Want a fake baby?

Maclean's recently posted a story about reborn dolls; life-like baby dolls that women collect.

"It's not a doll. It's a baby.

You don't 'buy' a reborn. You adopt one.

ALEXANDRA SHIMO | March 26, 2008 |

Three-month-old Victoria has grey-blue eyes and auburn hair, just like her mother. She weighs five pounds and zero ounces, and is 18.5 inches long, the same as when she was first adopted. This morning, 26-year-old Mary Shallcross is dressing her.

"Do you want to get changed?" Mary asks in a quiet, soothing voice as she pulls out a pair of baby-pink dungarees with fuchsia-pink flowers. The question is rhetorical. Victoria will be dressed regardless of what she wants, and in any event her wishes would be extremely difficult to determine, since the lifelike creature lying in a wicker basket and being dressed is not a baby at all, but a special type of doll.

To understand why Shallcross, a Winnipegger and a history buff, is addressing a vinyl doll as if it were her child requires entering the growing world of reborning. Reborn dolls look, feel and smell just like real babies. They look so realistic, in fact, that they are often mistaken for the real thing. Every aspect of their anatomy has been carefully constructed to imitate the experience of looking at and holding a baby. The dolls are painted with the same slightly blotchy colouring noticeable on a very young infant. Their bodies are stuffed with sand or silicone so that their legs, fingers, head and hands have the same floppy weight as that of a small newborn baby. They even have the same neck-support issues, so that anyone picking one up will instinctively support the head.

"My daughter, who is a neonatal nurse, finds them eerie, scary because they are too lifelike," says Martha Englishman, who is retired and has five reborns, partly because she has always collected dolls, but also to compensate for not having any grandchildren. "It sounds crazy, but I love them. They are the next best thing to having a baby." Click here to continue the article.

Listen, it's one thing for little girls (or boys) to play with dolls. It's another for grown women to not only collect dolls (for the majority of collectors are women), but also cuddle them, sing to them and change their nappies. Perhaps these dolls tap into these women's desire to nurture and well, mother. This reminds me of a BBC documentary about men who purchased life-size ultra-realistic dolls for sex. Many of these men dressed their dolls, put make-up on them and considered them their soul mate. I wonder if both these types of dolls are an antidote to loneliness and fulfill the need for companionship and connection (even if your companion is inert and made of silicone).

I've been working on a portrait series about isolation and identity so I've been thinking about the nature and forms of loneliness. I just realized these women who collect "babies" are related to that.

There's a clip from a Channel 4 documentary here. These dolls are becoming more and more life-like; this one breathes.