I so need to get this off my chest.

Have you seen the new face of female empowerment? Please welcome the newest pop music sensation, The Pussycat Dolls [0] :

[via CNN.com - Getting to know the Pussycat Dolls - Dec 6, 2005 [1]]:

"It's a fun, affirmative, female-empowerment tour-de-force of musical styles that embraces pop music and urban music," says A&M Records President Ron Fair, who helped produce the album.

[...]

"We like to say that there's a Pussycat Doll inside every girl," says group member Ashley Roberts. "I think we're just out there inspiring all these young girls, older girls, grandmas, to find that confidence and that Pussycat Doll within them."

And their message? "Just to live life to the fullest," she says.

As for the Dolls themselves, they seem to have stepped out of an adolescent boy's fantasy. They are a collection of women leaving nothing to chance looks-wise -- virtually every race and hair color is represented.

There's sultry Scherzinger, who is of Hawaiian-Russian-Filipino descent; Roberts, a blonde who has appeared in commercials and a Counting Crows video; and Wyatt, a tomboy trained by the Joffrey Ballet.

There's also Carmit Bachar, a redhead who placed fifth in the Olympic rhythmic gymnastics trials in 1992; Melody Thornton, a former backup singer who is of Mexican and African-American descent; and Jessica Sutta, a brunette who was once a Miami Heat dancer.

"We all fit like pieces of a puzzle," says Thornton. "Everybody's input and their journeys and where they've been help put that puzzle together."

As many of you already know, girl likes the gossip blogs ... a lot. There is nothing like reading The Corsair [2], Go Fug Yourself [3] or Perez Hilton [4] to keep up with the compost of American culture. With these "Pussycat Dolls" though, the words just fail me.

So let's take them for a spin, shall we?

Pussycat : By itself it becomes almost an infringement on copyright and trademark laws. I honestly thought this was the 'live' version of Josie and The Pussycats [5]; but no, PCD (as their marketers like to label them --which, btw, sounds like some illegal drug) is a stripper show burlesque show gone pop.

Riiiiight.

But, if you separate the word into it's components, the images they conjure are less "pop cultish" :

Pussy : Need I say more?
Cat : The "adult" version of the previous diminutive adds to the "ooh-so-taboo" virgin-whore complex.

And then we have the word, Dolls.

Oh Dear.

Have you ever heard of the Real Dolls [6] company? They are more than a seriously fringe use of engineering and design. They've become an cultural phenomenon all to themselves.

Say hi to Britney [7].

The Japanese know their porn, and the Real Dolls have had an online shrine a museum dedicated to them in Japan since 1998. In the US, and in keeping with the new tradition of using sex to sell art, Still Lovers [8] is what the dilletantes call them. There is even a RealDoll Doctor (more like a Dr. Frankenstein) who happens to own an RD (as iDollators like to call them), that looks like PussyCat #2 from the left [9] in the above photograph.

And that is the whole point of this post.

There is something creepy about these women ... regardless of whether they are women at all [10]. There are enough trangender women and men in New York City that it's easy to look at them and go, "Check!" and move on. But most trangender women I know do not look like the Pussycat Dolls. They look like ... well ... transgender women.

The Pussycat Dolls are not women, their transhuman women.

[via Transhuman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [11]]:

The etymology of the term "transhuman" goes back to futurist philosopher FM-2030, formerly known as F. M. Esfandiary, who, while teaching new concepts of the human at New School University in 1966, introduced it as shorthand for "transitional human." Calling transhumans the "earliest manifestation of new evolutionary beings," FM argued that signs of transhumanity included protheses, plastic surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values.

Or in their case, should I call them transhuman sexual commodities? The lips, the breasts, the heavily done faces, the oh-so-perfect noses, the shiny skins, the 'sculpted' bodies. They don't just look like they're Cinderella wannabes that came out of The Swan [12]. They look like the dolls sculpted by the Abyss Production team.

Take a look at (and the links will lead you to totally NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR MINORS images of these dolls) : Stacey [13], Britney [14], Jenny [15] and of course, the most pertinent example of them all,

Kaori [16]

That they are selling these women as symbols of empowerment is just mindblowing to me. They are a collection of women leaving nothing to chance looks-wise -- virtually every race and hair color is represented, says the CNN article. Same as the RealDolls.

Stepped out of a teenage boys fantasies. Wow. Those kids must be consuming tons of porn then. Then again, some have been making their own for a while now [17]. But the fact they call these women 'teenagers fantasies' ... I don't know. It freaks me out having two boys and knowing how they already look at girls even though they are in that stage of "icky icky pooh but I love you" girls.

It's a bit disturbing the surgically enhanced and hyper-photoshopped world of porn is all people have as cultural references to sex. Look at all the celebrities of --from the A to the Z list-- have fallen prey to "the swan" song. You know you go to Awful Plastic Surgery [18] to check out who is the latest freak (that would be as of today, Jessica Simpson and her lips).

Empowerment of women, as sold by the Pussycat Dolls, though, is about being unfettered sexual commodities withouth the "political baggage" or "psychological hangups" that feminism or puritanism brought to the bedroom. They are the willing prey for the caveman, no club needed :

[via Salon.com Life | Just like a woman [19]]:

Griggs is somewhat of a loner in the online doll world, an infrequent visitor to "Hello Dolly," a labyrinthine cyber haven for sex-doll enthusiasts with nearly 12,000 members and thousands of photographs and message strands. (Out of respect for members' privacy I have changed the name of the site.) Hello Dolly is a place where all my worst fears about men churned in an awful froth. Here were thousands of men who love the idea of peeling a woman's face off and replacing it with another, who revel in taking pornographic photographs of their "girlfriends" and sharing them with their friends, men who glory in sex unfettered by the daily push-pull of a relationship, men who might have little respect for the word "no." On a good day, as a female reporter lurking on the sidelines, I felt like the lone skirt at a Ducati convention, stunned in a testoster-zone. Visiting Hello Dolly on a regular basis over the course of about four months was like dropping in on an eternal gangbang.

The Pussycat Dolls.
The face of the eternal gangbang.
Hidden inside every lady.
Or dude [19].