Yo! They're making monkeys out of us!

Eeewwwwwwwwww!

Contributor: "Yo Momma"

Contact Comfort

Remember the film "Z.P.G." (Zero Population Growth) and that part about couples getting doll babies to fulfill their desires to have a child? (Here's a YouTube excerpt from the movie where the woman is brainwashed into accepting a plastic baby as real and in need of her love).

Check out this article. I like how they try to present it is a hobby and only near the end say:

Although Karen considers herself merely a collector, there are women, she concedes, who use the dolls to assuage sorrow; either because they are empty-nesters or, more tragically, have lost children.

Psychologist Dr Vivian Diller knows of women — and, more rarely, men — who have used "reborns" to alleviate grief . "People who buy a reborn doll following a miscarriage or loss of a child may be choosing a comforting, harmless way to ease the mourning process," she says.

Isn't it clever how they encourage these collectors to compete with each other to build ever more realistic dolls? Look at the "Adopted Baby Gallery".

This all pretty creepy since we know that babies are going to become increasingly rare over the coming years and I imagine at just the right moment the ultimate lifelike baby doll will be made available at a reasonable cost.

It reminds me of a photo I saw in a psychology book, when I was a child, of a baby rhesus monkey clutching at a wire mesh stand that had little more than a swath of furry material covering it, and two plastic eyes. The experiment was to find out what was more important to the baby monkey - food or contact. The baby chose the wire stand even though it offered only the barest resemblance to a mother and gave little more than physical contact with the furry material.

I remember feeling so sad for that little monkey - how desperately he needed protection and comfort and how the researchers took advantage of his need and tricked him into bonding with a dummy - and a lousy one at that. It pained me that the monkey would hold onto this dummy even at the potential risk of starving to death.

How about that - I found a write-up about it on the Internet. Yikes, what a nasty experiment:

"Harlow found baby monkeys were very forgiving of their terrycloth mothers. One "mother" was designed to occasionally catapult the baby off, throwing it to the other side of the cage, but the babies always came back. Another had spikes beneath her terrycloth, but the babies put up with the pain. Only running cold water through tubes contained inside the terrycloth mother, making the body cold, made baby monkeys reject it and retreat to a corner of the cage."

How sad would it be to one day accept it as "normal" for humans, trained like monkeys, to bond with "reborns".

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Ed Note: In conversation, "Yo Momma" and I agreed that women who cling to fake babies, or even to pet lap dogs, should be trained out of their immature, antisocial behaviour and reach out for human companionship instead, or even seek to provide a home for an orphaned child - because there will be plenty of those thanks to unending wars and manmade poverty and environmental conditions.