Things That Give You the "No Feeling"

This is the most highly anticipated creepy article of 2008, and possibly of all time. My mind has just been blown.

The newest issue of Macleans (April 7) has an article discussing the most messed up thing I’ve ever read about. Please make sure you read it in full (link below).

Here’s a little taste. My comments in pink.

“It’s not a doll. It’s a baby.”

Three-month-old Victoria has grey-blue eyes and auburn hair, just like her mother. She weighs five pounds and zero ounces, and is 18.5 inches long, the same as when she was first adopted. This morning, 26-year-old Mary Shallcross is dressing her.

"Do you want to get changed?" Mary asks in a quiet, soothing voice as she pulls out a pair of baby-pink dungarees with fuchsia-pink flowers. The question is rhetorical. Victoria will be dressed regardless of what she wants, and in any event her wishes would be extremely difficult to determine, since the lifelike creature lying in a wicker basket and being dressed is not a baby at all, but a special type of doll. (BAM. And there’s the creepy punchline).

…Reborn dolls look, feel and smell just like real babies. They look so realistic, in fact, that they are often mistaken for the real thing. Every aspect of their anatomy has been carefully constructed to imitate the experience of looking at and holding a baby. The dolls are painted with the same slightly blotchy colouring noticeable on a very young infant. Their bodies are stuffed with sand or silicone so that their legs, fingers, head and hands have the same floppy weight as that of a small newborn baby. They even have the same neck-support issues, so that anyone picking one up will instinctively support the head.

…As the dolls grow more popular, doll-makers keep adding new details to simulate the experience of holding a real baby. There are reborns that seem to breathe, ones that have a faint heartbeat, others that feel warm to the touch, since they come with heating packs. There are dolls modelled after premature babies that are sold with incubators, a breathing apparatus taped to their nostrils (this just took the creepy to a whole other level).

…For some, the realism is too much. Philip Englishman, whose wife Martha has five reborns (WHAT? Who do you think you are? Fake Brangelina?), finds the whole thing a little odd. "They look like dead babies."

…Shalcross is sitting in a cab holding Victoria, whom the driver has mistaken for a newborn, heading back from her best friend's house. "Society expects you to have done certain things to be considered a successful adult. I'm 26 and I still live with my parents, and I don't have children, so it's hard not to feel that society is judging you." (Don’t even get me started on this. You are 26 years old (although clearly with the mentality of a 3 year old). Drop dead).

Since Victoria looks so much like a real baby, sometimes Shallcross will ask her little sister, Aaliyah, 8, to "babysit." (Can we say traumatizing for the younger sister?? Just say no Aaliyah!) Other times, Shallcross will bundle Victoria up in a baby-pink terry towel blanket and take her to see friends (there are no words). When people see her holding the doll, the response is usually the same: someone will ask about "the baby." For a split second, Shallcross gets to be the mother she has always wanted to be. Then the moment ends and life returns to normal as Shallcross explains that no, it's not really a baby, it's only a doll."

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“Do you want to get changed?” Um…do YOU want to get EVALUATED?!

This is the craziest thing I’ve ever read and I’ve never had a stronger “no feeling” in my life.

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=20080326_14179_14179&page=1