Someone: Barbie is a bad role model who forces inaccurate beauty expectationsโ
Me: Barbie was created in a time where sexism was very much prominent and fought to break gender norms by giving girls an independent and powerful female role model showing young girls that they could be who they wanted to be and got so much sexist backlash simply because the doll was meant to be a pretty girl who just so happened to be a part of so many prominently male-dominated fields of work, in this essay I will
Tl;dr: An Aryan-blonde doll with completely unrealistic body proportions, feet that will only go into high-heeled shoes, and an intense fixation on being ~fashionable~ is actually feminist, sweaty :)
Dumbfuck solipsistic girly-girls are bubonic plague.
so letโs talk about Barbie
because I see these two vastly different takes around a lot, and as a Doll Personโข, I have my own thoughts on the matter
Barbie was created by a toy developer named Ruth Handler. a toy developer who was constantly being told by the men who dominated her field that little girls only wanted baby dolls they could mother. no matter that sheโd seen her own preteen daughter eschewing baby dolls for paper dolls of adult women- girls must want to play at mothering, because that was all they were going to do when they grew up, right?
my own mom had a first-issue Barbie in 1959, when she was six years old. to her, Barbie was revolutionary.ย โHere was a doll,โ sheโs told me,ย โthat you werenโt playing Mama with. Here was a doll who had a life and a career outside of the home. Iโd never seen anything like that, and I loved it.โ
the career was modeling, and Barbie did indeed look more like a fashion illustration than a human woman. all of these things were true at the same time- the independence and the traditionally feminine trappings thereof
Barbie was far from the first fashion doll intended for children- that honor went to the French lady dolls of the 1850s-90s, another type pioneered by a woman in a male-dominated field. and like Barbie, her great-grandmothers were fraught with controversy. but thatโs a topic for another day
Barbie has been many things over her half-century of life. an astronaut, a president, a doctor- and a beauty pageant queen. a character who appears in videos about coping with depression- and a toy that once came with aย tiny diet book that simply saidย โDonโt eat.โ sheโs come in a variety of races, but it took until 1980 for Barbies of color to actually BE Barbies, not just โBarbieโs friends.โ she was created by a woman who saw that her daughter wanted to play out an independent future for herself, but that future took the form of a modeling job (not inherently bad, but not particularly challenging to the status quo of womenโs employment at the time)
Barbieโs legacy cannot be neatly summed up as good or bad, empowering or oppressive. sheโs complicated, as is our cultural relationship to her
but hey, what do I know? Iโm just a dumbfuck solipsistic girly-girl
Calling ppl who found empowerment in Barbies โdumbfuck solpisist girly girlsโ is 1000% more misogynistic and sexist than Barbie could ever be. The whole point of Barbie was to provide empowerment. Occasionally missing the mark is not as severe as missing the point so much you double back to trying to control what women and girls do with their lives.
Barbieโs slogan in the 80s wasย โWe girls can do anything. Right, Barbie?โ
Barbieโs slogan today isย โbe who you want to beโ - something that somewhere along the line, feminism has stopped telling women and girls in favour of making them believe they will forever be victims instead.ย
When a little girl sees barbie, she doesnโt think that she has to look exactly like her, she seesย โthis barbie is a doctorโ,ย โthis barbie is a businesswomanโ, she sees what careers she could potentially become.ย
Instead of telling women and girls that Barbie teaches them to look like stick thin models, we teach them that barbie shows them everything that they can be.ย
I went on a huge rant about barbie once and i will paraphrase it
Barbie has been a President and a fast food worker.
She has been a maid and a formula-1 driver.
She has been a secretary and an astronaut.
Children who play with these toys can grow up to have less stigma surrounding the โless fancifulโ jobs. Barbie was so great she was presidentโฆ so there might be nothing all that wrong with working in fast food, either.
Also, the barbie films are wonderful,have brilliant morals and Barbieโs youtube vlog is an absolute treat.
From what i understand they record the actors doung the challenges then mocap or animate the models, leaving for very realistic reactions and itโs very sweet. Barbie is also a fan of video games, is a cosplayer and her all-time favourite game is Portal 2, and her first cosplay was of GlaDos!
All this!!
It wasnโt Barbie making me feel ashamed of my looks, or weight or anything! It was horrible fucking people!
REAL girls told me I would never get a boyfriend. Real girls made fun of my weight. Real girls made fun of my clothes and looks.
With Barbie I was more concerned about where her shoes had gone, I was always losing them, and how I could use the left over fabric my grandma and mom had to make her some clothes.
