Embed Notice

https://spectator.com/article/meet-the-jellycat-kidults/

One of the world’s most successful modern toy companies, ‘Build-A-Bear’, allows paying customers to design and make their own teddies. Adult ‘Build-A-Bear’ enthusiasts are a rapidly growing part of their market, but what are the adults doing with their bears, I wondered. Are the bears on the bed? Out and proud in the front room? Online, I found a group of adult Build-A-Bear fans discussing how they’d begin to cope if they couldn’t take their bears to work. The general consensus was that nobody could be expected to ‘regulate their emotions’ without a soft toy. ‘I take my Build-A-Bear Ninja Turtles in with me,’ said a 23-year-old shop assistant. ‘It helps me deal with my anger issues.’ Think of Sebastian Flyte as the patron saint of the 21st century.

How are any of these overgrown toddlers going to grow up enough to have children of their own – to be the comforters not the comforted? The answer increasingly is that they’re not. Men over 65 are now more likely to get married than those under 25, and I only wish that was because the under-25s are having too wild a time to settle down. Where Boomers once had orgies, the kids now have ‘cuddle parties’, where you can go just to be held, in a safe space, by strangers. Held. Seen. What happened to these people?

https://archive.ph/fyY9E