Voice of Reason: Research Debunks 'Barbie Ideal'
So good so far.Once again, Barbie was one of the best-selling toys this past holiday season. Mattel's world-famous fashion doll has become a cash cow, selling nearly $2 billion of merchandise each year. Barbie has also become part of many a girl's childhood.
We'll pass over the oddness of Barbie being referred to as a "cow" for now.Just before Christmas, however, a team of British researchers announced that many young girls mutilate and torture their Barbie dolls. According to University of Bath researcher Agnes Nairn, "the girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity....The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking, and even microwaving." The reason, Nairn said, was that girls saw Barbie as childish, an inanimate object instead of a treasured toy.
OK, despite the fact that we actually agree with much of this opinion piece, Tiki is going to screw on her little scientist cap and bitch for a while. We HATES it when folks in the media pluck out the results of one, single, well-publicized study, and act like it's definitive!!!! We do Science, every single week day, all day long. (Well, actually, we come in, delete our spam email, check our LJ friends page, and then we do Science all day long. But you get the picture.) As anyone who has ever tried to do the most rudimentary literature search has found, you can't tell anything from one single study. In the best case scenario, you'll have the majority of the work saying one thing, so you can at least make some kind of wimpy, half-assed conclusion. Mostly, what you'll find is a wildly contradictory mess, sometimes even within one single paper.
And the study from Bath seemed wonky even on the surface. These same researchers claimed to have found--besides a pack of demented, Barbie-mutilating girls--a reverent pack of glowingly nostalgic, toy-worshipping boys. To which Tiki says, ha-HA! You can't fool us, as we used to buy the collections of former boys, and if you want to see mutilation, take a look at a crop of well-played Star Wars action figures: crudely amputated hands are more the norm than the exception. And these are the surviving figures, NOT the ones that got buried in the sand by your evil Cousin Bud, NOR exploded with M80s one giddy 4th of July. The boys interviewed for the Bath study are all either mutant space aliens posing as boys, or bloody liars.
But, back to the heart of the matter....For decades, journalists and social critics have assumed that young girls idolize Barbie dolls, but little actual research has been done on the topic. In the absence of evidence, assumption and speculation ran rampant....
Yet recent evidence, including the University of Bath study, suggests that the "Barbie ideal" may be a myth. Just because a girl plays with a Barbie doll does not mean she idolizes it or views it as a physical role model....
Girls are far more intelligent than Barbie critics give them credit for; they know their dolls are just that: dolls.
Well, duh!
Though, to be completely fair, we've seen similar behavior from worried parents of male children, who forbid guns, or any implements of un-PC behavior from the homes, only to find their sprouts ignoring the BRIO blocks and instead running around using 2 by 4s as zap guns. Tiki once passed by a pre-school class on an outing. All of the dozen children had been supplied with eco-friendly brown paper bag lunches. The girls of the group daintily clutched the bags and marched in unison. The boys cheerily swung the bags from the rope handles at each other's heads in primitive combat.
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