[marketing.blogs.ie.edu]
Barbie has been the gold standard in dolls for 50 years now, and she’s gone digital. At uk.barbie.com, you can play Barbie games and interact with her friends like Christie and Skipper.
But let’s get down to the nitty gritty. I’ll go ahead and say that I for one don’t want my kids playing with Barbie online, and here’s why. Young children tend to both project and gain their identities from their playthings. The Barbie Doll’s creator, Ruth Handler, noticed that there were no adult dolls on the market. She also noticed that her daughter preferred dressing paper dolls up as what she wanted to be. Barbara “Barbie” Handler Segal, on a visit to Oprah, said “We projected our dreams, what we wanted to be, and we could dress up paper dolls like anything we wanted to be.”
The problem is, Barbie isn’t a paper doll. She’s a 3-D representation of what beauty should be according to SOME people. In fact, Barbie might be the first doll that defines your child’s understanding of beauty. If Barbie were a real woman, she would be 5′9″, and have the measurements: 36 inches (chest), 18 inches (waist) and 33 inches (hips). She wouldn’t even be able to menstruate because she wouldn’t have enough body fat.
Barbie Syndrome occurs in many grown women, who want to look exactly like the Barbies they played with as children. Women like Cindy Jackson, who spent 100,000 USD on surgery, or Sarah Burge, who spent 539,500 GBP on her surgery and currently holds the World Record for the most plastic surgery in the world.
[Sarah Burge]
[Cindy Jackson]
But what if the little girl playing with Barbie and getting the idea of beauty from her is not white with blonde hair and blue eyes? What does that do to her self-esteem, that the main girl is eurocentric, and her sidekicks are women of color? Barbie is not even modeled on a real woman, she’s modeled on another DOLL, a german doll called the Bild Lilli Doll which conforms very much to the German/Scandinavian look and standard of beauty.
[Bild Lilli]
I for one believe we should give children a lot of different toys to play with. This website has reviewed products as diverse as Ranger Rick, Bob the Builder and Spongebob Squarepants. There are many, many role models your children can try out and use to define different parts of their personalities and interests. 50 years is long enough. Let’s give Barbie a rest.
