Human Barbie (and Ken)...insane and heartbreaking

Note: I'm tired & cranky today, but have done enough whining via IM about the ridiculousness that currently is the Nebraska Legislature (to clarify - some of the senators in the NE Leg., not including my boss, who has the patience and fortitude of a saint!), so below is a post I wrote up yesterday...the alternative was writing a 2000 word rant complaining further about the sh*t going on down here. If for some inexplicable reason you want to stream it live and watch this crazy circus yourself, click here.

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Human Ken and Barbie

I saw an article on Foxnews about "Human Barbie" and followed it to the longer GQ interview of Ukrainian Valeria Lukyanova, who now goes by Amatue (a name she claims appeared to her in a dream). Apparently she's been a "thing" for a while, but I've managed to be unaware of her existence up till now. Dubbed the "Human Barbie," the pictures of Valeria look like they have to be due to photoshop-run-amuck, but sadly it is not so. According to the Daily Mail article, she has an 18" waist...pause for a second and picture that...her measurements 34-18-34!  That is ungodly thin and supposedly a combination of good genes (she has her mother's waist, she says), exercise and a liquid diet...she claims the only surgery she's had are breast implants and the rest is makeup and diet (or, lack thereof). 

Side note: Valeria has a male American counterpart, "Human Ken" Justin Jedlica, shown with her in the picture to the right. His physical alterations are no less heartbreaking...he "celebrated" his 100th surgery last year.  The UK's Daily Mail posted an article about the two of them meeting, which apparently didn't go well...Ken and Barbie aren't soul mates, it seems.

I'm not someone who follows the tabloids and normally when I see things like this I shrug or roll my eyes and move on. I'm not sure why, but I didn't for this one. It could be the general lack or loss of humanity that Valeria is personifying, or just shock at this extreme example of a person embracing society's "ideal woman."  Or the thought of living on a vegetarian, all liquid diet is so utterly unimaginable that I had to know more. I don't know. But what I do know is that what Valeria and Justin have done to themselves is so sad, if for no other reason than they did not understand how beautiful they were without surgeries and implants and felt like they needed to change themselves. I included "before" pictures at the end...they were very good looking people before deciding to look like "perfect" plastic mannequins. 

Reading up about Valeria is mind boggling. If you are remotely interested in her/this story, I would suggest reading the GQ interview written by Michael Idov (editor-in-chief of GQ Russia).  It's not short, so I've pulled out some...I can't call them gems, but particularly interesting portions of the interview, to save you a little time. 

Not so long ago, images of a young girl washed over the Internet. She was impossibly blonde and impossibly shaped, and surely it was all a masterly work of Photoshop. Right? Michael Idov travels to meet with Eastern Bloc Barbie herself and discovers that her world is far more bizarre and twisted than anything in the photos.

Per Barbie's instructions, I enter Kamasutra, a brightly lit Ukrainian version of an Indian restaurant. Imagine a blind date, with all the attendant "Does she look like her picture?" jitters, multiplied by the queasy fear that she does look like her picture. If you saw the pictures I saw, you would understand. You would know that meeting Valeria Lukyanova is the closest you will come to an alien encounter.

Her improbable looks—the Margaret Keane peepers, the head quizzically cocked like a sunflower too heavy for its stem, the plasticky skin and wasp waist—reached the West when her self-shot home videos began drawing gawkers to YouTube. The Western media were quick to dub her the "Human Barbie," but Valeria was hardly the first Homo sapiens to willingly make herself look like a doll—she wasn't even the first to earn the moniker: Some tabloid-damaged Brit laid claim to it a few years back. Still, where others had dabbled, she went for broke. However odd her own view of perfection, she appeared to have achieved it.

Well, Valeria exists, all right. She is seated in the back of the restaurant in her classic pose, preternaturally upright, head cocked...Her brand-new hair extensions, the color of Chardonnay, hang straight down, reaching her nonexistent hips. Her mouth is frozen in a vacant half-smile; the teeth are small and almost translucent....A one-eyed smiling-skull pin perches on her sky blue top, pushed to the side by the veritable shelf of silicone around which her whole body seems arranged. In the flesh—the little of it that she hasn't whittled away with what she says is exercise and diet—Valeria looks almost exactly like Barbie. There might be some Loretta Lux-style postproduction to her photos, sure, but it's not crucial. This is live. This is happening.

"Hello," she says in Russian, remaining perfectly still. Her mouth, like in a cheap cartoon, is the only part of her that moves. The eyes, the staring eyes, are the scariest. Part of what I'm seeing is an optical effect brought about by makeup (there is essentially an eye drawn around each eye), but even after I make the mental correction for it, Valeria's eyes remain chillingly large...Evolution has taught us to think of big eyes as beautiful—it's a so-called neotenous feature, implying youth—but tweak that delicate scale just a little and you've got a wraith, or an insect. A living Barbie is automatically an Uncanny Valley Girl. Her beauty, though I hesitate to use the term, is pitched at the exact precipice where the male gaze curdles in on itself. Her features are the features we men playfully ascribe to ideal women; it's how we draw them in manga and comics and video games. Except we don't expect them to comply with this oppressive fantasy so fully. As a result, she almost throws our idea of a supervixen back in our face.

We walk through the mall, maneuvering around clusters of children out with their parents. I begin to wonder whether a nuclear family—the ostensible endgame of the Odessa bride—is in the cards for Valeria and Olga. I carefully broach the subject.

"Oh God, no!" both women exclaim in unison. "It's unacceptable to me," says Valeria. "The very idea of having children brings out this deep revulsion in me."

"It's so boring, I'd rather die," chimes in Olga.

The topic has clearly shaken something loose in Valeria. In her view, expressed in a staccato rant, parenting is the pinnacle of selfishness. "Most people have children to fulfill their own ambitions, not to give anything," she says. "They don't think about what they can give this child, what they can teach her. They just try to shape her according to some weird script—whatever they couldn't do in life, like becoming a writer or a doctor. Or some woman who's almost 30 and thinks no one needs her, she says, 'Oh, I'll have a kid. He will love me and become my reason to live.' And then this kid becomes a soccer ball she and her boyfriend will kick back and forth.

"I'd rather die from torture," she concludes, "because the worst thing in the world is to have a family lifestyle."

You know, I can't help saying, that last part sounds almost feminist.

"I'm against feminism," Valeria says proudly. "But what would you keep the children for? So they can get you a glass of water when you're on your deathbed?"

From the Daily Mail article:

(Valeria) admitted in 2013 that she believes she is from another planet - possibly Venus, but she isn't quite sure - but is adamant she isn't human. 
 

'I come from a place where only love and joy exist,' she told Vice. 'But I noticed the media is only interested in negativity: show someone in a bad light, show someone's mistakes.

 

'Perhaps at some point I was an energy vampire, because I constantly received their negative reactions and enjoyed it. Specifically for them I created posts that would make them angry.’

More recently, Ms Lukyanova described how she practices Breatharianism - a pseudo-science in which people think that they can derive energy from the sun, rather than food. Former Breatharian practitioners have suffered from starvation, dehydration, and even death.

And a final contribution from The Daily Beast:

What made you want to become a spiritual teacher?
My out-of-body experiences began when I was a little girl: I could travel outside of my body to other planets and universes. Back then it happened spontaneously and now I can control my trips and travel only when I feel like it. For the last four years, I have been teaching seminars on meditation and out-of-body travel.

How popular are you as a spiritual leader? And what do you teach at your seminars?
Many people are interested in that topic nowadays; people do not even realize that aliens visit them—they need to be explained certain things. I know only a few professionals of my level who have the skills to communicate with visitors from other civilizations. My experience is very wide. I can travel around the entire world, to the past and to the future. I also share my ideas on dieting with people. If you want to live a long life and stay beautiful, eat vegetables and herbs, eat very small portions—you will have more energy, feel more pure emotions, and that will make you a more creative person.

So you communicate with aliens?
All the time. My communication with aliens is not verbal—we speak the language of light. I have learned a lot from my contact with them. Now I know that my spirit is very old. And also that humans are the least sophisticated civilization—we’re on the lowest level of evolution. Aliens helped me understand everything about the creation of our world. It turns out that the truth has nothing to do with how religions interpret it.

So basically it just goes from bad to worse. All I can do is feel so sorry for Valeria and this insane space alien existence she has constructed for herself. I can only imagine that she's done it subconsciously to survive how inhuman she has become over the years...and she's still do young! She's my age...only 28 years old. 

I know it's a choice. She's doing this to herself. But it's no less awful. 

I just...(sigh). 


~ Katie

Justin Jedlika (before)

Valeria Lukyanova (before)