From the 7-year-old girl's Christmas list: "A little thing that can turn into anything at anytime."

From "My Kid's Insane Christmas Wish List, Annotated." (Via Metafilter.)

Also on the list: and "A pet puppy. Border collie with a peacesign coller, and a leash" and "1,000 bucks."

The dad's annotations are not as enjoyable as they'd be if he'd resisted appealing to Deadspin readers by using the f-word repeatedly. Not that I don't use that word. Just that he's interacting with the innocent expression of his young daughter, and — even though she's not reading this (not yet, anyway) — it doesn't work to say things like "The fuck is this?" and "Great. Fucking great."

Too bad, because otherwise this is seems to be great material. And maybe I want to take a stronger position on appropriating the sweetness of children for cheap, adult yucks. I know that when I was a young girl, it hurt me to hear adults finding great amusement in what I only understood years later to be how adorable I had been long ago when the concept was quite unknown to me.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said...

American Girl Dolls are the perfect Grandmother-to-Granddaughter gift, if you can afford it.

File this information away, Althouse, just in case :) Not sure if you can get them through the althouse portal.

Well, you sure can! Here's Saige, the American Girl Doll of 2013, and here's her border collie, Rembrandt, who comes with a leash. Don't know if it's a peace sign "coller." Seems to me that if the father did a little more poking around in Amazon, he'd have figured out that the child wasn't requesting a real border collie, just an accessory for the Saige doll she wants.

And thanks, again, to all who've been doing your shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"Like Barbie, Ken is from Willows, Wisc."

#5 of "15 Surprising Things You Didn’t Know About Ken."

As for surprising things you don't know about Althouse, I was an early adopter of the Ken doll. I have the original version, with his original swim trunks. Unfortunately, he has no other clothes, as I spent all my doll clothes money on Barbie, who — additional misfortune — never had a bathing suit, having been originally purchased in Nighty Negligee Barbie form.

"Judging from this 'mission' statement, the problem that Tina Gong’s cartoon vagina is supposed to solve is not that women can’t find their genitalia..."

"... but the 'cultural stigma' that makes them feel bad about … doing whatever it is they do with it, as often as Tina Gong does it, which seems to be pretty much all the time."

Writes Robert Stacy McCain, displaying an image that I'm not going to copy here because to my eye, it depicts the female genitalia as a baby. I think it's safe to click over there, but my answer to McCain's wondering how women can be supposed to be so dumb is that this is aimed at children and seems to proceed on the theory that little girls need to learn to play with themselves by perceiving their genitals as baby dolls.

McCain links to Daisy Buchanan at The Guardian, who says it "feels patronising."

Any woman gamely negotiating her neglected areas is probably going to be put off by the colour scheme, which features more pink than a Paris Hilton perfume launch. Similarly, there's something strange and infantilising about the cartoon instructions.

The simple answer is: It's aimed at children. This is what — back in 1994 — people were afraid the Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was talking about when she said "I think that [masturbation] is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught" to young people. What we are looking at now are the teaching materials.

Even if this wasn't aimed at children, I would still object to a cartoon that turns the vagina into a baby. It's sexualizing babies! Talk about a cultural stigma that makes you feel bad about it.

Breaking up mother's collection of 700 dolls.

After she said, before dying, "I hope they all stay together."

After a dealer offered $35,000. Then...

Thanks to the recession, dealers and auction houses were no longer scooping up collections the way they had before. Not only that, but people tend to buy the toys of their youth in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and Mama Jo’s dolls, I was told, were “aging out.” Our local doll museum, like others across the country, was on the verge of collapse.

One doll lover came for a look. “Honey, you should have taken that money,” he said. “You were standing on the edge of the ledge of the canyon.” He made a karate-chopping motion in the air with his hand.

I prayed. I saw a therapist. I consulted an astrologer. Finally, after a shamanic healing, I became unstuck. Maybe I was just ready to let go of my grief.

When I read "astrologer" and "unstuck," any sympathy over this plight melted away. (Somehow "unstuck" is a word that annoys me more than "shamanic.") Also, I watched the video:



Somehow, I just don't believe that this was a serious emotional struggle and I don't get the enchantment of the dolls. The mother's engagement with the dolls — seen a bit in the video — is lighter and sweeter than you might expect, given the author's presentation of the collection — and keeping it together (metaphor alert!) — as a profound burden. The author is Jo Maeder and she got a book out of the (faux?) ordeal.

***

Happy Mother's Day! Call your mom, if you're lucky enough to have a mom that's callable. If not, I hope the memories that flow into the foreground are not burdensome and require no therapy or astrology or shamanic healing to allow you to go forward and flourish.

"Until about 30 years ago, the typical 'Dutch Wife' (love doll) sold at sex shops in Japan was of the inflatable type..."

"... and of shoddy quality that was easily subject to deflation at the slightest, er, prick."

That's just offensive. Not just the terrible pun, but the abuse of the Dutch.

“When customers brought the dolls in for repairs, vendors would stick on hot patches, like on tire inner tubes,” [said Hideo Tsuchiya, president of Orient Kogyo K.K., a manufacturer of state-of-the-art love dolls].

Some of these buyers, however, had their own reasons for preferring rubber joy mates to real women. Some weren’t satisfied with going to brothels. Others, jilted by their mates, had become eternally suspicious of females....

Orient Kogyo also provides after-service. When and if the time comes for the dolls to part with their owner, the company will conduct a kuyo (Buddhist memorial service) for the doll, complete with floral offerings....

American Girl dolls in stop-motion video.

A YouTube phenomenon.



Those American Girl dolls are expensive, but if a kid is interested in stop-motion animation, she (or he) doesn't need any particular kind of expensive doll. Here's "The Klutz Book of Animation: How to Make Your Own Stop Motion Movies." And here's "Stopmotion Explosion: Animate Anything and Make Movies - Epic Films for $20 or Less."