The BBC has an interesting article about Barbie called, “What Would a Real Life Barbie Look Like?” The article concludes that women with Barbie’s proportions are rare and even unhealthy, but not unrealistic. Holy Oxymoron, Batman!!
Academics from the University ofSouth Australia suggest the likelihood of a woman having Barbie’s body shape is one in 100,000. So not impossible, but extremely rare. Researchers at Finland’s University Central Hospital in Helsinki say if Barbie were life size she would lack the 17 to 22% body fat required for a woman to menstruate. So again, not an unachievable figure, but certainly not a healthy one.
One in 100,00 – that is .001% of women are able to be Barbie shaped…
The US has a population of 305 million people. Let’s say that 50% of that 305 million are women. That makes a whopping 1,525 TOTAL of women in the USA who are naturally born with a Barbie figure. If ALL of these 1.5K women lived in the ChicagoLand area, they would still only compromise .03% of the ChicagoLand female population (again assuming that 50% of the ChicagoLand population are women – stats calc’d off numbers provided by Wikipedia)!
When you were a child (or even an adult), did you ever wonder why you didn’t look like Barbie? I know I did… Silly me. I just wasn’t smart enough to be born as one of those 1.5K of women who are born with this shape in the US. Hah.
So the BBC takes this woman who is a size 10/12 and stretch and squish her to Barbie’s proportions. If they leave her at 5’6″, she looks like a bizarre bobble head. When accounting for Barbie’s waist to hip proportion, the woman shoots up to 7’6″ tall… which makes me giggle. Apparently in the 5’6″ version of getting Barbiefied, the model has a waist about eight inches smaller than Victoria Beckham’s. That is teeny and not a size achievable for the vast majority of women.
All the above is neat and all, but that’s not what caught my attention. What got me writing this post was a quote from woman who has spent 500,000 British Pounds to have surgery to make herself look like Barbie. *headdesk*
Here is her before and after:
Barbie wannabe Sarah Burge says:
“I actually agree she would probably look a bit freaky if life size but as a doll she looks fantastic,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong in using her as a role model when it comes to looks, as well as attitude to life. At the end of the day you don’t see a personality from across a room do you.”
Oh man… where do I start?!
Barbie simply cannot be any realistic model when it comes to looks, my dear, as this particular body type is extremely rare and not everyone wants to spent a half million pounds (USD $712,750) in plastic surgery either. (Not to mention that some folks – most likely the majority, no matter how much plastic surgery, aren’t going to look like Barbie anyway.) For most women trying to achieve a Barbie body, they would have to become so thin that they would stop menstrating. Yup. Great role model. Who needs health anyway?
Regarding Barbie’s attitude towards life… she has one? I had many Barbie’s growing up in the 80’s and 90’s. They all had the same face… this one:
Whether Barbie was throwing a garden party or curing cancer or exploring Africa, she had the same face… this calm smile. It always gave me the impression that Barbie was one of those women in old tv shows that would wear high-heels, full make-up and a fancy dress while vacuuming with a weird, drugged smile on their faces. No matter what, Barbie would smile serenely. No emotion. Almost as if she was afraid to show original feeling or thought. Right… that’s a great model for girls. Meh.
The bit about not being able to see a personality across the room. I disagree hugely. There are bits of personality you can see from across the room! You can see body language. You can see hints of self-esteem in the way someone holds themselves. You can see how one interacts with others… are they rude, are they screaming for attention, are they kind, are they patient, are they shy… etc. In Speech 101, I was taught that 80% of communication (or was it 85%…?) was non-verbal.
Non-verbal communication is far more dynamic than one would think. From Wiki:
[Non-verbal communication] can be communicated through gesture; body language or posture; facial expression and eye contact; object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture; symbols and infographics. Speech may also contain nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress.
My point being – you can see some personality from across the room! Building this skill was crucial for me in my learning to stop picking jerks to date. 😉 I learned to stop approaching the most conventionally attractive guy in the room… or the guy with the jerkiest body language (because this attracted me for some reason) and learned to be open to men who had more self-respect and patience… and who exuded a respect for the people around him.
Barbie apologists in the article point out that Barbie is just a doll and should be viewed that way. I will say that I agree… and I don’t agree.
Barbie is one more drop in the unbelievably ginormous bucket of images of unrealistically (for most women) proportioned and thin women. As was written about in the “How Fat Women Helped Me Love Myself” post by AGR, it makes a difference if a woman (or girl) is exposed to only one narrow vision of what a woman is or if they see a great diversity in what a woman can be. Do I see a great diversity in the dolls out there? No, I don’t. In fact, I see that the doll market is flooded with dolls like Barbie & Bratz. Bratz has gone so far as to sexualize babies. *headdesk* Can’t even a baby not have to conform to a hyped-up sexual image in the doll world? Not in the world of Bratz apparently and this is not an insignificant portion of the doll market:
I don’t think Barbie would be such a problem, if Barbie dolls and dolls that riff off the Barbie model weren’t so choking the market. When all you ever see from growing up (like I did) from dolls and media is this super-thin ideal that isn’t even healthy (but portrayed as the ultimate peak of health… barf), it can inspire a girl to chase after these “ideals” even to the detriment of her emotional, mental and physical health.
Do I think Barbie is the beginning and the end of the problem? No way. She is a drop in a big nasty bucket filled with all sorts of sewage that inspire a lot of self-image issues in women (and men even!). Either way, I feel strongly that speaking up about those things that can hurt us is important… and so, I do.
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
Yanno, I must have been a weird child way back when. I had a Barbie doll and her friend, Midge. My mother made all their clothes, and took a roller skate case and turned it into a carry case for them and their clothes with a closet to hang their clothes in and a drawer underneath for shoes and accessories. Even though I played with those dolls, I never thought I was supposed to look like them. To me they were dolls and dolls could never be real people. They weren’t real, they didn’t have belly buttons or real female parts, hell, my brother’s GI Joe didn’t have real male parts either (and I used to steal his GI Joes to be boyfriends for my Barbie and Midge). I never thought of dolls as representations of real people until I got into doll-making and soft sculpture, those dolls have a personality that appears as I’m making them and they name themselves (and NONE of them ever look like Barbie….lol). But then, I was more a tomboy than anything else. I went fishing with my brother and my dad, I talked to my dad while he worked on our cars, I rode my bike and climbed trees and went horseback riding with my best friend (she saw it as a way to meet boys, I just wanted to ride the horses), I had small plastic horses that I painted and played rancher with in the long grass under the tree in our yard. I also didn’t grow up hearing that all a woman was good for was cooking/cleaning/making babies. My dad always told me I could do anything I wanted to, and my mom worked a full-time job besides what she did at home (and my dad helped out with things like laundry and house-cleaning). So the gendered crap I saw on TV (not that I watched a lot of TV as a kid) didn’t really mean much to me, that wasn’t what I saw in our house.
I was a tomboy too… the difference I see in your story and mine… and it is a major difference – your father told you that you could be anything that you wanted to be.
My step-father (who rasied me) felt it was a little girl’s duty to be thin and beautiful and the value of any female (adult or child) was measured by their attractiveness TO HIM.
My mother further played into this junk. She starved herself to maintain a certain figure. She was one of those women who thought being too intelligent wasn’t womanly. She didn’t even learn to balance a check-book or build credit until her mid-fifties and she only learned that (I suspect) because her husband is in his 70’s and his health isn’t great and she needs to learn to take care of herself… to ya know… survive.
Vesta, you were so lucky to have the father that you did. It makes me feel better about the world to hear fathers like that even exist. I can’t say I saw any growing up among the fathers of my friends and cousins.
So, I think you bring up an important point. The dolls can be seen as JUST DOLLS given a healthy upbringing. I wonder how many homes are able to offer the upbringing you described?
Did most of the parents you saw when you were growing up have the same lovely values your father had?
I ask, because I wonder if I wonder if the sampling of families I saw growing up is typical or not…
Vesta! Thank you for posting all this! I think you have just inspired another blog post for this site… something about how a good family can really put things (like Barbie) into perspective… and maybe some research on how common these healthy families are….
Since up to 30% of people (according to this Yale study: http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=1787) would rather:
“walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese. Five percent and four percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight.”
… Maybe families like mine aren’t the majority, but there certainly seems to be a scarily large chunk of them in existence…
Yay for commentors who make me think and add to the conversation!!! Thank you for stopping by, Vesta. I always love your comments.
I don’t know if other dads were like mine or not. Hell, I was living with a guy one time, and my mom was all hot for us to get married and I just wasn’t sure I wanted to get married yet. My dad told my mom to leave me alone, that it was a lot cheaper to throw the guy out than to divorce him if things didn’t work out. Not something you expect to hear from a father about his daughter. My mom was all up in arms one time about one of the girls I went to school with who got pregnant and how awful it was, and my dad told her that a couple of girls in his class got pregnant before they got married and he didn’t seem to think it was a big deal (and he went to high school in the late forties, graduated in 1951).
My mother, on the other hand, well, the less said about her the better. She didn’t want to have kids, but that was what women did in the 1950’s when they got married – they had kids and took care of house and husband. Yeah, my mom worked outside the home, but not because she wanted to, more because she wanted more than dad’s Air Force pay could give them, and when he got out of the Air Force after 10 years, more than his pay as a mechanic could give them (although I grew up with the idea that if they hadn’t had me and my brother, who is 2 years younger than me, she wouldn’t have had to work, so it was our fault she had to work). My mother is the reason I read so much, reading was my escape from her abuse and all the bullshit she pulled on everyone in my dad’s family (they didn’t like her [with reason, I think] and she didn’t like them either). In spite of all that, my folks have been married for 56 years (and still going strong at the ages of almost 75 and 76). I don’t think our family was anything like the families of the kids I went to school with, but I don’t have any way of knowing for sure, because I didn’t have a lot of friends back then. I do know that I was thought strange by some of the kids because we had been to England (dad was stationed there when he was in the AF and my brother was born there), and every year, we went on vacation to Washington state to see my mom’s family (we lived in Illinois at the time), and none of the kids I went to school with had traveled out of state. We also went to places like Rockome Gardens (an Amish tourist site in Illinois) and Lincoln’s New Salem, and dad’s folks took us on a riverboat trip one summer. So my life as a kid was a weird mixture of fun things done as a family and abuse (mental, emotional, and physical) from my mother that my dad did nothing to stop (he’s a “don’t rock the boat” kinda guy and my mom is one of those “not only will I rock the boat, I’ll sink the damned thing if I don’t get my way” kinda people).
So probably my dad had a big influence on me as far as how I saw myself and what I could do (and that being a woman shouldn’t stop me if I wanted to do something that was traditionally a “man” thing), and the fact that my mom worked and had a say in how the money was spent showed me that I didn’t have to depend on a man to support me. So all of that contributed to the fact that I saw dolls as just that, toys, and not representations of people and gender roles (hell, when your dad cooks and helps with laundry and your mom helps mow the yard, gender roles don’t seem to matter much). And my mother did have an equal say in how their money was spent, she made the decision on what car she drove, he decided what car he drove, when they decided to move out of the house we had lived in for years (rented) and buy a mobile home, they both went looking at different models, with a list of what he wanted in one, and what she wanted in it. Equality, they had it, most of the time.
My barbies lived in an Amazon society. I had some of my mom’s old Barbies where you could pop off their heads, and I had some Winter Barbie marching around the back room with another Barbie’s head on a pike.
Angie,
LOL… great comment! Heh. I love your amazonian take on Barbie. hehehehehehehe