Because we as humans are not stackable on shelves in small square piles, it was necessary to create mannequins. That is essentially the history. I could mention old kings using wooden torsos to avoid the hassle of fittings, or the early fashion dolls of the 1700s advertising clothes, or the industrial revolution and the creation of display windows, but you’re not here for that. You want to know about the genitals. Patience dear reader, we will all learn about the genitals in no time.

For something without a soul, mannequins come in many shapes and colors. They can be wooden, plastic, steel, fiberglass, wax, and plaster. None are grown in fields. Some are premade in certain humanlike positions, while others are flexible, and made to undergo dirty positioning by drunken afterhours retail clerks.

As an advertising tool, they are remarkably effective. Clothes displayed on mannequins are often the highest sellers, wherein the facial expressions, the pose, and even the tableau in which they are displayed, have a part in swaying the customer. Who’s the dummy now?

Mannequins however require certain parameters. One mannequin by himself is acceptable, but several mannequins are somehow creepy, and when they are missing parts, and there are piles of arms and legs – that is frightening. If the mannequins are being fed on a conveyor belt into a pool of lava, and there is an old man with glass eyes laughing, and the mannequins are looking at you, crying, desperately imploring you to help, but you are strapped down to an oversized dartboard, and your legs have been replaced with springs, and if it is February, especially if it is February, then that is the scariest thing of all. I certainly wouldn’t shop at that store.

What is the future of mannequins? We can soon expect them to be electronic and have robotic gestures. They will turn to look at their watch, point to a distant mountain, and attempt to remove their emotion chip. The customers will watch them, fascinated, and completely forget to buy any clothing, which was their point in the first place.

As technology advances, supermodels will be threatened by robotic mannequins taking their place on runways. It is not that I doubt the supermodels’ ability to stay as thin as their plastic counterparts, it is that mannequins will be better able to make that turn at the end of the runway, what with their spinning heads and torsos. The question is: should we program them to hate their bodies?

Now that I’ve answered every question on mannequins, we may talk about the genitals. Most mannequins have no genitals whatsoever. In the case of females, they are usually flat; in the case of males, there is occasionally a mound of plastic meant to suggest a bulge. It is that power of suggestion which keeps mannequins at the top of the doll hierarchy, followed by crash test dummies, sex dolls, and scarecrows, all of which have fully functioning genitals