Around the age of eight, I remember some toys around the house being shaped like grown men and women, instead of robots or plush fluffy toys.

I had Big Jim, a handsome lantern-jawed athletic man’s man. My sister had a Barbie doll, the lithe, sleek and likewise unrealistic female toy. In 1974, gender stereotyping was not a thing yet, and these male and female avatars were the first kind of action figures that my sister and I had known.

For whatever reason, any clothes Big Jim came with (boxing trunks, I think) quickly got lost. Unlike Barbie, Jim had no plain unadorned erogenous zone under his shorts. He just had a permanently integrated plastic speedo that contained his invisible ass and hip joints. Thus, Jim was never completely naked. Weird.

He was also significantly shorted than Barbie, which I remember really pissed me off. If Barbie were scaled up to a statuesque 5 foot 11, then Jim would have been barely 5 feet tall. He was a grotesquely over-muscled, under-grown dwarf with no dick.

He fascinated me, but I grew bored with him, obsessed on his faults and inconsistencies, and in my attempts to learn his physical limitations, I abused and damaged poor Big Jim. Maybe I even hated him, I don’t know.

Firstly, Jim had this karate chop action on his right arm, where if you pressed a section on his back, his right arm would slash down at the shoulder. Chop chop! If you bent that same arm at the elbow, a small bulge would appear in the bicep to look like he was flexing his rubber-armed muscle.

So of course I cranked that arm compulsively until after weeks the rubber skin of the bicep finally ruptured and cracked open revealing a little white plastic piece which I thought resembled an arm bone. I had ruined his arm. I was cruel and impatient with Big Jim.

Eventually, I cranked Jim’s head right off when trying to bend it backwards so he could look up and forward when “flying” like Superman. His head just came right off, leaving a round neck knob underneath. This decapitation was a rather shocking injury, given how many moments I’d shared with Jim by this time.

I guess I could have drawn a little smiley face on Jim’s neck knob and just kept on playing, but that wouldn’t have been satisfying. The perfect man was now literally defaced. So I took Jim’s cracked skull and headless figure to my Dad for repair. Dad could fix anything, and did indeed repair Jim, glueing the head back on with some epoxy. After that, Jim’s head was fused in a straight-ahead position and he never looked to either side again.

(My Dad James was the real Big Jim in the family, and I have no doubt that it was he who had picked out that toy for me.)