Deconstructing Barbie
(Continued)

My survey was informal, and had a small and probably biased sample skewed toward college-educated women in their late twenties. Then again, I’m not making the claim that girls idealize Barbie; it’s the responsibility of those making the claim to back it up. I assumed I just wasn’t looking in the right places; surely there was good evidence for a belief as widely held—and as often repeated by experts and authors —as this was. I contacted Ophira Edut and Sharlene Hesse-Biber, two well-known experts on the topic. Both are authors of articles and books on body image and young women, and Hesse-Biber is a sociology professor at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. If anyone should have the information at their fingertips, it should be those two. Hesse-Biber told me, “I don’t know of any particular research that has examined the impact of playing with Barbie dolls on young girls’ sense of their own body image.” She suggested I contact Edut, who was also unable to provide any supporting evidence: “I don’t actually have the answer to your question, unfortunately. A worthy one to research.”
It is indeed worthy of research, and that research should have been done twenty years ago, before it became a core tenet of modern feminist theory and body image research. Despite assertions in dozens of books, magazine articles, news reports, research studies, and Web sites, I was unable to find a single survey, poll, or study that had actually asked girls if they wanted to look like Barbie dolls.

The most likely reason for this glaring oversight is lax scholarship. Adequately designed and constructed surveys and polls can be very time-consuming and expensive. Why spend the money to quantify and verify what seems obvious to you? Critics chose to impose their own agendas and assumptions about what girls believed and what they wanted without asking them. Instead of giving girls and women a voice, feminists were speaking (incorrectly) on their behalf.

The claim that Barbie can cause eating disorders also rests on shaky assumptions. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are serious diseases that cannot be “caught” from playing with dolls. Research has shown that the disorders are strongly influenced by genetic factors, not thin dolls or media images.

In the rush to criticize Barbie and thin images, the assumptions got ahead of the scientific evidence. Eating disorders and self-esteem are important issues, but have little to do with Barbie dolls. That girls and women should not try to emulate Barbie and thin images in the media is obvious and undisputed. Everyone (men and women) should have good self esteem and be at a healthy weight. Barbie critics have turned a plastic doll into a straw man, bashing away at a “dangerous myth” that never really existed.

Benjamin Radford is managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and author of three books, hundreds of articles, and a few poems. His Web site is http://www.mediamythmakers.com/cgi-bin/mediamythmakers.cgi.

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