body representation

How do we perceive the world around us? How do we interact with the imprinting of our world as we perceive it? How do symbols and representations of abstract natures come into being in our psychological mind, translate into our lived reality? As a multi-lingual person and I suppose also as a psychology major as well as a women studies major, I guess I always come back to these questions. How is it that we individually, culturally and cross culturally come to experience the symbolic interactions of daily life? I am always trying to deconstruct the way that the order of our interactions affect our culture I guess. So it's no wonder that I was little less than shocked when I came across this body representation. I imagine that it is my liberal ideology and country girl approach to things,
( and no doubt others have reached this conclusion through their own unique a possibly opposite path), but its plain freaky to think of practicing on such a model. Maybe it was the language... "This comprehensive system is designed to provide a complete birthing "experience", including before, during, and after delivery." Almost sound like a doula pitch...
In any case, I find it repulsive to think that one would learn to understand the body, to read the body and to be 'provided a complete birth experience' on a dummy. It makes me think of learning to make love by using a blow up doll.
Perhaps new interactions in the future will help me to overcome my initial issue with this body representation, then again I'm still weirded out by this other foetus in a bag thing that I was given last year. It was designed to help one identify the position of the baby in utero. It's this bizarre bright yellow bag that can be filled with air and there is this relatively anotomically correct baby inside it...you kind of have to feel around and try to figure out the position of the baby...Everytime I see it I feel like liberating the baby but then I think this device is costly and is suppose to serve a purpose. I just cannot help but wonder how these strange and unsettling body representations make us subconsciously perceive our bodies. It reminds me of the pregnant barbie, of women as cyborgs too. Eeek! Ireally think I would prefer to be used as a model in a class than to pawn off these models for learning. Resolve the disconnect!