world reflected in it. I get it. Beautiful is not the adjective I'd use to describe it though. I'd like to see the artist make a strong woman. But I bet that wouldn't sell as well.

You're projecting the age, since the intended age of the dolls is not actually listed in the article....I assumed them to be in their 20's, some look perhaps in their 30's, and yea...a few look to be teenagers, but they all look like older teens in my eyes at that.

There's nothing wrong with nudity...so being naked while crying isn't inherently a problem. A person depicting a beautiful human being in a vulnerable state shouldn't be offensive or disturbing, but apparently it is to you and while that isn't "wrong"...you really do seem to be projecting your personal angst onto others.

The artist probably does not suffer from the same mental anguishes you do, they have their own, so calling this hideous for the reasons you are is not only callous....it also shows you don't really understand the intention behind art in general.

Also, some of these show nothing other than emotion. Some of them are simply still poses that are unsmiling. Not nearly all of them are "sad", not nearly all of them are crying, being naked is not weakness because vulnerability does not equate to weakness (which you don't seem to understand, hence your reaction), being made out of porcelain does not inherently make something weak either...the way you personally interpret symbols is not necessarily the way the artist intended for them to be interpreted. It's not that you're "wrong", but you are definitely projecting and making it seem as though your personal judgment of these dolls is finite.





You're making it sound like everyone is literally crazy for thinking these are beautiful because of your personal issues....without stopping to realize just how those issues make YOU sound to others who don't have them.

I honestly don't think the implied age is a projection. The whole concept of a doll is capturing a youthful appearance. The large eyes, slim frame, and barley developed 'bodies' all appeal to the vulnerability of youth. Let's not pretend that wasn't the intent. And let's not pretend that something can't be beautiful and disturbing at the same time. These dolls are beautiful, but it's also okay to not be comfortable with the tearful sexualization of young bodies. And that's not to say what the artist did was wrong-- it's just an acknowledgment.

I don't find them all too appealing to be honest. The dolls could be pretty without sexualizing little girls. You may not find what the artist did "wrong" per say, but I definatly don't think anyone is incorrect to find "the tearful sexualization of young bodies" totally creepy. Especially the girl put on the bed.





Understanding what a human body looks like at different ages does not mean that you're projecting, it means you understand what you're looking at. These dolls are indeed modeled after very young girls. No one that looks at a baby doll is being accused of "projecting ages" onto a doll modeled to look like an infant. Humans have very distinct growth phases, and the phase they are modeling here is very much adolescence, from breast position, pelvic structure, and face shape. It's adolescence. Just because you never took basic anatomy and physiology, or any human reproductive biology classes and don't understand how that works, doesn't mean it's wrong.

I agree that it's creepy. All of those features together are identifying traits of a 11-15 year old girl, and if you don't find that creepy, then that's your issue. You can say that it's fine that they're naked and crying, but I find it less so being that they chose to make dolls that look like girls going through puberty, then make them look like they're crying, and then photograph them nude. On top of that, pose them on a bed while crying. It's creepy. It's creepy to sexualize the form of young girls, it's even creepier to sexualize the image of young girls crying. But hey, that's just me. Maybe you're a ok with people making virtual child porn too, because you think it's "just a projection of age".

I guess the big question to ask yourself, here, is this: Why do you find depictions of female nudity to be inherently sexual? These aren't sexualized poses or situations.





So you don't think that the doll made to look like a girl between 11-15 laying on the bed crying in a very reveling outfit is sexual at all? You don't find it sexualized one bit? Remember, that doll doesn't have any agency what so ever. An adult person made the choice to construct dolls to resemble all traits characteristic with adolescent girls going through puberty into one doll. Spend hours painting their genitals, and then photograph them nude. This adult chose to then make it so that they were crying. Chose to put these dolls that they intentionally modeled to look like little girls physically, who they chose to depict crying, and looking afraid, onto a bed.

Yeah... I don't think they're projecting. I think that's pretty straight forward in creepiness. This reminds me of all those creepy 3D renditions of virtual child porn that people always get busted for. Except this isn't 3D renderings of naked kids, they're dolls. But hey, "art".





Post-blog thought. People blathering about the horrible sexual connotations of the little girl "laying on the bed" missed another point. That doll is meant to illustrate The Princess and the Pea. Laying on her bed. On top of all those mattresses, eh? Then again, "that doll doesn't have any agency what so ever". That, and "I'd like to see the artist make a strong woman. But I bet that wouldn't sell as well." But to say these creations aren't "strong" is to miss the point by a mile. Oh God, I'm going to bed now.

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Just twist my arm!

Like clowns, dolls are all uniformly terrifying.

I don't care how cute they are.

They are demonic. And none more than Saucy, a pert-looking thing dressed in pink. Wrench her arm around, and all sorts of things will happen. 

Since no video can do this justice, I sat there and made an endless series of gifs of her twisting, wrenching, macabre facial expressions. Since this was 1965, long before the advent of sophisticated robotics, there must have been some kind of grinding metallic mechanism under the vinyl face that made her expression change like that: and wouldn't THAT make a great YouTube video, if someone peeled back Saucy's skin to reveal the Borg-like structure within?

There's a certain amount of overlap here because my Makeagif program cuts off a second or so at the beginning and end of the time you set up for your gif. So I've had to compensate. We don't want to miss one second of the fun!

So enjoy these - or don't enjoy them: be creeped out by them. I know I am.

Oh, and! Each gif is approximately 20 seconds long, unlike the jerky two- or three-second things you normally see. So you have to spend a bit of time with them. Oh come on, do it anyway. 

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The Unborn: full body silicone baby boy

It's getting late, I'm feeling sick, but had to share this with my Beloved Readers. I have been doing a serious study of the squickfest that is the Reborn Doll, but this all-silicone version, quivery, rubbery and virtually transparent, takes the freaking cake. It's called the Full Body Silicone Baby Doll, and it's unlike anything you will ever want to see again.

One might almost be convinced this is a real baby, until she starts bending his arms backwards at a 90-degree angle.

Let's diaper the sweet little son-of-a-gun, so his teeny rubber wee-wee won't keep quivering like that.

Quick! Call Child Protection Services! Silicone baby in trouble!

Hey, lady, listen to me. That baby ain't breathin'. 

Rubber baby buggy bumpers.

Bonus link!  More pictures of full-body silicone baby dolls. Warning! Don't go alone.

http://www.anhuangbabies.com/full-body-silicone-babies

Post-blog thoughts. Like the Grinch, I just had an awful idea. There could only be one way these babies could be manufactured with such eerie, even grotesque realism. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A cast? A mold? And how would a cast be made? Let's not consider the possibilities. We look at Victorian post-mortem photography with repugnance, and yet it looks like someone is taking a dead baby and making a cast from it, then squirting in a bunch of pink silicone. Often these dolls are "recommended" to bereaved parents as a substitute, but then the possibilities grow even more macabre. Cloning pets is a new industry that is booming, but is that much more extreme than casting babies? The next step will leap across the gap: cloning a dead baby so that the parents receive an exact duplicate of the one that has died.

This idea is much creepier than those tired old stories about dolls coming to life. Even this quivering little homunculus doesn't come anywhere near the horror of a cloned baby.

I feel a short story coming on.

Post-post-blog thoughts: The internet is both great for me and awful for me, for it takes only seconds to find a treasure trove of pictures of my latest obsession. There are people who make a fat living from creating these things. Often it's carefully rationalized: well, men get obsessed with model trains, don't they? Yes, but model trains don't look so lifelike they seem to be ready to cry at any minute.

Come to think of it, there are distinct advantages over a real human being. You have complete control here. This baby does what you want. Period. It never changes. It can become a focal point for all your expectations, all your love. I have already read about marriages breaking up over this, when love for an inanimate mold of silicone supercedes love of a messy, ageing, cranky, needy, "real" human being. Though reborns seem needy, they are not. They can be put aside for years if you want, or taken into the bath with you.

And they never die. This is a real bonus for women who have lost babies. They never die because they were never born, in spite of their weird-sounding name.

I won't get into the weird "extras" some of these have. And I don't want to think about why they are there.

And as a kicker. . . 

WTF did I just see???

The creepiness of dolls is a topic I return to again and again, just because I haven't squeezed all the squick out of it yet. Not by a long shot.

This all started with a '60s ad for Baby Echo, which took me to Baby Secret, which then landed me squarely in the Oz of Doll-land, that place where women (and men? Who knows, maybe they're out there but still in the closet) conspire to treat the inanimate as not only animate, but precious and irreplaceable.

Wikipedia talks about reborn dolls in a way which is obviously years out of date. There is no mention of the newer all-silicone, rubbery pink dolls that can be plunked into the bath water (as opposed to the older models with stuffed cloth bodies that have to be wiped down). It refers to the reborn phenomenon as being the province of bereaved, pathetic, disturbed older women. My research contradicts that. It's even more disturbing to me how young most of these "mothers" are: in their twenties or even their teens. Is this the "new parenthood", I wonder - no mess, no fuss, no pesky stages of maturation, just an endless, powerless babyhood? For unlike a kid, a reborn baby will never answer you back. Or answer you - at all.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of YouTube videos of women with their "reborn" dolls, taking them for walks, bathing them, buying clothes for them, etc. Some of them would class themselves as collectors, though this is often a mask for a fetish. "Dollers" insist there's nothing harmful about any of this. Isn't it normal and natural to treat a quivering pink blob of silicone like an infant?

As with not being able to look away from a train wreck, I've sat through lots of these. Mostly they're really long, maybe fifteen minutes of giving Little Presley her bath, or outlining Baby Grayson's morning routine: "Grayson! What do you want for breakfast this morning?" (Grayson is the one who gets sick and has to go to the doctor. What doctor would be willing to play along with this - a plastic surgeon who implants silicone breasts?). Many feature the grand opening of the box from eBay that the doll comes in.

But the Birth of Ellie Mae video takes the proverbial birthday cake, and the candles too. It's a youngish woman actually going into labour and giving birth to her blob of silicone, depicted in excruciating detail. I thought most of us gave up this sort of "role-playing" when we were ten years old. But apparently not. Apparently there is a whole class of adults who never grow up, who continue to "play" like Peter Pan, to play at babies, bondage, and a whole lot of other stuff I know nothing about. Last time I checked, relying on that kind of extreme behaviour to cope with life meant you weren't coping very well, if at all. But now - am I sounding old here? (yes) - it seems that anything goes. Nothing is a perversion any more. The line is blurring.

I couldn't watch all of this, and I don't advise YOU to watch all of this - just skip through it for the high- or low-lights. I have a million questions. . . Do her "friends" watch this sort of thing? Are they into it too, or is this solitary? Is it a sort of sex tape for silicones, made mainly for the participant's pleasure? Do these women already have children, do they want children, do they LIKE children, or have they lost a child and are looking for a substitute?

Why does it vex me so much to see a video of a woman opening her reborn dolls' Christmas presents, fingering the new outfits as if trying to see if they'll still fit in six months? Why does it chill me to hear middle-aged women go on and on about "hanging out all day long" with their "babies", or taking them to the Walmart to see what sort of reaction they'll get (knowing they'll shock the shit out of people, a form of sadism which most would probably vehemently deny)? I have even heard stories of women leaving their reborns in cars for long periods of time, as a weird kind of "bait". It's an unhealthy, even creepy attention-getting device which is one of the less-discussed aspects of the subject, mostly because people don't know how the fuck to respond to all this bizarre shit.

I always object to people who refer to their gerbils or Golden Retrievers as their "babies", but on second thought, I think they should call them whatever they want to. At least they are alive and sensate. They have a pulse. Shouldn't that be a minimum requirement for a baby?

Post-blog revelations. I'm writing this later, in the new year. I notice the original YouTube video has been taken down, for reasons unknown. Was there too much flak from those who are creeped out by the silicone baby phenomenon? Did the user realize it was just too over-the-top to film a "role-playing" video about giving birth to a gelatinous, inanimate blob? I'm not sure. Most of the comments for these kinds of videos are positive, believe it or not - breathless ooohs and aaaahs over how beautiful Little Kaylee is, and how they want one exactly like it. Which can no doubt be had.

You'll have to take my word for it how strange this was. Believe me! I saw it with my own eyes.

They Came from Hell: the strangest dolls in advertising

I apologize for this, but I had to load it up-front to get you used to the flavor of this post. My obsession with old comic book ads knows no bounds, and on my recent trawl I found some pretty good ones - push-up bras made of baling wire, memberships to secret mystical societies, ads for starting your own frog ranch, circuses for a dollar starring a performing "actual live" chameleon, etc., along with classics like Grog Grows Own Tail and the chihuahua in a teacup plaintively asking, "Will you give me a home?"

But I ruthlessly cut these out of the mix when I saw the number of creepy doll ads. Like clowns, there is something inherently squickish about the doll as an object, human yet not human, and often grotesque even in its supposed cuteness. "Lifelike" is the word that comes up again and again to describe a lifeless object.

I won't get into "reborn" dolls either, often made of rubbery silicone so that their arms and legs jiggle and quiver. Some of these actually have heaters in them, heartbeats, and miniature sound systems to emit baby noises (though Edison obviously got there first). No one wants to think about the next innovation.

I've written about these incredible '60s artifacts before, but there's an update which shocked me. I used to wonder about this ad, how they could ever get away with it, and what "Lilliputian cuteness" meant (I wasn't into Swift at age eight). I tried to picture a hundred rubber dollies a few inches high, but after a while the whole thing was shoved away in a back room of memory.


Then, the wonder of the internet led to this revelation:

Someone had actually ordered these, all those years ago, and kept them in their original box. These reminded me of those little plastic ornamentations you find in cocktails, only thinner, more toothpicky. And yes, it looks as if there's quite an array of them, but the thing is, calling them "dolls" is a real stretch. Apparently in one incarnation, they came with paper clothing, but it's hard for me to imagine how that would work.

And then I found this. . . 

This is obviously the same product, but all of a sudden they're five bucks! The type is too small to read, but presumably they had dropped the Lilliputian bit. I have no idea what year this version came out. But it's ripoff times five.

There's a whole category of moving dolls, the type that emit the most godawful grinding-gears sound as they inch along. 

Some of these look like cheats. I think you have to stand behind this one and "walk" it, so it's incapable of independent movement. And any doll that costs 50 cents - I don't know. Maybe, like the 100 dolls for a dollar, she's really only an inch high, a prototype version of nanotechnology.

Botteltot just has such a strange name. You'd think the manufacturer could come up with something better, more descriptive, such as Cindy Pees-a-lot. And I just don't get Toodles. Nobody costs 44 cents, with a 19-cent "layette". Maybe, like the Walking Doll with the checkered skirt, she came with boxtops from Joy Liquid - or whatever. 

We don't have to know what the text means, which is good, because I don't. The sad purse-mouthed expression on Grasitas's face kind of says it all. And that sure is a strange diaper.

Noma the Electronic Doll is manufactured by Effanbee, which somehow makes me uncomfortable. Noma was the brand of our old Christmas lights, the ones that used to electrocute you or give you third-degree burns. Though the ad gives the impression that Noma walks, she doesn't. But she prays, which is maybe a good thing for everyone.

Does this doll resemble Regan from The Exorcist, or Carrie, or - Good God! Feel my ribs? Hear my voices? Somebody call Stephen King.

Here is a ventriloquist's dummy - always a staple of the Twilight Zone series of the '60s - who not only talks (in your own voice, of course) but SMOKES. And he's under three bucks,so what can we lose, except maybe sleep?

And here is Sandy, endowed with Rubber Wonderskin and hair you can "wave", along with the usual accoutrements (bottles with rubber nipples, etc. - though with hair like that, she can't be the right age for diapers). Someone must have believed this advertisment would attract Mommies enough to want to shell out four dollars (C. O. D.!) to scare their daughters half to death.

The Edison Talking Doll was a flop. It stopped talking after little girls had cranked it a few times, and once the public saw its inner workings, they were too creeped out to want it. The whole concept was flawed from the beginning, but I don't think it mattered to Edison. It was just another way of getting attention for his REAL phonograph, which he stole from a guy in Germany. The Berliner Talking Doll just doesn't have the same ring to it.

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