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JEFF MIGLIOZZI: We deal with young people,
which means their bodies are changing constantly.
And one of the nice things, again, about having vision
is that when you're in the locker room with your buddies
and you're changing,
you have an opportunity to look around
and kind of see where you are in your development
compared to those around you.
"Am I late?
"Am I early?
"Why is this hair here?
Do other people have hair there?"
And it just gives you a sense...
and the same for young women, it gives them the same sense of,
"Am I developing as quickly as somebody else?
"What's going on with my body?
"Why do I have these... you know, why all of a sudden
are my *** growing, or other people's *** growing?"
I mean, you just don't have that opportunity to look at yourself
and say, "Where do I fit in with everybody else?"
And so you again feel isolated.
"Am I strange, or am I normal?
Am I developing properly, or am I behind?"
These are just fears that teenagers have anyway--
I think we all remember being teenagers
and having all kinds of anxiety about our appearance
and what's going on with our bodies--
but imagine if we don't have the ability
to compare ourselves to our peers.
NARRATOR: We see a video clip of several teenaged girls
who appear to be at a pajama party.
One of the girls sits on the floor
and allows her hair to be brushed by a friend
who is sitting behind her on the couch.
The models that we use for teaching students who are blind
tend to fall into two parts, or two categories.
One is the rag doll type,
which were initially developed for children
and developed, unfortunately,
really for children who may have been abused sexually
so that they can show on these models,
on these dolls, on these rag dolls,
where they were touched and this kind of thing.
And so they're not realistic at all.
So there may be a hole with a little piece of felt around it
and that's supposed to be a ***.
They're often sort of on the stomach
so they look more like belly buttons
than they do like vaginas, which can be very confusing
to somebody who's trying to learn about them.
The ***, the testicles are often just a piece of material
that just sort of hangs down,
that doesn't have any real shape to it,
doesn't have any real, you know, feel to it
that feels anywhere normal.
But it's meant to represent a part of the body,
and that's all it's meant to do.
But they can be useful in terms of at least giving
some sense of very broad...
what I refer to them as sort of ballpark.
NARRATOR: Two Teach-A-Bodies rag dolls are shown.
The female doll wears a dress, and the male, pants and a shirt.
Next, we see the female wearing a white bra and ***,
and the male in white underwear.
Finally, the dolls are unclothed.
A bit of brown fabric outlines the *** area of both dolls.
MIGLIOZZI: So those are one kind of models.
And the other kind of models we have are these bigger,
disembodied body parts.
So we might have a model of the ***,
a model of an erect ***.
They're bigger, they're good in terms of being able
to point out various parts
and explaining what they are and describing them
and explaining how they work,
and we have an erect *** and we have a flaccid ***
and so we can talk about those things.
But they don't feel like skin.
They don't, you know, have anything really human about them
except the shape and what they're supposed to suggest.
And so, you know, they're helpful, but they're not ideal.
Surprisingly, we have not been able to find
what I would love to have,
which is sort of an anatomically correct Ken and Barbie doll
that you can bend and move and you can shape
and you can show exactly how, you know,
two people's bodies interact, you know,
what intercourse truly is, how it all works.
NARRATOR: Fade to black.