Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, invented the doll in 1959. Since her birth, Barbie has had more than 100 careers, entered and left a relationship with Mattel’s male doll, Ken, and possessed a number of younger sisters. The doll’s measurements are a 5 inch bust, 3 1/4 inch waist and 5 3/16 inch hips, and weighs 7 1/4 ounces. The site gives these out but under a section entitled “For the Record,” it reads, “She’s a doll, people...”
The Struggle to Create an Adult Doll Market for Little Girls
Robin Gerber writes in her novel, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her, that Handler struggled to convince others there was a place for adult dolls marketed towards children. When Handler told her husband, Elliot, about her new proposal for Mattel, Gerber says Elliot “balked. ‘Ruth, no mother is going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts,’ he told her, despite his usual support for his wife’s ideas.”
Even Mattel experienced some discomfort. Gerber says of the company’s employees: “They were comfortable with toy guns and rockets, musical instruments and pop-up toys, but the doll Ruth described defied their imagination. They told her that mothers would be horrified by a sexual-looking doll. What she was proposing was much too curvaceous.”
But the company relented, and Barbie became integrated into our society. Mattel’s Web site reveals that 90 percent of American girls aged 3 to 10 currently own at least one Barbie doll, 1,000 YouTube channels are dedicated to Barbie, and there are at least 300 Barbie Facebook pages. Little girls have proved Ruth correct in that they wanted a doll—a 3-D, 11-inch tall plastic adult figurine—whether to model, dress, or just use to play out their childhood fantasies.
Does Barbie Cause Negative Body Image in Women?
Several feminists and similar groups have attacked Barbie, believing the doll promotes a negative body image. The Wellness Resource Center at Vanderbilt University says that if the doll existed in real life, she would be unable to walk due to the fact that the upper portion of her body is much heavier than her lower portion. The site provides a chart that reveals a real-life Barbie would have to be 6 feet or taller.
Jennifer Reid, program coordinator and clinical social worker at the Atlanta Center for Eating Disorders (ACE), says today’s ideal image for women involves tiny hips, large breasts and long legs. She believes that little girls are not mature enough to want to emulate Barbie, but they begin to perceive how everyone wants a Barbie. “It cements the idea that everybody wants her,” Reid says. “It’s like a Petri dish—it’s a breeding ground for problems.”
College-aged women are particularly susceptible, Reid explains, especially as they are learning who they are. “Especially for girls, it’s mandatory you fit in and by golly, most girls are going to try to accomplish that,” she says. “If you’ve got a young girl who is already a little bit more in tune to those messages and what is expected of her and she hears ‘you don’t want to look like that’ it can lead to body distortions and excessive obsessions.”
Haley McNeal, 21, and a magazines major at the University of Georgia, agrees that little girls aren’t affected by Barbie’s perfection; at least, not at the time. “Barbie shapes what America thinks beauty is,” McNeal says. “When it’s just fun and games Barbie is a fairy tale and you want to be a princess, but I think the doll does influence the idea of beauty.”
Dr. John F. Grace, a clinical psychologist at the Eating Disorders Recovery Center of Athens, believes that the doll itself is not enough to cause negative body image. “It’s part of a culture—embedded in a culture,” he explains. “You have to look at the culture itself.” He further remarks that although he sees many college-aged women in the treatment center, the facility is now experiencing a “spike” of women in their 40s and 50s. Grace says this is happening nationwide due to increased public awareness of eating disorders and body distortion. It is interesting that these women, in their 50s, grew up along with the invention of Barbie.
Do Little Girls Idolize the Doll's Perfection in an Unhealthy Way?
“Barbie certainly does represent an unrealistic body type because if she were full-size, the dimensions would be impossible for a human to attain,” says Alice Bender, nutrition services coordinator at the University of Georgia’s University Health Center. “This is a plastic, manufactured image, and as most manufactured images, they are unrealistic.” She believes Barbie is another distorted picture of contemporary society’s emphasis on thinness, and especially affects those who are already genetically prone to develop eating disorders and other manifestations of low self-esteem. “Dolls are toys,” Bender says, “but toys do have an impact on how children think—play is a child’s work.”
Megan Davis-Fields, 19, says that for marketing reasons, creating perfect Barbie dolls is the most reasonable thing to do. “No one’s going to buy a fat Barbie,” she says. However, Erin Hansen, 20, believes Mattel could make the doll have more normal, healthy proportions and consumers would still buy them. She mentions that every little girl plays with the dolls and a larger Barbie probably wouldn’t deter parents from buying one for their daughters.
“It’s just like the old expression that if a kid hears he or she is stupid enough, he or she starts to believe it,” Reid says. “If you flood a kid enough with these direct or indirect messages the kid is going to fall prey to it.” Although Barbie may not immediately produce inadequate feelings in little girls, Reid suggests that as girls transition into womanhood, these sorts of ideals affect their lives more than actively realized.
