All Tale material on this page copyright 2001, Susan Ryan. All rights reserved. Tale #1: Barbie Torture
I had lots of Barbie dolls and other "fashion" dolls as a kid. Generally speaking, I was pretty kind to them, but as I got older they began to lose their appeal, and I started looking for other things to do with them.
I specifically remember a couple of Barbie incidents involving my friend Kerri. We were probably about nine or ten years old, about the age when Barbie started not being as much fun for us anymore. We used to take the Barbies' heads off, shred their clothes, tie them to table legs in the nude....
One time I was visiting Kerri on a Saturday. Her family was more religious than mine; she bordered on Orthodox Jewish, which meant it was okay for her to have a friend over on the Sabbath, but that we couldn't do stuff like watch TV or anything like that, so naturally we gravitated towards the Barbie dolls. We played with them normally for a while, but then the inevitable boredom set in and we started yanking off heads... only we were having trouble shredding the clothes without scissors, and also figured we needed one so we could cut some yarn into more manageable lengths to tie the dolls to the table legs and such, so we asked Kerri's mom for scissors. For some reason, she was not very concerned with the fact that we were doing all these unnatural things to the Barbies; she just refused to give us one because "it was Shabbos, and it wasn't appropriate to use a scissor on Shabbos!" Nor was it, apparently, appropriate to tie knots on Shabbos, because she was also rather dismayed that we were tying knots in the yarn we were using to bind the dolls to her tables... but she could have cared less about the REALLY troubling stuff, the fact that we were doing a bunch of sick, twisted things to the poor dolls! I have to admit I always wondered about her priorities....
Tale #2 - Beautiful Chrissy
I had one of these dolls as a kid: it had long red hair that "grew" if you pulled it out of the head, and got shorter if you turned a knob on the doll's back. I never did any of the truly twisted things that I did to Barbie to Chrissy, but I do remember being convinced that since Chrissy's hair "grew" it would be okay to cut it... so I did! And for some reason, nearly every doll I ever owned, Beautiful Chrissy included, seemed to lose their panties almost immediately after I started playing with them.... I found Chrissy recently in a box of old toys, and while she doesn't look THAT pathetic (okay, the chopped off hair isn't too pretty), she's in pretty good shape--except that she's still missing her panties! Funny thing is, Beautiful Chrissy dolls are now quite collectible... if only I hadn't tortured her!Submit your own terrible tales! Or just tell Susan how twisted she is! Join the mailing list to learn when Twisted Tales of Toy Torture is updated. Return to the main Twisted Tales of Toy Torture page Return to the current issue of Rational Magic Return to the Rational Magic home page
