Shocker: 'Human Barbie Doll' Has Bad Ideas on Feminism, 'Race-Mixing'

If you’ve somehow missed the media hubbub over Valeria Lukyanova, she’s a 28-year-old Ukrainian woman who’s used plastic surgery and heavy makeup to transform herself into an, um, intense plastic doll-person. A new GQ profile reveals deeper insights into Lukyanova’s personality and politics—Lukyanova hates feminism! Lukyanova drinks glasses full of chutney instead of food!—and some of the results aren’t so pretty.

It’s a fascinating and somewhat humanizing piece, actually, and the whole thing is worth a read. But here are some highlights.

On eyeballs:

“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. The Internet rumor mill claims she has had her eyelids trimmed to achieve this look, which seems unlikely and sounds nightmarish.

On beauty standards:

“But that’s a relatively new thing,” I reply. “The ideal of beauty used to be different.”

“That’s because of the race-mixing.”

“For example, a Russian marries an Armenian,” Valeria elaborates helpfully. “They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad’s nose. She goes and files it down a little, and it’s all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there’s degeneration, and it didn’t used to be like that. Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this.

On marriage:

“It’s unacceptable to me,” says Valeria. “The very idea of having children brings out this deep revulsion in me.”

…”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.“

On feminism:

“I’m against feminism.”

I actually think it’s impressive that Lukyanova found an aesthetic she likes and she’s sticking to it—the lady COMMITS, you have to give her that—even if, unfortunately, that aesthetic was shaped by a rigidly patriarchal and racist culture. Her rejection of women’s traditional domestic obligations is downright progressive (if it could somehow be decoupled from her uninformed dismissal of feminism and scorn for other women’s choices); and her refusal to conform to a more “normal” beauty ideal, in the face of international scorn, makes you think she could have been a body-positive Tumblr icon in a different universe.

But, wishful thinking, I guess. In this universe what we’ve got is Racist Barbie with chutney breath.