In my experience stuffed animals are encouraged to be left inside, partly because they get filthy much more easily but also because they mean so much more to the child. Stuffed animals are seen as pets by children whereas dolls are recognized as toys. This is why dolls are constantly evolving, baby dolls gain new features to make them more lifelike while barbies and Bratz get new outfits accessories and dwellings.

A friends mother recently purchased her daughter “Novi Stars”: Dolls that sing, light up, can be taken apart and come in shades of clue and green. (I think they are alien rockstars?) As I grow older grown-up dolls get stranger while baby dolls creep towards the uncanny valley. Stuffed animals however have hardly changed. This is because a doll will not keep a child’s interest long.

Children recognize that these tiny humanoids are merely reproductions of the people they see in the world. No matter how cleverly made they are lifeless hunks of plastic. Stuffed animals on the other hand can easily become “real” As a child I never loved any of my dolls. barbies were kept in a drawer, packed together like human sardines, baby dolls were kept in a toy chest. I took meticulous care of my stuffed animals though, arranging them on shelves so they could all see and breathe.

I would never have dreamed of hurting one of my animals, but because I recognized the dolls as toys I felt quite comfortable treating them any way I wished to. My antics were constricted to haircuts and terrible clothing choices, clothes made out of tissues and toilet paper, or no clothes at all. I had a kitten who saw my barbies as toys and delighted in pulling off their heads. and nibbling at arms and legs. I found this endlessly amusing as a child and would give him my least favorite barbies to play with.

By contrast I also had a dog who would come into my room at night and take any animals that had fallen from the shelves to be his chewtoys. I would find them covered in slobber the next morning sometimes leaking stuffing from small holes. I would angrily scold the dog and wash them off. If there were any injuries I would cry and insist my mother drop what she was doing to sew them up IMMEDIATELY. I treated the animals as though they were bleeding to death in my arms, yet paid no attention to the barbie heads I saw beside them.

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a child who “loved” a certain doll. It is difficult to believe that these humanoids are real, so children do not form the same emotional bonds as they do with stuffed animals. The dolls you find have been treated with carelessness and human curiosity, not malice.

I come from the era when Barbie was slutty-looking, not cheerful and smiling. My mother wouldn’t let us have Barbies because they were “too sexy.” We had Tammy dolls. They didn’t wear heavy eyeliner, and they didn’t have enormous pointy breasts. Which means they didn’t really do justice to the endless stream of Barbie clothes my grandmother (NOT my mother’s mother) sewed and crocheted for us.

I don’t believe Tammy had a boyfriend like Ken. Perhaps she wasn’t wearing enough eyeliner.

Also, Barbies look like they were designed as separate pieces -I don’t mean their physical construction but the way there’s clearly a ‘pointy breast’ part, a ‘skinny waist’ part, etc, that don’t make sense together from a biological standpoint, as if the designer was just going through a checklist of attractive body parts, and also the way bits of the doll change depending on the theme, while the basic outline of the body stays the same. If the doll doesn’t look like she’s supposed to have a stable, cohesive body or a unique identity anyway, it’s not as big a deal to physically decapitate her. I didn’t think about it that way as a kid, but I think I sensed it on some level. And, for what it’s worth, I never made up personalities for my Barbies or felt compassion for them. I loved my stuffed animals, but I always felt sort of angry at the Barbies.