Brighton lights – Lynn Ruth Miller

Oh, you beautiful doll!

Lynn Ruth Miller on the toys we play with …

A U.S. study has concluded that the dolls you play with influence your career choices. When American children play with sexy Barbie dolls, they want to grow up to do girlie things like go to Hollywood and get humped by the stars, but when they play with dolls made out of potatoes, they think there is no limit to what they can do with their lives. It all goes to show that image is everything.

You have to admit that when you see curvaceous women in movies and on television, they are often doing very ‘feminine’ things like flirting with policemen or dancing provocatively in revealing undies. You know, instinctively, that women like that never pay for a meal or have to take a bus home. It is the thick-ankled ladies in print dresses with no visible cleavage who end up locked to a stove and a Hoover in their prime. And what fun is that?

Every med student who specializes in plastic surgery instead of healing the poor knows what a money maker that pre-conceived notion is. Ordinarily clever women will blow their grocery money on a shot of silicone to puff up their lips, just to be like the toys we played with as a child. If we change our playthings, our self-image will change as well. We won’t give a toss about Barbie or Ken’s silhouette; we will thirst for the bumps and curves of a root vegetable.

Estrogen-deprived women with moustaches
will turn on men with potbellies

Indeed, we can restructure our children’s ambitions by giving them potatoes to play with instead of human-shaped dolls. They can dress them in frilly dresses or put them in macho uniforms and carry them around to cuddle and talk to when Mummy and Daddy won’t listen.

If you start a child early enough, their goals in life will become far more realistic. Young women will ache to become thick-wasted, faceless entities with little protrusions on their skin like the playthings that comforted them when they took a nap; boys will no longer gobble up porn with its images of hairless, busty women and muscular, well-hung men. Instead, they will go crazy with desire when they see a local farmer yanking a yam out of the earth.

I envision a new world where the elderly, with their aging bodies and shapeless silhouettes, will suddenly become the most sought-after centerfolds in magazines and on the screen. Estrogen-deprived women with moustaches will turn on men with potbellies and bowing legs and anyone who dares to eat chips will be accused of cannibalism.

So take heart, all you people with bad measurements and loose body parts. If you wait long enough, your image will eventually be ‘in’.

“People are obsessed with … Hairless, fatless Barbie Dolls.”
– Gaby Hoffman