Smackdown: Barbie and the End of the World

Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:06:00 GMT

We planned this Smackdown awhile ago, not long after my daughter opened a Scuba Barbie for Christmas. Her grandparents, who had refused to purchase a Barbie for their own daughter, were beyond thrilled to buy one for mine.

"Every girl should have a Barbie," they gushed. My wife stared at them in slack-jawed, open-mouth wonder.

"What the hell?" she said, "I wanted a Barbie for years!"

If someone had taken Tiny Tim's crutch and beaten him about his frail, twisted legs while eating all the Christmas goose, it still would have been a merrier scene than the one at our house at that moment.

My wife stewed, my in-laws beamed and I sat on the couch, staring at this plastic creature I had successfully avoided for nearly three years.

I never wanted a Barbie in the house.

Her clothes don't bother me so much. The early Barbie wore some swinging outfits and I've seen some newer Barbies that sport the kind of clothes your cool, older sister might have worn while packing her belongings for college. Unlike Bratz, you have to purposefully find Slut Barbie.

Her hair, her makeup. These things are easily changed, cut, washed off, shaded -- any girl can style the doll to her own liking.

Except, of course, for the body.

Barbie has an impossible body.

Now, before the great Christmas Barbie Episode of 2008, I was originally worried not that my daughter might grow to look and dress and act like Barbie. Rather, I was worried what she might do to try.

A friend's daughter, then 7, told her mother one day that she needed to go on a diet so she could look "more like Sally" -- the name she had given to her Barbie. I'm not saying Barbie is the gateway to eating disorders. But I also don't think dieting fits into the realm of playtime. How fun is that to look at a toy and think you're suddenly not good enough? Yay! And our friend's daughter is not the first to bring this up. And I doubt the same emotion overcomes a girl playing with a chubby Cabbage Patch Doll.

Some young girls see Barbie, want her body and then destroy their own. After all, isn't Barbie a model for the perfect female?

Then Barbie did in fact come into our house.

When she did, my daughter, Emmeline, picked up her new toy, examined it for a bit, played with her clothes and then eventually abandoned the thing for the two dolphin friends that came in the same pack and lent testimony to the fact that this was, indeed, the real Scuba Barbie. (Why the dolphins are wearing mascara, I don't know -- even animals have to be sexualized now, I suppose.) But at this moment, Barbie lays forgotten upstairs, buried underneath a pile of clothes.

I'm not going to throw it away or keep it from her, although now is my chance. No, it dawned on me that I, her father, probably have a lot more sway over how she will one day view herself and her body than some stupid doll. Do I really want to be the person whispering in her ear about body issues? Do I want to make such a big deal out of it that an issue heretofore unknown to her suddenly becomes a cause for serious familial discussion? (And of course a story about Iran banning Barbie didn't help, when it left me thinking, "Great, now I'm the fucking Ayatollah of the toy box.")

But what really sent me over the edge in the past week was when a friend of a boy said, "You've got Barbie to deal with, sure -- but what am I going to do when my son wants a gun?"

A toy gun. I had 35 of them. Cap guns. Laser guns. Electronic talking hippy pacifist guns that fired words instead of bullets, man! And I never went on some drunken rampage and shot up the post office (although I suppose there's still time). I was never the bully. I've been in all of one real fight.

It's just a toy, I caught myself thinking.

But then what of Barbie?

This was supposed to be the side of the Smackdown in which I let loose on the dangers of letting young girls play with shapely molded plastic -- how it's only setting them on a course of crash diets and the latest fasting fads, tweenish liposuction and adolescent insecurities. But now I've seen the actual impact of Barbie up close and I'm not too worried. I still maintain that I'm not going to buy one (there are actually a hundred cooler dolls out there, including the freaky-eyed Victorian-era porcelain cherubs my daughter has come to love) but if another Barbie enters the house, I think I'm the last person who should be making a big deal of it.

The Other Side:

Smackdown: Aw, Just Let Her Have a Barbie

Also, Barbie's Sordid, Swinging History

Magazines Make Men Feel Insecure, Too

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:30:00 GMT

It's official: airbrushed images of stick thin women with large breasts make everyone feel bad, even dudes. A recent study has found that men feel more insecure about their bodies after reading men's magazines like Maxim and Stuff, just as women's self-esteem suffers from reading such journalistic treasures as Cosmo and Allure.

The problem is not, as you may have guessed, that men long to have the perfect six-packs and toned legs of male celebrities. (Let's be honest: the only magazines that have sexy pictures of men's bodies are not being read by either women or straight men.) Rather, the standard of impossible beauty portrayed in most mainstream magazines makes men feel insecure because they're worried they won't be able to get laid. How can I ever get a girl like that?, they wonder.

Answer: you can't. Just as we women will never get a body like that. So, as Salon's Kate Harding suggests, what we need to do is fill magazines with images of absurdly attractive men, since hot men don't make anyone feel bad about themselves. "Seriously,y'all," she writes. "Think of the children."

Photo: Many Bells Down

Strollerderby : insecurity

Smackdown: Barbie and the End of the World

Smackdown: Aw, Just Let Her Have a Barbie

Magazines Make Men Feel Insecure, Too