Deconstructing Barbie
(Continued)

In a widely- cited journal article titled “Fashion Dolls: Representations of Ideals and Beauty,” two researchers point out that “Barbie [does] not represent… an healthy individual’s body proportions.” (Elaine Pedersen and Nancy Markee. 1991. Perceptual and Motor Skills (73) 93-94.) The authors present this declaration as if an important social revelation, but provide no evidence that anyone assumed the doll did represent a “healthy individual’s body proportions.” Who said dolls should be realistic? Many of Barbie’s critics fall into this logical trap of criticizing the doll for not being something it was never claimed to be. It’s true that Barbie does not represent a healthy individual’s body proportions; neither do Raggedy Ann or the Cabbage Patch Kids.

This strikes me as a case of reading far more into a doll than is actually there. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a Barbie is just a doll—not an idealized role model. I remember playing with action figures (boys, of course, do not call them dolls) as a kid; I had Spider-Man and G.I. Joes galore, as well as a few Star Wars figures. I don’t recall emulating G.I. Joe, or deciding I needed to look like him. But I also had He-Man, one of Hasbro’s Masters of the Universe figures. He was a hypermasculine man; he had a massive, muscular chest, giant arms, and a thin waist. Even though it was realistic in many respects—he had nipples, as I recall—it was a thoroughly impossible body type, and also one that never crossed my mind to emulate.

I assumed that most girls were like me in that they just saw the dolls (er, action figures) as toys rather than attainable physical role models. Then again, I’m not a girl. I recognize that there are significant gender differences in socialization, and that girls are raised to emphasize appearance and beauty. Perhaps my gender bias had blinded me to how young girls really think. According to dozens of experts and writers, girls want to look like Barbie.

So I contacted several female friends of mine and asked for their opinions (and those of their friends) regarding their experiences with Barbie dolls. This was not meant to be a scientifically representative survey, but it would at least give me a place to start and a sense of how some women, at least, viewed the much-maligned Barbie. Did they play with Barbies as girls, I asked? If so, what did they think about them? At that age did they believe that they could or should try to look like their doll?

Twenty-six women kindly responded to my questions. Only one woman had not played with Barbie, and of the remaining twenty-five, only one woman said that as a girl she believed she should look like her Barbie doll. These responses are typical:

• “No. … Most of the pressure as far as appearance went came much later and largely from my girlfriends and teeny-bopper magazines.”
• “Mostly I helped my brother decapitate them and threw limbs in neighbors’ yards. No one told me I should look like Barbie and I never felt like I should look like her. I knew I’d never have mongo boobs!”
• “Needless to say I never thought I should look like her!”
• “I don’t remember believing I should try to look like her and certainly no one said so.”
• “I don’t think I ever thought about having to look like Barbie, she was just a stupid doll to me.”

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