In my exhaustive (not really) analysis, it seems that about 1 in 10 people are secretly terrified of sock monkeys. I will start the ball rolling by taking a deep breath and admitting that sock monkeys frighten me. But I know I am not alone in this.
I guess I can see, in the abstract, why people think sock monkeys are cute. It's a stuffed animal made from socks, which I guess is cute. I do like the rag sock look, with its heathery wooliness. And some people think monkeys themselves are cute, although I myself do not. I do love stuffed animals, though.
My problem with sock monkeys (and I suspect the problem other people experience) is the thorny intersection between the Uncanny Valley and a fear of clowns.
The Uncanny Valley was described by the earliest researchers into robotics. If you draw a graph with "amount I like it" on the vertical axis and "how human it looks" on the horizontal axis, the "like it" line will move steadily upwards from left to right…. Except for just before the end, when it takes a steep nose dive. That nose dive on the graph is named the Uncanny Valley. We like robot faces that look only barely human (like C3PO) and robot faces that look entirely human (like Data) but we are deeply horrified by faces that look almost-but-not-quite human. We find these just-a-little-off faces to be uncanny, and we hate them.
Some people have a wider Uncanny Valley gap than others. Sock monkeys fit nicely into that gap. (As do real monkeys.)
The other fear is easier to explain. That big red smiling mouth is too clownish for its own good. Clowns are scary, there's no way around it.
(And finally, I personally wonder where sock monkeys fit into the minstrel show tradition of Terribly Racist Things. But that's just me.)
Sock monkeys: They need to stop. Now. I mean, not really? But keep them away from me, please!
Image courtesy Flickr/notmargaret
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