Recently an article came out on The Huffington Post about "If Barbie were made with a real human's proportions." This is a topic that has come under much scrutiny as of late.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/normal-barbie-nickolay-lamm_n_3529460.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
This topic bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, she is a DOLL. To put it in the words of Woody from Toy Story, they are "a child's play thing."
She is not supposed to be proportionate to an actual human. And second, the reason why she has a small waist is because it was easier for little girls hands to hold onto her. Am I right?
I never had an issue of wanting to look like Barbie. To me it was more important to dress them for going to the ball and slumber parties rather than trying to look like her at a young age.
Now don't get me wrong. I think that it's VERY important to warn girls about the dangers of undereating and to help them understand that anorexia and bulimia are not healthy and you can actually die from these conditions. However, I don't feel that changing Barbie will help that cause.
Plus, none of the old clothes will fit anymore! :)
I think Barbie has been under enough fire through the years. Remember Butterfly Art Barbie and how everyone was freaking out about her having "tattoos?" (Which I have NRFB by the way. Do you have her too?)
Let me know what you think. I'm not trying to start controversy but just want to hear other Barbie lover's thoughts on this topic.
The new fun post will be up tomorrow!
4 comments:
That sort of articles pop up regularly, lol. Every time I read something like that, the first question that pops to my mind "Did the accuser ever have a Barbie and played with her?".
I was a die hard Barbie girl from the second I got my first doll. And I never wanted to look like her or be like her, it was more like Barbie became whoever or whatever I wanted her to be. Like you, I wanted to redress her and played out my fantasies. My real role models wee the real women in my life. Same goes for my daughters, who also played with Barbies and miraculously survived that without developing any eating disorders.
Yes eating disorders are very dangerous, but blaming a doll for them is ridiculous. Young girls today are under extreme pressure to be "popular" and in a society brainwashed by advertising a perfectly slim and forever young role model for women, it becomes very hard for a teen to compete. Then there is the fashion industry with people like Karl Lagerfeld utterig things like "You can never be to slim", models who are too thin and those "Next Top Model" Shows on TV, where healthy girls are being told to loose weight in order to get a shooting or a runway job. There are irresponsible mothers who put even toddlers on a diet. It's insane.
And they also regularly refer to a handful of women who get unlimited beauty operations to look like Barbie. And you can't even blame the doll for that either. If there wasn't a Barbie, they would find someone else to be their holy grail of ultimate beauty. There is somethin lacking in their lives, that they compensate with their efforts to be perfect. A therapist would have a field day.
You definitely hit the nail on the head. There is an extreme pressure to be popular and skinny but I think most of that comes from actors and actresses that have their photos airbrushed to make them look thinner. That I think is the main culprit. I was reading some of the comments on the article and one lady said that she thinks that changing Barbie would be a good idea. Another person commented and said "How about we just educate our daughters?" She is SO right! Changing Barbie would be like getting rid of all ice cream because there is an obesity epidemic in America. Education People!!!!
There was a few runway designers who have eliminated size 0 models because there was a model who died from starvation. I think it's a step in the right direction but sadly we still have a long way to go.
Barbie-bashing has a long and interesting past, and it goes back to the early days of feminism when Barbie was often used as a symbol of everything that was wrong about how society viewed women. It seems that a lot of the arguments against Barbie haven't changed much since then, although both the doll and the world around her has. I still see a lot of articles talking about the Barbie who was sold in the sixties with a set of scales and a little book saying "how to lose weight - don't eat" like its a contemporary thing - taking it completely out of its historical context (of course, when that doll was made, anorexia was not widely understood, talked about or written about). It seems strange to me that people can have such a strength of feeling about this issue, and yet be so ill-informed.
As for the scaling-up issue, there are so many ways to do it and they all come out differently ... as if it mattered. Why is it OK for a little boy to play with an action figure who is roughly shaped like an upside-down triangle, but we don't trust little girls to be able to process the idea of a character or a cartoon?
You are so right. And education is the biggest thing here. So many of us are ill-informed and it makes their argument ignorant. Things have changed so much and I wish that people would stop finding something to blame their problems on, like a DOLL!
And also true with the action figures. G.I. Joe is one that I remember seeing controversy about. But apparently they must think that men don't care as much about their physique as women do?
I don't know, it all baffles me why some get on their high horse about issues like this.
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