Delight Your Daughter With Brenda™ The Living Doll
By Brad Pike
For thousands of years, little girls have loved playing with dolls whether they’re Bratz, Barbies, or — if poverty stricken — buffalo wings with locks of blonde hair taped to the tops. Through playing with dolls, girls are gender normalized so they can fulfill their roles in American society as wives, mothers, and prostitutes with hearts of gold. This indoctrination process, however, has one downside: dolls are lifeless plastic objects. How can little girls be fully inculcated into a rigid social construct if they inevitably come to realize it’s as fake as the dolls themselves?
At Bube Labs, we have the solution. We’ve genetically engineered a revolutionary new product that will forever change the toy manufacturing paradigm. Brenda™ is a living doll for the young girl who wants a doll that cries when left in a pitch black closet for three days, that eats bits of old lasagna behind the refrigerator, that kisses her on the cheek while she sleeps and then watches over her with the unblinking stare requisite to creatures born without eyelids. It’s a doll that walks, talks, breathes, eats, and poops just like her. As children shift their interest from toys to iPads and videogames, the toy industry must respond with an equivalently dramatic advancement, one that can engage children aggressively but not violently. Never violently. Never.
How did we create Brenda™? Well, first, we bred short women abducted from rural gas station parking lots in an underground facility in the desert, carefully selecting the gene for shortness until they reached a height of approximately two feet. Then we cloned the one we considered consummate, splicing in genes for unintelligence, codependency, irrationality, and gigantic lidless eyes. At this point, the products are still smart enough to campaign for suffrage, so we lobotomize them using tiny ice picks. Next, we plop them in a movie theater where we screen Maid in Manhattan, Beauty and the Beast, Entertainment Tonight, and, just to mix it up, Suspiria, over and over for six months. The resulting doll is then cosmetically enhanced by the best toddler pageant make-up artists in the country, and placed in a terrarium full of Bube Brand Food Pellets. Finally, they’re shipped to your neighborhood toyshop where hundreds of them are lined up on a shelf, staring at the opposite side of the aisle, thinking nothing, feeling nothing.
And yes, Brenda™ dolls are trained to use a litter box prior to release in stores, but little girls looking for the genuine baby raising experience will be thrilled to learn we have a special line of dolls that poop and pee their Bube Brand Diapers, expect only milk from bottles, and have had their Broca’s areas (the speech region of the brain) removed to facilitate authentic infantile babbling. In this way, little girls can learn the parenting skills they’ll need in high school.
Every Brenda™ doll is preprogrammed with hundreds of adorable phrases including: “I love your dress!” “How many calories is it?” “Lol!” “Boys are such jerks!” “Oh my God, Pinkberry!” “Who wants to go see the 3D rerelease of Titanic with me?” “I’m such a fatass!” “Edward and Jacob are so hot!” “Only sluts use contraception!” and “WHAT AM I? WHAT THE HELL AM I?” Of course, you can also teach it new phrases by withholding Bube Brand Food Pellets until it repeats what you say. Try, “You’re the prettiest girl in school!” or “Voting’s so boring! Let’s watch Sex and the City instead!”
For the more ambitious Brenda™ owner, we provide the Brenda Dream House™, a six foot tall, three story mansion with a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a special soundproof bedroom to muffle the sound of nightcrying (Bube Brand Duct Tape is available for dolls that wail too loudly). Why not buy the Brenda Dream Car™ as well so that Brenda™ can zip around the house or in the yard? No remote control necessary; Brenda™ drives herself around just like a real girl! The car comes equipped with a GPS device that shuts the engine off if it drives too far away. Also, Brenda™ may try to drive under the wheel of an oncoming car, so it’s best to keep an eye on her.
Brenda™ dolls can last up to five to six years until they have their first periods, at which point, they’re summarily euthanized by our Quality Taskforce and replaced with fresh new dolls for a nominal fee. The old model is then shipped to Utah and dropped down a mineshaft onto an enormous pile of thousands of Brendas™ in various states of decay (skeletons at the bottom, fleshy bodies at the top).
One small caveat: a tiny percentage of Brenda™ dolls may begin lurking, creeping, or even menacing their owners at night, only to return to a state of innocence after a wife/ husband is called into the room. You may wake up with Brenda™ standing silently on your chest, whispering under its breath. Other times, Brenda™ may pop out of shadowy crevices unexpectedly or sneak itself into the backseat of your car before work. Small fires may start mysteriously in your home. The electricity might go out right after saying something like, “It’s just a doll!” or “Where’d the steak knife go?” Brenda™ may smile ominously or even leer in a discomforting way. If your Brenda™ displays any of these behaviors, call Bube’s Quality Taskforce immediately for safe disposal, and they’ll arrive within three to five business days.
