“ Seen Through Rose-Tinted Glasses”: The Barbie Doll in American Society Wether we realize it or not the toys our kids play with everyday have an immense impact on their behavior and development. Motz essay describes the perfect example of what these toys do to our society. In her essay, Marilyn Ferris Motz describes how Barbie portrays an image of a woman that lives based on her appearance, her popularity and her status. When playing with this dolls, girls take on the role of a teenager or an adult woman, letting them imitate adult female behaviors they see on other people and on the media. Girls take on the role of the doll enabling them to participate in dating and other social activities.
Smiley’s first Barbie doll came into her home when her now twenty-four year old daughter was three. The author describes how both of her daughters would only wear pink and purple as they went through the “Barbie phase.” Jane Smiley says, “Both of them (her daughters) learned how to put on makeup before kindergarten” (376). What Smiley means by this is that her daughters were advanced in age mentally. Smiley’s daughters were doing things at age five that most girls would only start doing at the beginning of their teenage years. Now that’s growing up without a childhood.
Those who have played with Barbie dolls at some length can grasp what Prager was talking about. Prager chose this audience because she is well aware that Barbie was the most popular doll for girls. She knew that subliminally every girl or woman was thinking the same thing
All of these things helped conform little girls into thinking that their role in life was to be something pretty for a man to look at. Modern times are not that much better. Little girls are still given Barbie dolls and feel pressure from an adolescent age to look a certain way. This epidemic is causing girls to succumb to eating disorders, face bias when it comes to their appearance by others, and have a general low self-esteem. Stereotyping people is just as dangerous as bullying
It all begins with a young girl being born into the world of judgment. Children believe everything they are told. If they are told they are beautiful, they will believe it until someone tells them otherwise. Young girls are impressionable by their mother’s and female counter part’s actions, such as wearing fancy clothes and putting on make-up. In the poem, the speaker states the girlchild has “wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy” (4), showing that she already wants to alter her appearance.
Life as Plastic Both today and yesterday's society have created a mold that young women are expected to fit in to. Tall, tan and slender girls are often looked at as the beautiful members of society. The positive and wonderful qualities of both women and men are often overlooked because of physical appearance and image. Marge Piercy accurately portrays the unreachable standards placed on women to be beautiful from adolescence into adulthood by her use of fluctuating tone and effective symbolism in her poem “Barbie Doll”. The poem follows a young girl from her childhood to her adulthood in a third person omniscent point of view.
Ironically, the dimensions that Barbie would not even be anatomically possible on humans. A women with her dimensions of 36-18-38 would not be able to live. The perfection Barbie portrays has influenced many women attain Barbie's body by having operations to make themselves "look like" Barbie. Cindy Jackson, founder of the Cosmetic Surgery Network, is a famous Barbie Doll human. She had more than twenty operations and dispensed more then $55,000 in her attempts to look like Barbie.
She has a slim waist, has round hips, and long legs. She's not necessarily realistic within our world, but she is what you can say, "perfect sized". Her body has become idolized and wanted by women within society. Barbie is a fashion icon, the perfect girl, and purely looked up to by many. She's a representation of how girls should look or want to look within the current time frame.
Let me remind you again that this is why girls under 16 shouldn’t be allowed to be models. The fashion industry is to blame for most girls’ fixation on being thin according to the 89% of respondents who took part in a survey conducted by the Girl Scouts of Australia. Psychologists and eating-disorder experts are worried about this and so should we all. These children are part of the future generation. No one wants to see what could have been bright and healthy futures taken away from them simply because of their diet.
International Business Chapter 14 Oxford University Press Prof. Rakesh Mohan Joshi Case Study BARBIE FACES ISLAMIC DOLLS Barbie, so named by ideator Ruth Handler after daughter Barbara s nickname, became the world s most popular fashion doll. Handler found that young girls enjoyed playing out their dreams in adult roles when she saw her daughter Barbara playing with a paper doll and imagining it as a grown up. Most children s dolls available at that time represented infants. This gave rise to an idea of a teenage doll, Barbie. Handler co-founded Mattel, a Southern California toy company with her husband Elliot Handler, and spearheaded the introduction of the doll.