I would venture that there are few phrases that stimulate the brain-meats of journalists or bloggers more than “Nazi sex dolls”. It is an idea so rife with possibility that it is nigh irresistible. The Daily Mail, in fact, just recently found itself under its powerful sway when it published this article, detailing the findings of one Graeme Donald, author of Mussolini’s Barber: And Other Stories of the Unknown Players who Made History Happen, who stumbled upon this tantalizing bit of information while researching the history of the Barbie doll. Barbie, in case you do not know, was originally modeled on Lilli (pictured here courtesy of The Daily Mail), a 1950s German sex doll.
Donald claims to have uncovered evidence relating to the “Borghild Project”, a program set up by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in order to make a doll who could satisfy the desires of their soldiers on the front and, in turn, help them to avoid being sidelined by the venereal diseases passed onto them by (The Daily Mail specifies) French prostitutes.
The dolls were apparently trialled in Nazi-occupied Jersey at the German barracks in St Hellier.
After being refined, Himmler was so impressed he immediately ordered 50 of them.
However, at the beginning of 1942 he changed his mind and the whole project was axed and any evidence was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Dresden.
The story came from German sculptor Arthur Rink, one of the men on the team which designed the doll at the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit.
The plan referred to the dolls as “gynoids” and were said to be “smaller than life-size” (again, quoting The Daily Mail).
So, you can see the allure here, right? Hitler commissioned lilliputian sex dolls for Nazi troops. How could you not want to publish that story? Everyone wants to run that! It possesses a bizarre, fucked up perfection. And so, people have. More importantly, people did. In 2005. A quick search shows that Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin fell under the siren spell of Nazi sex dolls (via Fleshbot who, in true, blogger fashion, appended a question mark to their headline to give themselves an out (NSFW)) just a month shy 6 years ago. She was quickly disappointed thirteen days later, when it was argued that the story was, instead, a hoax. She was, perhaps, just as disappointed as I was when I Googled “Nazi Sex Dolls” upon receiving this link to see if I could beat Boing Boing to the punch. DAMN YOU JARDIN!
So now the question is: Is it a hoax? Has Graeme Donald found actual proof of the fabled “Borghild Project” or have both he, and The Daily Mail, and about a dozen others (including Gawker, no question mark this time) simply given in to the temptation of writing about lilliputian Nazi sex dolls, something for which I can hardly blame them? Could it be that I have become part of some sort of recursive hoaxing? I very much hope it is the first. History that weird should always be true.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yet another wonderful post from our longtime contributor, Jeffrey Wengrofsky! This past year, he’s been keeping busy with all manner of projects, and this Sunday, April 3, his Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers will be screening “The Gospel According to Reverend Billy” as part of the Prison is an Angry Father fundraiser at Goodbye Blue Monday (1087 Broadway, Bushwick, New York). It’s a benefit for a prisoner’s rights project created by the Sanctuary of Hope. The event will include live performances of an almost musical variety, as well as the screening of several more short films in addition the Syndicate’s. Doors open at 8pm. Showtime for “The Gospel According to Reverend Billy” is 10pm. This event is free of charge.
Last year I spent my summer vacation working on a feature film in Detroit. While creeping around the city, I could not help but notice its mountainous Masonic Temple – the largest in the world – whose muscular shoulders rise above its environs as if Charlton Heston’s urban fortress in Omega Man were carved into Yosemite’s El Capitan. I was even able to arrange a private tour of the windowless monolith by its hospitable and wily Grand Master, including many meeting rooms and a majestic 4,004 seat auditorium (numerologists take note), all of it a visual feast for anyone with a taste for dramatic architecture, grotesque beauty, or even cryptography for that matter. While in the lobby, our guide offhandedly revealed three levels of meaning behind a seemingly random painting, and the stately oddities awaiting us in floors above and below nearly exploded with symbolic resonance. Unfortunately, the photographer I brought with me was so spooked by the experience that he ran screaming into the long night, ever since unreachable by phone or email.
And who can blame him? The uninitiated public can never comfortably claim to understand the true raison d’etre and inner machinations of secret societies because any scholar or spokesperson or self-declared defector may actually be a shill for the organization, spreading misleading rumors and planting seeds of misinformation. Conspiracies are easily projected behind vaulted iron doors, masks, secret handshakes and passwords. Consequently, it can never be definitely settled as to whether any or all such societies are actually: cults of mystical inquiry; repositories of Enlightenment values of science and public service; the core of a “power elite”; a collection of people who enjoy rituals involving aprons (not that there’s anything wrong with that); or some combination thereof.
Last year, Fantagraphics reproduced Catalog No. 439 of the DeMoulin Brothers– the most extensive depiction of initiation contraptions and ritual outfits used by Freemasons and other fraternal orders, like the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and E. Clampus Vitus. Bearing the title Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes, this wacky book may shed a shred of light into the outer sanctum of these associations – unless, of course, it is actually a hoax disseminated to lead us astray. Bracketing but never disregarding this notion, the readership of Coilhouse may discover certain Truths regarding these quasi-mystical clubs from perusing its glossy pages. Even if Enlightenment should, as always, prove ever elusive, the illustrated designs of Edmund DeMoulin and the handiwork of his brothers Ulysses and Erastus, as reproduced in Burlesque Paraphernalia, will still deliver amusing, if sadistic, anthropology.
It’s hard to imagine who the intended audience was for the “Stuffed” Girl’s Heads* from Honor House Products Corp. Certainly, there was and, no doubt, still is a well entrenched consumer base comprised of misogynists who would perhaps guffaw at the site of such an item or nod sagely, in possession of the belief that women are, indeed, nothing more than trophies. Despite this unfortunate reality, I have a hard time believing that anyone would actually buy something like this. No, this strikes me as the perfect gift for the laziest of movie serial killers; the star of some Grunge-era slasher film in which the villain is too stoned and jaded to actually get up off the couch in his parents’s basement to slay a cheerleader.
Regardless, for the low price of $3.35 you get the complete array of hair colors, those being blond, brunette, and redhead, affixed to a genuine mahogany base (notice no quotation marks there, so you know that shit is real.) The downer here, of course, is that the head is only 3/4 scale which may not completely sate your blood lust unless you have a Beetlejuice inspired fetish to go along with the murderous psychopathy. It also has the unfortunate side effect of putting a damper on the “realism” touted so often in the copy. That said, as the article suggests, it would no doubt be a conversation starter, though that conversation may take the form of a hushed exchange with authorities over the phone while the owner is in the other room.
*Also, who decided on the placement of those quotation marks. I mean, “Stuffed”? Shouldn’t they be around “Girl’s Head”? Shouldn’t the implication be that the head in question is not a real goddamn head and not that it isn’t actually stuffed? Maybe I’m over-thinking this.
Gynoids. Pleasure models. Fembots. Bionic women. Borg queens. Stepford wives. Sometimes they’re hot. Sometimes they’re fierce. And yet sometimes, they all start to look the same.
When’s the last time you saw a female robot who didn’t appear to have a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7? Other than Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons. This powerful portrait of London-based plus-size model Bea Sweet by digital artist Benedict Campbell (previously on Coilhouse) confronts that question head-on.
It’s great to see a sexy, strong robotic woman who isn’t rail-thin, to imagine a future where robot designers craft something other than Barbies and Kens, or one in which robots design themselves in a way that discards the expectations of their human forbearers. And yeah, loving this doesn’t mean letting go of a deep adoration for Bjork’s All is Full of Love, or, for that matter, Takashi Itsuki’s bruised bondage robot amputees. There’s room for all those things.
“We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”
“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
“Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”
“It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man – and so the essence of woman – breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex.”
“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
I’ve spent, I think I can say, an inordinate amount of time browsing through the fetishization of the most mundane activities in order to provide you, dear readers, with interesting material. Yes, it was for you that I watched dozens of Japanese YouTube clips of earwax removal, trapped in a horrific, personal grooming K-hole, desperately trying escape only to do so and realize that most, if not all of the people who would be interested in such a thing are already ensconced in a vast, virtual library of such material. Alas, such is the life of an internet spelunker.
We are not here to talk about earwax removal, however, (though, if you want to I have some videos to show you) no, we’re going to briefly discuss Konapun. Konapun is a Japanese cooking toy that allows the you to create realistic, miniature food with the use of chemicals. It’s like molecular gastronomy — a practice in which people who are bored by food and the idea of it as nourishment torture it into funny shapes and forms with needles and eyedroppers — but without the pretense of being edible.
Polish designer Katarzyna Konieczka first made an appearance on Coilhouse this past July, but these newer photos of her medical fashion are too wonderfully twisted not to share. Above is a new image of her previously-featured Elephant Man-inspired ensemble, shot by Maciej Boryna. After the jump, two dreamlike masks, photographed by Marcin Twardowski. Definitely one to watch.
Anouk Wipprecht creates garments that move, breathe, and react to the environment around them. Wipprecht started with a background of fashion, theater and dance, but a growing interest in interaction design and electrical engineering inspired her to develop clothing that appeals as much to the DIY/tech crowd as it does to fans of haute couture. “Instead of the body having to give a purpose to a design” Wipprecht said in a recent interview with Fashioning Tech, she’s interested in developing “design [that] gives a purpose to the body.”
Wipprecht has crafted projects such as Intimacy, a set of garments that become transparent when in proximity of each other, Fragilis, a dress that evokes the heart and veins through lighting and motion, and Daredroid, a cocktail-making robot dress equipped with IR sensors that administers booze through pneumatic control valves. More projects can be found on her site. Here she is discussing Pseudomorphs, her self-painting dresses:
