CW: Violence
Critic Te Ārohi gave a (fake) baby to a five man Castle Street flat to take care of from Thursday to Sunday. There were only three rules:
- Don’t lose the baby.
- You must bring the baby with you everywhere.
- You must keep a diary of your adventures with the baby.
We didn’t tell them about our secret social experiment. Would they take care of the toy as if it’s a real baby like the couples on Love Island or would they tear it to pieces? Critic will let you decide if they were good fathers or not.
George*, Montgomery*, Rogan*, Flynn* and Miller* have decided to keep the baby, by the way. Critic asked for it back and they said no, so basically we lost 20 dollars and they gained a child.
THURSDAY
Critic handed George the baby in his 3pm lecture. It was born in The Warehouse from an assorted collection, and just so happened to be ‘baby has a bath’ so wore a smart little bathrobe. George immediately told Critic to put it away as he was “self conscious about being a dad,” so adoption was postponed until we’d reached his flat. He hadn’t brought a backpack and was too ashamed to carry the baby through campus.
4:02pm:
The baby had officially been adopted. The boys helpfully timestamped all entries in their baby diary, so Critic knows that exactly two minutes after adoption the child was drop-kicked down Castle Street. Four minutes after that it was placed in the airfryer to “await its untimely death.” The boys do not seem to take kindly to suddenly having a child to care for, but they assure Critic this is “all part of the hazing process” here at their flat. “None of us had ever been parents before,” flatmate Montgomery tells Critic in the follow-up interview. They didn’t really know what to do with it. “I just thought he was ugly.” Rude. Valid, but rude.
5:10pm:
The boys turned the baby’s toy bottle into a bong. However, they promise it wasn’t until later that the child actually had its first cone (they are so responsible). At this point they’ve named their precious child ‘Fuckwit’.
6:03pm:
The baby goes missing for the first of many times over the next days. It’s later found in an empty ice cream tub filled with water in the freezer. Later, the baby is burnt after being set on fire, and for the remainder of the weekend it has a large black spot on its forehead. The boys tell Critic that trying to kill the baby was a “collective effort” between the dads. Critic does not endorse infant murder of any kind.
FRIDAY
9:30am:
The baby has its first coffee and then hits the gym: “Big chest day, get them gains.” After a lunch of chicken tenders, the baby has an afternoon bong and then travels to Mt Cargill “screaming at the top of its lungs.”
8:00pm:
The only entry is: “Baby fucks it up.” Critic is unsure what this refers to and would rather not ask. We wandered over later that night to have a durry with the baby. It’s not looking great, but all body parts are intact and it still has its bathrobe, so that’s a win.
That night, Montgomery hides his speaker under George’s bed and plays crying noises for an hour. They’re starting to treat the toy as a real child, just like Love Island, where the fake baby inevitably drives the couples crazy.
The boys tell Critic how many times the baby went missing today. George (who was the primary father figure) would constantly be looking for and relocating it – across the fence, up the top of a tree, in the freezer and so on. At this point, the other flatmates are still mostly disinterested in baby Fuckwit. Rogan speculates his role in the whole thing was an unhappy grandad, while Montgomery was a godfather – has to be around but doesn’t actually do anything.
10pm:
Flynn has bonded with the baby. That night “flatmates play with the baby and enjoy it,” but the other boys hastily corrected Critic that only Flynn enjoyed playing with the baby and they still thought it was weird. After inquiring why, the boys respond: “Baby has no chat.” He doesn’t do anything around the house. Fuckwit’s a freeloader.
SATURDAY
Saturday is Baseline: the day the boys really became fathers. They tell Critic how they finally thought it was cute. Critic infers this is because girls absolutely loved the baby at the festival, so the boys grew towards liking Fuckwit as well. Love is too strong a word to describe their father-son relationship at this point.
Lots of people wanted photos with the baby as well, which made the boys very popular. George put it in the top pocket of his checkered button down shirt (the unofficial uniform of breathas at festivals) to keep him safe.
The diary says at Baseline “baby funnels” and “baby bumps.” In the interview, the boys express dismay that they hadn’t thought of taking a shot out of Fuckwit’s head, which they’d discovered on Friday was removable. “Everyone decapitated the baby,” they tell Critic proudly. That day George did a couple bumps of gear off the baby’s head in the portaloos, which Critic thought was quite creative but poor parenting.
SUNDAY
Today was the end of the boys’ time with the baby. Critic ask them to give Fuckwit back. They’ve inflicted so much violence on it that we assumed they’d be happy to have it out of their sight, but they all say no. Why? “When you really look at it, it does look cute. I was trying not to look at it [before] because I didn’t fuck with it,” says Montgomery. Rogan comments, “The burn marks add character.” As Critic is interviewing them, they’re discussing bringing the baby to Hyde and also dousing its head in alcohol to see if it will light on fire. At this point, Rogan becomes self aware. “Is this an experiment?” and Critic informs them that we wanted to see what would happen under their care – would they turn all paternalistic or would they destroy it?
They tell Critic that Fuckwit was loved in a different way, that he received ‘tough love’. Critic mentions that on Friday it seems like the flat just saw him as something to destroy. “I tried to ruin him,” Montgomery admits before trailing off, and Flynn cuts in, “He’s a tough bastard, I will say.” The flatmates then stop listening to Critic for a few minutes while they decide what to name the baby if he was real. Reginald. Barry. Knobhead. Kael. They all really like the name Kael. “Like the plant?” “No, K A E L.”
However, Rogan doesn’t agree with any of this emotional stuff. “It’s not real. It’s a piece of plastic.” Montgomery, George, and Flynn snap out of their baby fever as they realise they’re feeling emotion towards a child’s toy, and stay silent for the next minute. It was nice to see some paternal connection for about thirty seconds. We need more displays of male emotion in the world.
Fuckwit’s pinned on the wall when Critic came over to interview, and they pull him down to listen in. They keep looking over to it, telling Critic proudly that he’s still in one piece and still has his clothes for the most part. Bare minimum but acceptable. When Critic asked what they thought of the experiment, they mused it had shown them what they’d be like as real parents. “Shit,” says Flynn.
Critic ask them if they want another baby. “Two? What for?” Montgomery says they’d be open to it. They also wanted to make it clear to readers that if the baby had disabilities, they wouldn’t have treated it with such violence. However, Fuckwit was an “inglorious bastard”. He could handle the heat. From a lighter. When they burnt his forehead.
*Names changed.