The second I got wind that the Breast Milk Baby Doll, already popular in Europe, was launching in the US, my first thought was…hoo boy. Here come the crazies. And yep. I was right.

On Cool Mom Picks, the dissenters have, almost without exception, been sane. Because our readers are, almost without exception, awesome. Most of them like the message it sends, but if they don’t like the doll, it’s because they don’t feel that a parent needs to spend $89 for a battery operated Chinese-made doll for a kid to be able to “nurse” her (or his) dolls. I buy that 100%. We don’t have dolls that pee or poop or talk around our house either.

For a brief while, we did own the doll affectionately known as Lead-y Betty, who was rescued off the tough streets of Chinatown in 2007 by a well-meaning relative. She wore a sparkly pink Daisy Duke number dipped in six layers of premium grade lead paint, for extra sparkle. And she didn’t speak so much as she shrieked. In some crazy Chinese-English-Parrot hybrid language. At any given moment, with or without human intervention, she could be heard flailing her arms and legs and yelling WAH-OOH! WAH-OOH! WAH-OOH! before launching into a frenetic rendition of TINKLE TINKLE LITTAH STAH…WAH-OOH!

It was worse than even a Sing-a-ma-jig.

So I do get the point that we don’t need our dolls to actually do the things that our kids’ imaginations already make them do.

What I’m having trouble understanding are the people who say things like “this crosses a dangerous line” or “it sexualizes our little girls” or “Jesus is going to be SO MAD!”

(I did respond to one person who suggested that the doll is upsetting because little girls don’t actually have boobs. I reminded her that little girls don’t actually have babies, either. Still haven’t heard back.)

But really the toughest for me, was understanding my own initial discomfort when I first heard about the doll. I wholly admit: my first reaction was “Hm. That’s a little weird.”

So I asked myself…would I okay with a baby doll that simulates drinking milk from a bottle? Of course.

Would I be okay with a baby pig doll that sucks milk from the mommy pig? Why not.

Would I be okay with my kids simulating breastfeeding under their shirts? They already do.

Hm.

That’s when I realized…it’s a gateway doll.

It’s a doll that leads to other things!

Let your kid have a Breast Milk Doll and the next thing you know, she’ll want a co-sleeping doll. Can you imagine? A doll that is made for you to sleep with it! The downfall of independence in our country! The end of democracy as we know it!

And then? I imagine your formerly sweet little girl will be wanting to carry it in a sling instead of pushing it in a stroller like God intended. Before you know it, she’s feeding that baby doll homemade organic baby food from some communist food CSA, pre-registering it for a Waldorf preschool, selling the family TV, and refusing to shave her armpit hair.

Stupid Breast Milk Baby Doll.

I’m just glad I figured it out.