When my daughter was born in 1983, my mothering was driven by late-70s feminist ideals. I believed that if I dressed her in overalls, cut her hair as short as a boy’s, and gave her trucks instead of Barbies, she’d end up a nuclear physicist. I got my comeuppance right away. Among her first words were, “What’s that?” We had just passed a desultory-looking store window in downtown L.A. She was in her stroller, firmly pointing her pudgy index finger at a sorry-looking Barbie, alone and dusty, sitting atop a tower of toilet paper.

With some girls, the lust for dolls begins well before two. The doll industry considers the sweet spot for girls and dolls to lie between the ages of seven and nine. After that, girls become increasingly uninterested in dolls until, by 13, they would rather be dead than be caught playing with a doll.

For all the hours of happy role-playing dolls offer, they’re slightly creepy things. They pose as charmers, but if you step back a bit, their blinky, blank eyes, stiff limbs and hyper-colored, shiny hair make them closer to monsters. Some people have actual phobias for dolls. No one has a clue if they’re good or bad in guiding the little girls who love them into becoming accomplished women. Dolls are simply a force of nature. (Well, nature combined with capitalism.)

When I was small, I loved my doll with utter passion and sobbed uncontrollably when I accidentally killed it by feeding it hamburger meat. As an adult, I am suspicious of the hold dolls have over little girls. While boys are learning to run the world by manipulating the control module on PlayStation 3, girls are learning to be second best by endlessly brushing their dolls’ hair.

Although I couldn’t keep dolls out of my daughter’s hands, at least I found relief from the dreaded Barbie. It came in the form of the American Girl Doll. Now a subsidiary of Mattel, the American Girl Doll Company began in 1986 as the Pleasant Company, named after its founder, Pleasant Rowland. A former schoolteacher, she thought up the idea of books that came with “historical” dolls. The dolls were nine instead of Barbie’s 19, and were wholesome little girls from different historical periods, described in individual stories, instead of trashy little sluts from the 50s. They were pitched to doll-loving girls who liked to read and the parents who wanted them to be reading. The number of doll characters has grown exponentially since my daughter was a little girl — from four to around 16. Thirteen million dolls have been sold since 1986. These aren’t Barbie’s obscene numbers, by any means, but keep in mind that American Girl Dolls sell for about a hundred bucks a pop. Last year’s sales amounted to a hefty $441 million.

While strolling down Fifth Avenue last week, I dropped in to visit one of the three retail stores in the country dedicated to the American Girl Doll, called the American Girl Place. The dolls with their infinite array of stuff are there, although most of the company’s business is conducted through catalog or online shopping. But the store offers something different: The complete doll experience.

While riding the escalator, I stared at a gigantic ad above my head: “Meet Seventies Girl Julie Albright, our new historical character”! Sigh. My youth has turned into someone else’s history. The store was packed with eager little girls and their mothers and grandmothers, and their dazed fathers and bored little brothers. It was a virtual spa for dolls, and the human beings were oddly almost extraneous. I would have been killed on the spot, however, were I to have yelled, “Hey, everybody, these things are nothing but plastic!”

There’s a hair salon, with eight little chairs lined up on top of a counter and a bevy of young women who hover over the dolls, styling and cutting their hair while the girls warily watch (hair styling choices cost ten, fifteen or twenty dollars); a doll hospital (just in case your doll needs a new head); a doll restaurant, where little girls take their dolls to lunch (they get a special little chair) with their families in tow. When I peeked in, the place was full. The pris fixe price for lunch is $23 per person. There’s also live theater, with three or four shows a day.

Although by any reckoning I ought to have despised what I saw in this store — especially the stunningly excessive consumerism in all its full glory, I didn’t. Instead, I walked out of the store convinced that the genome project won’t be complete until scientists discover the one small gene, possessed only by females, that I’d just identified for them:

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