Thursday, December 13, 2007
Barbie
Having a little girl always poses the question of "To Barbie or not to Barbie", does she unnaturally warp little girls minds with unfair expectations and hopes? I'm thinking if we created a Barbie that was more true-to-life it would be "flat-chested, pear shaped Barbie". Maybe with stretch marks...
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9 comments:
And she would need "The Proactive Solution"!
KT
i loathe this admission of guilt, but hopefully you'll all continue to love me nonetheless: I LOVE BARBIE. love her. seriously. my best friend cassie and i had our first barbie wedding in kindergarden together in front of my granma's fireplace, and to this day my best childhood memories are of playing barbies with cassie. we were quite delusional about it, literally brushing their hair and changing their clothes EVERY DAY. there was no putting them away naked in a barbie case. G A S P!!
so now i have little girls and we're having so much fun creating new barbie memories; we even had a wedding (surprise surprise!) in our living room not too long ago... :)
Disclaimer: I am not female nor do I know much about child rearing.
It seems like Barbie has the potential to be a creative toy and I think that's good. Whereas Nintendo for example, is rather limited that way. That being said, I did like and play a lot of Nintendo as a kid. Babs can do and be (and wear) anything you want. I guess it's important to stress that you create her identity not the other way around.
For school, we've been working on "wearable architecture" for the past few weeks and often use Barbie as a model. She was made with 1:6 proportions in case anyone's interested...
Let's say "based on" 1:6 proportions.
I had the same concerns about Barbie, so here's how we worked it out...
1. We get Barbies in a variety of ethnicities. White is not the only bauritul skin color. We make sure to have lots of boys too.
2. We seek out Barbies (maybe not Barbie brand...Happy Family is a good one) that has the whole family. We have Grandma and Grandpa Barbie with grey hair and polyester pants and all!! LOL! Dad and little brother too. And Pregnant belly mama. Belly comes off and a baby inside.)
3. There are "tween" looking barbies that have smaller chests and look less developed.
I think Barbie is what you make it. If you have 20 Barbies all blond haired and blue-eyed and white...then maybe you're helping send that message, but it you truly have a wide-range of colors and sizes of Barbies...I say you've helped your child see that beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. JMO.
This is so helpful. I played with Barbies too and loved the big homemade circle skirts my mom and Gramma made, the big pink fold-in case.
I brought home the monstrous bright pink Barbie book from the library and Afton LOVED it. She called them all princesses and asked about all the outfits. Hilariously, there was a hideous 1980's Bob Mackie fantasy Barbie that she asked about, "Why is this Barbie so mean?"
1980's fashion WAS mean. It punched me in the face once.
And for a while there, they were coming out with a more proportionate Barbie, but sales were so poor that they discontinued it. We want our Barbies unable to walk, baby!
yeah, barbie's with gorilla feet just aren't the same...
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