Barbie Girl

The song today is dedicated to 3 Score & 10.

When I was a little girl, my mother would not buy me a single Barbie doll. At the time, I smarted under the unfairness of it all. Her explanations did little to soothe me: "The Barbie doll teaches little girls that this is the ultimate standard of beauty. I don't want you growing up thinking like that," said my ever-practical mother. And no, mom didn't look like Phyllis Diller. We come from a long line of models, as a matter of fact.

NOTE: Being a tomboy, I probably didn't want a Barbie for the same reason most girls did. I wanted something I could strap parachutes to, or use along with an assortment of 'talking' rubber and plastic animals in a vast animal kingdom my best friend and I created.

But as time went on, and I had a son of my own, I began to see my mother's point of view. "Barbie’s body type, which translates into real life measurements 5’9”, 36-18-33, is anything but realistic and naturally cannot be achieved."* Additionally, although they've come out with certain ethnic Barbies, those fall even farther from the standard for that particular ethnicity.

"If Barbie were real woman, she would not be able to menstruate. According to a group of researchers at University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, they concluded that if Barbie were an actual woman, “her narrow hips and concave stomach would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat required for a woman to have regular periods”. Lack of menstrual cycles is a common result of women suffering from anorexia nervosa. Actually, there was a time, 1965 to be exact, with the introduction of “Slumber Party Barbie”, that the doll’s creators encouraged the young female consumers to become obsessed with their own weight. Along with the set of pink plastic hair curlers, the doll included some “bedtime reading—a book called How to Lose Weight that offered this advice: “Don’t Eat.’ ”* (I have excerpted some of these quotes from another site, but had already read all of these facts many years ago in both the newspaper and in a flyer)

Along came my boyfriend's daughter, Bugs, who had buckets full of Barbies. Incidentally, she has now grown into a lovely young lady who, if you were going to pick a doll, strongly resembles Princess Jasmine. What she doesn't resemble is Barbie.

One of the first things Bugs (who was 5 years old) said to me is, "Wow, you are so beautiful!" One of the next things she did alarmed me: She started asking to get her hair cut short and bleached blond, like mine. Instead of being flattered, I saw it as a call to action. Much to everyone's surprise, I immediately banned all Barbies from my house. I also started giving her the lecture that my mother gave me when I was her age.

At first she was bewildered. Why couldn't she look like me when she grew up? Wasn't she going to metamorphis into a tall, blond, nordic woman?

"Look at your skin, baby," I'd say. "It's the color of coffee n' cream: I wish that *I* had a natural tan all year round! And your eyes are chocolate brown, not blue. Your hair is dark, just as your eyebrows are. You are beautiful as you are! There are all different kinds of beautiful women out there. What is important is that you're beautiful on the inside, and if you're beautiful on the outside later, fine! If not, that's fine, too! You are important for what you are, not what you look like."

We got in the habit of finding darker skinned, beautiful women: Princess Jasmine, Cindy Crawford, Vanessa Williams, and more. We'd sit on the computer and hunt them down, talking about what she might look like when she grew up. And we did it for years. We also talked about character, and standards, and what a strong and intelligent young lady she was and would be.

Today, at age 11, she is a happy and confident young lady who is proud of who and what she is. She did turn out to be very pretty (although for a while there, I didn't think it was going to happen) but she isn't conceited about it. And she's not frantically searching about for skin and hair bleaching treatments, blue contacts, and diet books (although she is thin as a rail and doesn't need them).

Not too long ago, the Mattel company revamped (ha! pun intended) Barbie and made her figure a little more reasonable. But in my opinion, Barbie still sends the wrong message to girls and it objectifies women. We need a more realistic series of Barbies before I can encourage kids to play with them. Well, maybe not this realistic... but a more realistic standard needs to be set.

*excerpted from Jess Smiths Project