Adolescence is trademarked as a time of self-discovery and becoming one’s own person. Experimentation is not only allowed but expected in this time of rapid growth and knowledge. A.M. Homes illustrates this through her short story “A Real Doll”. The narrator is a young teenager who has a lot of internal questions about his sexuality and how that ties into his interactions with people, especially pretty girls like Barbie. He often goes through inner turmoil when attempting to find the best way to please her or to just be comfortable in his own skin. He resorts to who he feels he should be in order to project a more sophisticated aura and gets to this conclusion through drugging Barbie and viciously overcompensating. “A Real Doll” by A.M. Homes explores the topics of teenage insecurity, social anxiety, and the questioning of one’s sexual orientation.

The unnamed narrator of “A Real Doll” is as typical a teenager as any other. He is interested in girls in a transitional time of his life. This also becomes the source of a lot of his anguish and insecurity. His impending insecurity is often surrounded by genital growth and puberty. He feels he might not be enough man for Barbie when they meet and begin to spend time together. So, the way he copes with his changing body is to turn to medicating both himself and Barbie with Valium. It causes her to release her inhibitions while it helps the narrator become bolder. He is more confident so that he can take control of Barbie and she will allow him to do whatever he wants to her. Once this initial barrier is taken down, the narrator begins to feel more comfortable spending more time and being more explicit with not only Barbie, but later Ken as well.

The narrator’s past and developmental stages also play a part in the narrator’s anxiety. His anxiety ties into the insecurity he feels about his body and his ability to please Barbie. The narrator is obviously not a boy who is comfortable conversing with others, much less girls he is attracted to. Wyndol Furman and Duane Buhrmester argue:

Importantly, the development of new skills in the key relationship of a specific developmental stage is assumed to depend on the mastery and intercoordination of the competencies learned in the key relationships of previous stages. As a consequence, individuals who have failed to successfully establish the key relationship of a specific developmental stage may also lack the competencies necessary to successfully establish relationships of subsequent stages. By the same token, such failure may foster negative emotions such as a low self-worth and promote the development of maladaptive behavior (Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 79)

It is probable that the narrator had never effectively cultivated friendships and social skills when he was younger. This plays a part in how he feels around Barbie and how he uses drugs as an outlet for this. His anxiety leads to him making choices solely around impressing the girl he is interested in. This is not incredibly uncommon for the narrator’s age group. Teenagers are often looking for the validation they fail to receive in their same-sex peer group from the opposite sex. The narrator appears to not only want to be good enough for Barbie, but to be monumentally better than Ken. His dislike for Ken is one of his few sources of confidence. The narrator’s argument is “at least I am a real man”. This may contradict his genital insecurity, but comparing himself to a doll makes him feel more worthy and inflates his confidence when having sex with Barbie.

However, there are questions of the narrator’s sexual orientation. This hits its climax when he goes to visit Barbie and discovers that Barbie’s head was on Ken’s body and vice versa. Given the situation, the narrator still uses this time for sexual pleasure. He proceeds to complete the task in Ken’s body. This begs the question: Is the narrator gay? He surely used a replica of a male body for his own benefit and must have been attracted to Ken to some extent. This is a question that a lot of teenagers ask themselves. Much of this has to deal with how they will be perceived by their peers and society. Adolescence brings a time of figuring out who one is. He has to evaluate why he chose to act this way towards Ken and ask himself what this means to him. At the end of it all, he is still dealing with dolls and not living, breathing humans. But this allusion brings about a lot of commentary and the fact that he still is not sure about who he is. 

“A Real Doll” shows the transformation a boy goes through into becoming a more sentient being and being more conscious about himself and his actions. His behavior is not so uncommon. He is going through a vastly transitional time in his life in which he does not know what his interests are yet. His feelings surrounding his anxiety are valid if looked from the perspective of a flustered teenage boy in front of a pretty girl. That may be hard to understand at first from the perspective of anyone else.
