Barbie & The Struggle For Diversity
Barbie is as big or bigger of a household name as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s. Introduced in 1959, the blonde with the blue eyes has physically changed quite a bit over the years, but at her core, she remains the same.
As an African-American girl in the 90’s my choice of Barbies was limited to the three standard options; white, tan, or brown. More often than not, I was given a darker-skinned, black-haired version of the original blonde. Back then, I didn’t think much of it. To me, Barbie just a physical representation of the characters in the stories I created. We went on elaborately constructed adventures that involved mishaps, romantic entanglements, and mass destruction.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that something was seriously wrong.
Before I really dig into it, I want to preface this by saying that it would be irresponsible of me to lay it all at the high-heeled feet of the Queen of Plastic, but she is a symptom of a larger problem. She represents an unattainable goal for many with her pencil thin waist, permanently arched feet, large breasts and makeup coated face. She is consistently portrayed as having Ken on her arm, being a fashionista or thinking that “Math class is tough.”
A study published in 2006 revealed that young girls (5–8 years old) experienced heightened body dissatisfaction when exposed to Barbie images. They go on to say that “Barbie appears to occupy a strong and special role in girls’ developing body image (Kuther & McDonald, 2004), so that exposure to images of Barbie doll leads to detrimental effects, at least when girls are young enough to identify with Barbie doll.” Lastly, if exposed early enough, these detrimental effects could increase the risk of depression and/or eating disorders.
The Alliance for Eating Disorders state that anorexia is the 3rd most chronic illness of adolescents; 1 out of 200 women suffer from it and 24 million people in American suffer from some kind of eating disorder currently. If those numbers don’t scare you, then I don’t know what does.
On top of that, Oregon State University recently conducted experiments in which they tested the effects of toy play on young girl’s future aspirations. The results were not surprising. Girls who played with Barbies reported having less career choices in their mind than boys while girls who played with a control toy (Ms. Potato Head) reported having nearly the same career choices as boys. Now, development in children is a bit more complex than that and many factors play a part in the whole, but that study did show that Barbies have some measurable effect.
But there’s a happy part of this story. In an age where we have Malaville Toys, Naturally Perfect Dolls, and Elle & Cee World Girls, Mattel can no longer tout this idea that diversity won’t sell. After four years of declining sales, Mattel has no choice but to listen.
Barbie will now feature 33 new options. This includes three new sizes (petite, tall, and curvy), seven skin tones, 14 new faces, and 22 new eye colors. This is a major change from the one style, 3 skin-toned version that they had.
It’s about damn time if you ask me. I would like to see how far they’re willing to push it. What occupations will they begin to have? What will be their hobbies? Will that have companions and if so, what gender will some of them be? What more will they do to accurately represent the many faceted women of our world? This is just the first step and I hope they rise to the occasion.
