woman casually strolls down a supermarket aisle, infant in tow. An elderly woman shopping in the same aisle coos at the child, bending closer to get a better look. Such a benign, commonplace scene takes an eerie, if not outright bizarre, turn—the baby does not possess a heart or a set of lungs; in lieu of hair, angora mohair sprouts from its plastic scalp; and its skin is colored by paint, not melanin.
Upon closer inspection, the elderly woman realizes the infant she’s fawning over is actually an incredibly realistic baby doll. This is the first scene of the BBC documentary “My Fake Baby.”
Christened “Reborns,” these “babies” are marketed toward women, not little girls, retailing for as much as $1,000. The trend has proliferated in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, and now the media has latched onto the phenomenon with features on the Today Show, 20/20, and the BBC.
The implications of such a “movement” appear immediately evident: the “Reborns” must be aimed toward childless women lacking meaningful relationships. But the women featured in the documentary at first seem to have healthy relationships with their husbands, and many have children and grandchildren. Yet it soon becomes obvious they want these dolls to fill some void that none of their human relationships can.
On ABC’s 20/20, a forty-nine year old woman named Linda explains that she “feels like I have a real baby…I take them out to the park, if I’m walking the dog, and maybe put it in its stroller, or put it in its sling, or hold it in a blanket, and people do think it’s real.” In essence, a “Reborn” retains all of the positive attributes associated with having an infant without any of the unpleasantness, like constant fatigue on the parents’ part, diapers, and spitting up. The serenely pacified plastic counterpart devoid of nasty bodily functions replaces a screaming child.
Women treat these dolls like real offspring, giving their “children” names, dressing them up, and even buying car seats, strollers, and other childcare accoutrements. The popularity of these Reborns seems to draw upon the traditional conception that an infant represents validation for a woman: in having a child, she fulfills her “biological destiny,” a (perhaps in fact societal) pressure unique to the female sex. One woman deems an outing during which her Reborn garners no attention a failure—she needs to exhibit herself as a mother, to prove herself to others, more than she desires the other rewarding aspects of real mothering.
There is something undeniably creepy about “building” an ideal baby, commodifying the human body, allowing someone to essentially purchase body heat and a heartbeat, not to mention a human relationship. Moreover, the eugenics-esque aspect of customizing a “baby” has slightly sinister connotations; all of the familiar and comforting qualities of holding a newborn are dissected and artificially manufactured. These babies will never grow, or develop personalities of their own, or outgrow their mothers (there goes the empty nest syndrome). Is this disturbing phenomenon, playing upon expectations for women straight out of the cult of domesticity, a step back for feminism? Or can we write it off as simply an innocuous divertissement?
