At the beginning of the poem the girl is portrayed as a typical little girl without a care in the world. Her parents and family members presented her with gifts and toys like any other child would be. She receives gifts like Barbie dolls, play ovens and pretend make up. Piercy uses an anaphora in the first stanza as she repeats the word “and” three times (2,3,4). This is an effective strategy because it stresses the amount of gifts the girl is given to play with.
How Barbie is affecting young girls She is perfectly skinny, has a perfect boyfriend and family, perfect hair, perfect house perfectly perfect. Yet how is this doll impacting the millions of young girls who are playing with her? Out of all the young girls in the world 95% of them own at least one Barbie if not more. When girls spend hours on end playing with their dolls their brain is retaining everything about that doll. How popular she is and perfect she is, and so naturally these girls are beginning to want to be just like Barbie, happy and perfect all of the time.
The following two lines and second stanza speak of puberty and what her class mates think of her. This is a classic case where a social circle has profound impact of how young people see themselves; not for who they are, but for what their friends think of them. Further irony comes as the magic of puberty is not all magical and the only thing that changes is a girl changing into a woman with thick ties and big fat nose. In the third stanza she begins her quest for acceptance; diet, exercise, smile and wheedle. This is not who she really is and soon the pretense wears away, “Her good nature wore out.” when the real façade revealed who she was, she removed that which people dislikes about her, her nose and her legs and eventually gave up living.
Instead they show praise towards her and her whiteness by buying white baby dolls, even for black girls. “The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll….all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.” Not only do the girls of this novel learn that whiteness is superior through the white baby dolls and the idealization of Shirley temple but adult women too have learned to despise their own color and learn as they grow that whiteness is the desired color. Whiteness is considered the cleaner color. When Pecola spills berries all over the clean white ladies house this
It is bad that Barbie, a 6 foot tall, 100 pound, size 0, infertile doll is possibly believed to be realistic and perfect (Bennett, Saren). She is one of many reasons young girls eventually develop a low self-esteem and an inaccurate idea of body image. Due to Barbie, young girls have also developed eating disorders, and the lust for unnecessary, unrealistic material objects. Girls should not be pressured about the way they look, act, and dress (Bennett, Saren). By definition, Barbie is a trademark doll representing a slim, shapely young woman, especially one with blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin (Barbie).
Of course, Barbie is always there to start these trends. So when these young girls are playing with their brand new Barbie doll, their brain is registering everything about that doll. How popular and perfect she is, and so naturally these girls are beginning to want to be just like Barbie, happy and perfect all the time, which starts many of them on their way to eating disorders. It’s estimated that 8 million people in
Beauty pageants are a needless aspect in society simply because they put a big emphasis on money, set unrealistic beauty standards for easily influenced young girls, and they encourage judging on appearance, rather than on a person's character. Child beauty pageants are fun to watch. The cute little girls all dressed up in their tiny gowns, dancing, singing, and prancing around. The pageants consist of modeling sportswear, evening attire, dance and talent. For most parents and their little girls it is just good fun.
According to modern day society, girls should walk and talk pretty, have perfect skin, and cake on makeup; they should watch their weight and keep up with the newest trends in fashion. The mass media depicts unrealistic images of beauty, which have led many adolescent girls to attempt to become these unattainable figures. Girls go to extreme measures to imitate society’s impractical beliefs of beauty. The pressure that society puts on women to be thin is unhealthy, which links to the increasing rate of eating disorders and psychological problems among young women. There have been plenty of studies linked to the negative impacts of body image caused by the media.
But according to (Lalan Maliakal), she states that “the mothers pressurize their children to work their appearance to look like a Barbie doll.” Young Children forgo their improvement and childhood years for beauty pageants and pressure by their mothers to be the best, which for the most part is not good because the child’s virtuousness have been blemished and compress by false synthetic similes and counterfeit eyelashes and sophisticated appearance . Therefore the parents are stripping their children of being normal and not knowing how to interrelate with children their own age. As the children continue to develop their psychological mind set have altered where they feel that if they are not
Gender stereotypes begin the second a baby’s gender is found out. As soon as we find out it’s a girl, we immediately begin decorating a pink nursery filled with soft décor and butterflies and flowers. We assume that our daughter will be very "girly" and fill her closet with frilly dresses and her toy box with tea sets and dolls. What this is essentially doing, even though many parents don’t realize it, is setting our child up to be the "perfect lady," and teaching her how to be the stereotypical woman. We are teaching her that girls are supposed to wear dresses, serve food, and take care of babies; the biggest and most common stereotype put on women.