A beautiful doll

Taylor Russell has no desire to grow up.

The 26-year-old from Cleveland has a job in Bloomington that covers the rent of her one-bedroom apartment, and she can eat food from Denny’s — her favorite restaurant — ’til her heart’s content. Having kids is an abstract concept and having a partner to share her life with is likely too large a responsibility.

Play is her reality.

To overcome a stifling unrequited love situation and her hippie personality, she dyed her naturally red tresses orange and adopted a love of performance art and rough sex. She recently dropped from 386 to 220 pounds by following the Atkins Diet. The reinvented Taylor calls herself Tayng.

Tayng has spent most of her life collecting childhood and adult dolls. From childhood, there is an assortment of mangled, Mohawked blond Barbies.

Then there are Clarissa and Belladonna, which Tayng calls “extensions of herself.”
The Barbies got destroyed by virtue of being too boring.  Clarissa and Belladonna were dolls she didn’t destroy.

Clarissa was an anonymous Christmas present to Tayng at age 1.

“My mom told me Clarissa was a princess,” Tayng says. “She had fair skin and light eyes like mine. I always looked up to her like any girl would a princess.”

Clarissa is a foot-and-a-half tall. She wears brown Amish petticoats with a matching bonnet and Mary Jane shoes. Her face is ghostly porcelain. The only color in her face is a pair of vacant blue eyes and pink lips painted geisha.

Conversely, Belladonna, a 5-foot tall inflatable sex doll, is modeled after Tayng’s favorite porn star of the same name. Her look is decidedly modern, with a black- and gold-sequined tube top cinching the waist of an angular-cut, red lace dress resembling salsa dancer attire. She has tattoos matching the real Belladonna’s: a flying heart on the left breast and a green-and-black insignia on her left wrist.

Her puckered lips are painted to invite sex.

The real Belladonna stands at 5-feet-4-inches, weighs 127 pounds and is nearly two years older than Tayng.

Tayng can control Belladonna the doll. Belladonna listens to dirty talk. She’s always patient. Tayng never has to wear makeup around her so-called “rubber girlfriend.” Sometimes she watches TV with the doll, embracing her tightly. All Tayng has to do is play.

She projects her admiration of the porn star onto Belladonna the doll.

Tayng clicks her DVD remote and sits down on her sofa with Belladonna. They don’t get physical. She looks over at her doll, whose almond-shaped, hologram eyes are staring toward the ceiling, awkwardly positioned on the cushion next to her. Tayng removes the tension by grabbing her with a free hand and wrapping her arms around Belladonna’s waist. Tayng smiles.

A PERFECT WOMAN

Tayng, like any complex being, copes with dualities — the difference between Clarissa and Belladonna, a life of real versus play, of Taylor becoming Tayng. Chris, a nearly perfect woman, is the missing link who reconciles these dualities.

Chris was Tayng’s mother. To Tayng, she was nearly perfect. She made giant sugar cookies and sometimes told Tayng and her four-years-younger sister, Hannah, that if they ever misbehaved, the police would come take them away. Chris wished for the good health of all around her, while Tayng dreamed of picking strawberries and magic carpet rides.

There are pictures of Tayng’s mother on the back of her apartment door, wearing large round sunglasses, barefoot on the beach and laughing. She was tall and had a sarcastic sense of humor. She grew daffodils in her garden.

Chris died when Tayng was 14. A May 12, 2008, blog titled “Mother’s day bullshit” elaborates:

“She never was able to get out of bed after that night. I remember them telling me it was going to kill her. I didn’t care. I was just a kid, kids aren’t supposed to worry about things like that. She died VERY slowly. She hated her chemo. She was always sick. She slept with that grey bucket by the bed. She turned into a skeleton. Her skin turned grey and yellow. Her hair fell out completely. Her eyes sunk into her head. She couldn’t seem to think or talk or move. My mother died well before she actually passed away.”

Tayng helped raise her sister when their mother died. She was insecure about her own body. She grappled with God, learning to drive and high school cliques. As the glue of their once-perfect nuclear family began to fall apart, Tayng retreated to her dolls.

“The dolls were definitely her friends,” Tayng’s best friend, Kid Gabriel Crimson, says. “In a way, they were memories of her mother.”

Dr. Nancy Stockton, director of IU’s Counseling and Psychological Services, doesn’t know Tayng but says her reaction to her mother’s death was not uncommon.

“If an adolescent loses a parent, especially at a time where the relationship may have been difficult, some people cope by playing,” she says.

Doll destruction can be used as one coping mechanism. Dolls are easy to project ideas and emotions onto.

“We as humans tend to relate to objects,” Stockton says. “When we imbue them with certain qualities, they allow us to test out our ideas about the world. Children, especially, have many opportunities to invest objects with things that help us see the world.”

There are no formal studies on sex dolls, nor any linking them to the psychology of individuals using them, because they are still widely deemed a novelty.

The blond, boring Barbies were novelties to Tayng. In fact, the only one she kept around was a special edition Native American Barbie in a glass case.

Clarissa was a princess, and once, so was Tayng. Was this harder for her to believe when her mother died? Who else could make her feel like a princess quite like her mother?

AN IMPERFECT WOMAN

Belladonna is a porn star that Tayng believes defies norms.

“Contrary to what people tend to think about porn stars, she’s actually in control during her sex scenes,” she explains.

The difference between real and rubber love is the element of control, Tayng says. She couldn’t control the death of her mother, her father’s response in the aftermath or her first boyfriend from breaking her heart.

Tayng’s explanation for why she owns Belladonna is simple: “Females are better in bed,” she claims, although she’s never actually been with a woman.

However, Kid senses a real emotional connection from Tayng to the doll.

“In a way, she doesn’t have to (be with a woman) because she has Belladonna,” Kid says.

Tayng has used Belladonna for sex play with male partners.

Perhaps to understand Tayng’s progression from Clarissa to Belladonna, one would need to understand her love life.

Tayng’s first real boyfriend of several months, Stu, just broke up with her the week before Valentine’s Day. He now moves in what Tayng calls “lesbian time,” having moved in with a new girlfriend only days after knowing her. Tayng’s vanity has been bruised. These days, she applies sheer Victoria’s Secret lip gloss so often it comes off like a nervous twitch.

What Tayng wanted most through all of this was her mother’s advice, her support.  
“I know if she were still around, I wouldn’t get wrapped up in these situations,” she says.

She tears up on a Saturday morning in a Denny’s booth and picks at her glittering nail polish that is the color of nude ballet slippers.

“I’ve been so naive. I know she wouldn’t let me get into the stuff I’ve gotten into,” she says. “But you live and learn. I’ve got no regrets.”

A DOLL’S HOUSE

Tayng’s apartment is filled with the dualities that drive her.

There is a photograph of her at 5 years old on Santa’s lap in the prim and proper dress her mother forced her to wear. Tayng’s face is twisted up in the mischievous grin she inherited from her mother, as if to say, “I can’t wait to play in the mud.”

In her kitchen, shelves of clown figurines plastered in pop art designs and smeared paint are juxtaposed with crucifixes from days long gone as a young church girl. Do you remember when your parents forced you to go to every mass or every funeral?

Did you ever escape it?

Play.

Tayng’s memories of her mother are also all over her apartment — in the pictures taped to her back door, in a family portrait behind her entertainment center, in a scrapbook with snapshots of her in ballet costumes, in Clarissa’s face.

After putting on a soundtrack called “Pure Moods,” she sits cross-legged by the marble-top coffee table in her living room. Vaguely Middle Eastern and Celtic rhythms fill the room. Tayng, dressed in a floor-length black gypsy skirt and pink blouse, sways to and fro and gets comfortable, placing her laptop on the edge of the coffee table. Her icy-warm hazel eyes, underlined by a streak of mint-green glitter, survey the space. 

There is a knock on the door. Tayng lights four of six 75-cent, vanilla-scented Glade candles. Clarissa sits on the table, her pale, empty eyes reflecting the glow of the flickering candlelight. Tayng brushes strands of orange bangs behind her ears and greets her friends, Rachel and Larry, with a wan half-smile.

They enter, bringing raucous cheer to the otherwise somber setting. Tayng is handed a pack of Camel Wide Lights. Her friends plop down on the sunken sofa across from Tayng. The two begin to chat about “Barbie tampons” and Tenacious D.

Tayng occasionally chimes in. Her laughter is half-hearted. Tayng occasionally glances at Clarissa, who seems to be observing her every move. Discomfort causes her to shift around again. Another friend, Melissa, enters the apartment and begins crocheting a square inch of black patchwork quilt.

Tayng lights a cigarette, takes a puff. Her friends appear unaware of her anti-social behavior. Maybe they are respecting her space. She needs a moment before she can fully participate in the conversation. She twiddles the cigarette between her fingers before tapping the ashes in a white skull tray.

Tayng fixes her gaze on a picture of her mother on the computer screen, as if to block out Clarissa the princess, her chatty friends, the world.

Her mother is wearing a blue V-neck T-shirt, tilting her head coyly and flashing that mischievous grin of hers. It’s a candid portrait of a woman who once told her daughter that she, too, could be a princess.

Tayng smiles, puts out her cigarette and joins in the conversation.