You know, the last time I looked, the Barbie doll was a toy. A doll that little girls the world over loved playing with because she is one of the prettiest and coolest dolls around. But when it’s all said and done, still just a doll.
But a few years back, rumbles began about the possible repercussions having played with this doll may have on little girls and, before you could say “what the &%@#???” it was doing the rounds and now we are at the point where Barbie’s makers are going to change her wonderfully iconic looks to reflect a more “realistic” image to prevent little girls from becoming depressed, developing eating disorders and clocking up hours on the analyst’s couch because the dipsticks behind this move want us to believe that that’s what will happen when these little girls grow up to discover they do not look like their Barbies.
I kid you not! Some fool with way too much time on their hands appears to believe this and the tragedy is, they have managed to convince others. But you know, I cannot remember any of the kids I played with ever saying that their goal in life was to grow up to look like their Barbie dolls. Not one! And I seriously doubt this is happening today either, but with social engineering and politically correct barf so common these days, it appears that Barbie’s makers have finally bowed to the unfair pressure to change their doll’s appearance and now she will appear in all shapes and sizes to reflect “real women”. Oh puhleeze! It is just a doll for goodness sake!
But to be fair, I did the whip around several of women I know to ask them if a) they had played with Barbies, b) entertained hopes that they would resemble their dolls when they grew up, c) became distraught, depressed or sought the services of a psychiatric professional when the penny dropped that they didn’t resemble their dolls in the slightest became apparent and d) do they know of any Barbie-owning females to whom the above might apply? Their replies ranged from “Why would you even think something like that??!” to “Geez Lisa! Are you on drugs or something?!” So I explained why I was probing into their personal lives and once they got over the shock of beaurocratic lunacy run amuck, they all responded along the same lines; no, they had never dwelt on any desires to look like their Barbies or suffered psychologically or in any other way when they just developed into normal-looking human females instead of Barbie lookalikes.
Okay then, so where did all this come from? It’s a good question but the original dipstick may have been left behind in the melee that followed, when the will-mindlessly-believe-anything crowd went clamouring to hitch themselves to the bandwagon in the hope of grabbing at least some of the media attention, no matter how small. Anything for some camera/column space I guess. But at what cost? Well, the total destruction of the Barbie doll for a start. I mean, she was a real stunner with a wardrobe to match and we loved her to smithereens! There was no other doll like Barbie! Sure, there were some that tried and they made the market, but they could never really compete.
Meanwhile, my survey group remain as stunned as I am that such rubbish can be dumped on one doll. But did they have any insight on what might really be behind young girls and any image issues they may develop? Well yes, they did, and it didn’t stem from images of models or actors any more that it supposedly did from a doll, for each stated that the biggest impact came from the Schoolyard Goddesses. These being the girls on whom Mother Nature didn’t just smile but downright beamed, leaving them with hair, skin, bodies and faces that the rest of the school’s female population would  crawl backwards over broken glass to possess! There was always at least one of these goddesses in every class but usually a little group of them and they were the envy of every other girl who considered herself a bit short on perfection.
Just as a point of interest though, did any of the less blessed ever look at the goddesses and think “Wow! She looks so much like Barbie! She’s so lucky!” Nope, they didn’t, they just went home and wracked their brains over how best to emulate the goddess they most wished they looked like.
Barbie had been long forgotten.