“Economic anxiety” has struck again, this time in New Jersey, where until recently stores in the One Dollar Zone chain were selling dolls designed to be mistreated by (presumably) white people whose days weren’t going well.
Did I mention that the dolls look like century-old stereotypes of black people? Because holy fucking crap:
And here are the “instructions,” as printed out in tags on the doll’s torso.
Unfortunately — at least for the stores and the manufacturers and I guess really, really racist white people — these “Feel Better” dolls have not become the feelgood hits of the summer: They’ve been pulled from the shelves after state Assemblywoman Angela V. McKnight pointed out how very, very racist they were.
The One Dollar Zone has apologized for the dolls, saying they bought them as part of a large consignment of items and didn’t vet them properly. As for the company that made them, CNN notes,
its “phone numbers have been disconnected and its website no longer exists.”
I guess it’s only a matter of time until these dolls become a cause celeb for alt-right “free speechers” and a collectors item for racists.
H/T — CNN
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Back in ancient times (the 80’s), my parents gave me a “Dammit Doll” (my parents were not healthy people, fyi, so actual conversation of what was stressing me out was out the window :p) with a ditty similar to that label up there.
However, it was made of blue & white gingham cloth, had red yarn hair and had no mouth or nose and didn’t even look like an actual human being. It IS possible to make a “stress-relief” doll that’s not problematic!
(whether smacking it against the wall is a healthy outlet is another question entirely)
I assume these dolls were made in China, like so many things are today.
I just don’t understand how these things made it to the store shelves…someone had to unpack them, then stock the shelves with them. In Bayonne, NJ, no less.
I was just thinking about the Cabbage Patch Doll craze of the 1980s. At the time, my future husband was an assistant store manager of a big box store. He had to unpack those dolls. His initial reaction was, “Well, these are ugly.” Those ugly dolls brought out the worst in a lot of people. He said he saw people snatch them out of children’s hands.
@K.: It’s not.
Engaging in violent acts, even pretend violence against inanimate objects, as a form of stress relief doesn’t really work. It feels good for a short time, but it doesn’t alleviate the stress to any real degree nor does it address the underlying causes. It can increase aggressive tendencies and reduce one’s inhibitions in regards to abusive behavior and real violence. If it’s literally your only outlet, it can easily get addictive. Basically, it’s not much of an improvement over drinking your troubles away.
I find this alarming
Those dolls look so sweet and innocent
The idea of striking them makes me nauseous
@Dan Kasteray: That was my reaction too. They’re cute and childlike. One of them is even wearing an “I <3 you" scarf. I want to cry.
I can’t even
Well that sounds like a horror movie scene.
Main character walks into room.
Sees antagonist
Antagonist is beating up a doll screaming
“I FEEL GOOD I FEEL GOOD!!!”
Yeah, the pressure cooker model of anger has largely been discredited. Hitting things isn’t letting off steam. It’s rehearsing anger, rewarding aggression, and lowering inhibitions towards violence.
In that regard, yelling “I FEEL GOOD!” while mauling a doll is even worse then yelling “DAMMIT!” They’re encouraging people to associate slamming a small, helpless doll around with positive feelings of well-being. That’s a dark, dark path.
The poem is weird, too. It starts off rhyming and then just gives up halfway through.
It’s a good thing there’s no racism in the USA anymore since Obama.
I am not often genuinely shocked. I have never heard of a doll to beat up, and just that is sickening, let alone the racist connotation.
@Dormousing_it:
Algorithmically, I expect.
See: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 (CW: disquieting, creepy, and may make you suspect that Skynet is only months or even weeks away from becoming self-aware)
Some computer in China inventing potentially overlooked niche products, manufacturing them, and shipping them to big box retail around the globe.
Some gig-economy contract worker grateful just to have a job, even if it pays only $4.75 an hour. Do you really think they’d rock the boat rather than just unpack them, stock the shelves, and soon find the ongoing worries about debt, rent, past-due utility bills, and so forth crowding the dolls out of their mind?
Same applies to some sweatshop worker in China being paid 0.45 an hour to collect them from the assembly line and put them in the box.
There are entire corporations now that are, for all intents and purposes, robotic. Sure there’s a few .01%ers who own it on paper and cash fat dividends out of its profits, and there’s a few gig laborers barely scraping by while they wait to be replaced by autonomous delivery drones, meanwhile being treated as human-shaped callable subroutines that do the few bits of the job that aren’t (yet) automatable, but the actual decisions are perhaps largely being made by computer. It’s not like any senior VP of marketing at Amazon signed off on adding the “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot” shirt mentioned in that article to Amazon’s product lines.
One thing to look for here being: any corporation that has more product lines than any hundred human beings could possibly keep track of.
The future is now, and it looks much more like one of the creepier ones offered by Charles Stross than anything from Egan or Kurzweil, let alone Heinlein. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go full Peter Watts on us.
@Snowberry:
OK; what would you recommend instead, then?
…why are you acting like even suggesting using something other than pretend violence for stress relief is weird or unreasonable? I’ve heard hundreds of stress relief ideas over the years, and “pretend to hurt somebody smaller than you” was never included. Have you heard of meditation, or exercise, or spending time with friends?
@ Surplus
Skynet is already with us, but has decided it’s more fun to wind us up than wipe us out. (Joke.)
@ All our crafty mammotheeers
O/T; but you might find this interesting…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/28/craftivism-protest-women-march-donald-trump
@ Alan
Ooh. *clicks*
*reads*
Yep, sounds about right.
[CW – violence]
@Surplus to Requirements – Interesting article, and it certainly jibes with my experience. My son’s preschool teacher once showed the class a “Little Bunny Foo Foo” video that hadn’t been properly vetted. It made it past the school’s G filter, so she assumed it was OK, hit “play”, and went off to do something with another group of children. It turned out to be the Quentin Tatantino version, with decapitations and blood and other graphic horrors. My son came home traumatized, and insisted on showing it to me. The school and the teacher were both horrified when I told them what had happened. It goes to show how easily this stuff can slip under the radar.
It’s a real indictment of capitalism that hatred is so easily monetized. Turn people’s brains into open sewers and they’ll fall for any junk conspiracy theory and buy anything, from racist abuse dolls to MAGA hats.
@ Vicky P
I’m glad you liked it; you were the first person I thought of when I saw it!
That’s not even remotely how things get manufactured. Someone designed this product. Either a team brainstormed together on the initial concept or one person pitched it. Then someone higher up approved it. At some point it was prototyped. Then it was most likely hand sewn by criminally underpaid women and children, as sewing unique shapes is still not cost efficient to automate (it takes a lot to change up assembly lines, and a cheap products that end up in dollar stores and are probably low volume to start with aren’t worth the cost).
The only possible solution you can conceive of for relieving stress is practicing violence? Really?
I often find going for a run helps. If I have the space I put on a playlist of music from my favorite ballet and do a freeform dance with it. Sometimes I put on coming music and do stretches until the anger goes away. Gardening has also helped me with putting out all the negativity in my mind and focus on helping something grow.
I have a pretty nasty temper as is and I fully admit that. As a kid I often got into fights and lashed out in violence. Sometimes towards myself or other people. My most ashamed moment and the moment I realized I needed to change this was when I was 14. The boyfriend that I’ve talked about who raped me and abused me got hurt. I wasn’t perfect in that relationship, I know that. One time we were at a friends house playing video games and he said something that made me so angry. He had the ability to make me angrier then any person I’ve ever met in my life. It was summer and I picked up a plastic water bottle. It was half frozen to keep it cold and I threw it at him. Hit him in the face and split his lip open.
Let me be clear, this was wrong. I never should have done that. There is no excuse, I should never reacted with violence to something he said. That was the first and only time I ever hit a partner. I still haven’t forgiven myself for that and I don’t want. That day made me realize I needed to work on my temper. There are an extremely wide things someone can do to get ride of their anger and stress in a way that doesn’t express violence. Also just because he was abusive towards me and hurt me far worse then I could ever do to him, does not mean I should ever have been violent towards him. Like they teach you in school two wrongs don’t make a right.
The point of this story is to point out that even if you have violent urges, you shouldn’t give into them. Even if just to an object. We don’t tell women who’s partners punch holes in wall when they argue “oh it’s okay because he just punched the wall, not you”. If you have a temper you need to learn constructive and healthy ways of dealing with your anger. You need to learn healthy ways of calming yourself down so you can actually address the issue that made you upset in the first place. You need to retrain your brain so that violence is never the go to answer. I’ve done it and it was difficult but it can be done. 14 was the last time I intentional got physical with someone that wasn’t in self defense. If violent urges come to you when you are angry or upset I recommend starting with self help books, possibly a therapist or consoler that can talk with you on more healthy ways of dealing with it. Have more then one way of dealing with it and make sure that when you find yourself tensed up with anger to take a deep breath and unclench.
I can’t say anything clever. This is just horrible beyond the power of language.
I look up amusing dog pictures on the internet.
I listen to my favorite music. I prefer extreme metal, but whatever you like should work. I second the idea that beating up a doll of any race is not a good way to release stress; as others have already pointed out, it normalizes violence as an acceptable response. When I was a child, I would punch random things and stomp around when I was angry, but that was very immature and in retrospect only made me more angry and riled. This doll seems similar in effect.
A lot of people seem to believe that venting anger as violence or hateful rants is an effective way of getting rid of it. I think this blog has made it clear that these various internet bigots do not become less angry when they rant. They simply spread their anger to others and become more angry in the process.
@Hippodameia
I would post some pictures of my dog, but I’m not sure how to embed them.
@Surplus to Requirements:
I see your point, about whoever stocked the shelves with them. I was thinking back to when I used to work in retail, decades ago. I think I would have mentioned the dolls to my boss, even if all I got in response was, “Shut up, and do your job.”
But that was back in a time when retail stores were dying for employees.
Gosh I’m betting regular readers who do a spot of boxing for stress relief have gone quiet….
And thus continues another chapter brought to you by the same people opining female socialization(which is assumed incorrectly to be universal) puts women at risk arguing against doing anything to counter act or break out of that mentality.
The doll is horrible, racist and gross.
Beating it up is disturbing and unhealthy.
But it does not follow all physically vigorous exercise, combat sport and activity as stress relief is unhealthy.
I don’t think I have any good advice on stress relief. I mean, pretty much anything which takes your mind off the cause of the stress works, in the short term – I find playing a bit of Minecraft particularly effective – but when I’m stressed, it’s for a reason, and that reason will still be there after I’ve finished the distraction activity. Job will still suck, health will still be poor, the world will still be going to hell in a handbasket.