UNCAINNY VALLEY DOLLS

EXCERPT from faik magazine.

SYNTHOS by Midjourney, WRITTEN by ChatGPT

dolls: the pretty little tyrants of conditioning.

What is a doll but a dead-eyed sentry of patriarchal dogma? From the moment a little girl is handed one, she is being conditioned, taught that her role is to cradle, to nurture, to preen. The doll, that lifeless, silent cipher, offers her first lesson in submission.

And then there’s Barbie. The plastic high priestess of this insidious temple of conformity. She, with her impossible proportions, her feet engineered for a lifetime of tip-toeing servitude, her wardrobe a testament to the great lie that a woman’s worth is in the curation of herself. The justification has always been the same: “Barbie can be anything!”, as if being a president in a pink miniskirt changes the reality that she is, in the end, an effigy of male fantasy.

The 2023 film Barbie attempts to grapple with its own absurdity, wrapping its legacy of indoctrination in a thick coat of irony and self-awareness. It winks at us as if to say, “We know, we know.” But knowing is not dismantling. Dressing up the same old poison in a postmodern pink ribbon does not turn it into medicine. The film may poke fun at Barbie, but it never truly topples her from her pedestal. She remains the blueprint, the unshaken ideal, the dollhouse dictator in a different shade of lipstick.

Dolls do not liberate, they confirm the cage. They are an admission, a quiet reinforcement of the bias that the world has already decided for its daughters. Play with this. Care for this. Aspire to this. And when you grow too old to play, remember the lessons they taught you: be decorative, be thin, be desirable, be good.

Well, sod that. We are long past the time when women should be looking to these plastic little tyrants for validation. If we truly mean to unravel the centuries of conditioning that have shaped our roles, we would do better to consign Barbie and her ilk to the bin, not the podium.

“Knowing is not dismantling. Dressing up the same old poison in a postmodern pink ribbon does not turn it into medicine”

(Written by ChatGPT)