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Playing Doctor: Difference between revisions
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''I'll show you mine if you show me yours!''
Young children looking at each other without any clothes on.
Children tend to be very curious about things, including what the opposite sex looks like under their clothes. So naturally, sometimes they try to satisfy that curiosity by negotiating with someone roughly their own age. It's called "playing doctor" since it's frequently put in the form of a game where one child is the doctor, and the other the patient, who takes off their clothes for examination like at the real doctor's office.
For legal reasons, this game is almost never played all the way in visual media, being mentioned off stage, or interrupted before too many clothes come off. A common "bit" is for a parent to catch the children doing this, and completely overreact making the kids more confused and traumatized than the game ever would have. A common [[Subverted Trope|subversion]] is for precocious or overly intellectual children to actually be roleplaying medical professionals without any intent of taking off clothing. Indeed, this subversion is much more common in media than the "straight" use, as you'll see in the examples section.
It's considered kind of cute for very small children to do this, less so as they get older, and if either participant has hit puberty, they've lost the [[Children Are Innocent]] excuse. Indeed, if anyone past puberty suggests "playing doctor," it's an [[Unusual Euphemism]]. And if one child participant is significantly older than the other, it's [[Law and Order Special Victims Unit|usually a bad sign]].
Not to be confused with "playing [[Doctor Who|The Doctor]]", [[Playing House]], [[Actor Allusion|Playing]] "[[House (TV series)|House]]", or [[I'm Not a Doctor But I Play One on TV]].
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* Happened in a movie called ''[[Anatomy of Hell]]''. You actually saw the genitalia of the little girl playing doctor, Carolina Lopes.
* Schlocky horror film ''Milo'' has the title character, as a child, show a series of girls his abortionist father's collection of preserved fetuses (the children are all [[Nightmare Fetishist]] types) in exchange for one of them playing doctor with him. Unfortunately for the chosen girl, his idea of "doctor" involves scalpels.
* In ''[[Teeth]]'', the horror-comedy about the girl with the [[Vagina Dentata]], the step-brother has a scar on his finger, and it is revealed that this is from "playing doctor" with his step-sister in the pool as children.
== Jokes ==
* A rather old joke: a young girl mentions to her mother that she and another boy have been playing doctor. When the mom starts to freak out, the daughter says, "Oh don't worry! We've been playing HMO doctor. He didn't even get to see me!"
* Two babies, a boy and a girl, are lying next to each other under the covers. The boy asks, "how do you know which one of us is the boy and which one is the girl?" The girl looks under the covers and then back at the boy, and says "I'm the girl and you're the boy". "How do you know?" the boy asks. "Simple," the girl replies, "[[Pink Girl, Blue Boy|I'm wearing pink socks and you're wearing blue socks]]".
* Another old joke has a little girl's mother complain to a little boy's father about the children playing doctor. The man tries to dismiss it as childish curiosity, and the mother snaps, "He took out her appendix!"
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* Referenced in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', of course. As children, Willow and Xander played doctor in the same way as the ''[[FoxTrot]]'' example, and Willow doesn't know that there's another way to play it, leading to [[Innocent Innuendo|a bit of confusion]] when she references those games. When Willow asks Buffy how it's supposed to be played, Buffy looks embarrassed and [[Blatant Lies|claims she never played]] (Cordelia gives her a "Yeah, right!" look).
* An episode of ''[[Maude]]'', in accordance with its then-edgy subject matter, had parents reacting to finding their kids, a boy and a girl, naked playing doctor.
* In an episode of ''[[That '70s Show]]'', there's a flashback, where it's revealed that Kelso played doctor with Jackie when they were little. Kelso remembers to this more fondly than their first date, because he "got further".
* [[Subverted]] on ''[[Full House]]'': the kid yelled "don't open the door, Daddy" because she and a male friend were playing {{spoiler|eye}} doctor, and {{spoiler|the eye chart was on the back of the door}}.
* On ''[[M*A*S*H|Mash]]'', Hawkeye would regularly use "want to play doctor?" as a pick-up line on the nurses.
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