Barbie Girl

[tikistitch]

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.

Comments

[mmymoon.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear! I was having a similar WTFage moment when I was reading some study of monkey play behaviour -- in that the little girl monkeys played with dollies and play-stoves, and the little boy monkeys played with trucks and guns, or somesuch. (Driving trucks is somehow innate for little boy monkeys? And were the dolls human, or little monkey baby dolls?) It was paper-copy, but I ought to google around to see if I can find it online.

One study does not make Science, especially not of the grand, sweeping human behavior-generalization sort. (This is why we did not go into Psych when animal behavior ran out. Too many variables. Too unethical to test subjects. So much generalization.)

*hugs Tiki* We wishes we were making Science! Tiki is our hero!

I must say, though, Cory and I were the weirdoes. I was VERY fond of modifying Barbie -- although in my eyes, it was a service. I would use a hot glue gun to melt her plastic and sculpt her anatomically correct bits. (Ah, my sweet Dollfie Dream...) And man, GIJoes... you want to talk toy carnage... I don't know a single one of us in my pack of kids who had pristine Joes without a peg-leg or missing arm or melted head. She-Ra and Teddy Ruxpin all suffered from some damage... I was more prissy with my Star Trek figures, though, being older by then. The one-legged Spock figure got a wheelchair.

Cory, however, was the golden shining boy. Despite his love of MOTU's interchangable body parts, at the end of the day they all had to be switched back EXACTLY, and have the accessories go with the appropriate guy. Turtles were customized, though, as he didn't like having multiples of the same figure. On the topic of fighting, he claims to have NEVER bashed his figures together in the demented glee of a melee; his childhood battles were lengthy affairs requiring an entire room and detailed strategy maps. ... my poor obsessive baby.

As much as I'm an enlighted tomboy child of the digital era (who can do math!), I've seen too much of the natural world to believe that gender roles are ALL in one's head. My little brother baffles all of us by having extremely rigid gender roles and assignments (no "pink," that's a "girl thing," etc.) and he's in one of the most sheltered and non-conformist families you could pick in our society. We don't even have TV. (We do watch videos, but blaming the media is so trite.) HIS play, however, is almost entirely mechanical. He has almost no interest in figures or dolls. He likes stuffed animals, but usually more of a cuddle-toy than a character-toy. He enjoys gun-play only if it makes a noise/function, like cap guns, and never play-fights with them -- although he'll "make a battle" with robots he makes. Almost all of his toy-related play is building -- Duplos, Legos, K'nex, cardboard boxes, magnet-toys, whatever. For my guess, I'd reckon personality has a lot more to do with things than gender.

[mmymoon.livejournal.com]

And by in one's head, I mean the result of social conditioning. Nature or nuture, it'll all have to be in our heads anyway... ;9

I recently read a story called "X" by Lois Tyson, about a child raised in a completely gender-free environment who leads the other children to throw off the shackles of their gendered-behavior and cause the girls to use microscopes and the boys to cook. While it's a lovely premise, I doubt a real experiment, if carried out, would be quite as pure. Even pre-natally, there's so much one can do to influence a mammal fetus...

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Have you read, As Nature Made Him, the story of that kid who had his penis clipped during circumcision, and whom they *tried* to raise as a girl? That was a famous case back when I was taking psych classes, since it was supposed to prove gender identity is all learned. Of course, it's all B.S. (And, sadly, I head the boy committed suicide after the book was written.)

Seems like, gender identity is something that gets fixed in the brain quite early on.

[tikistitch.livejournal.com]

Cory reminds me of my beloved Mr. Tiki--all of *his* childhood Star Wars toys are in pristine condition. I wonder which genes or hormones influence the collecting trait? ^_^ But it seems like the nostalgic stories I've heard from other boys who played with Star Wars toys inevitably involve use of firecrackers. Mr. Tiki, of course, also played with things that went "Boom!" but always kept them far away from his treasured action figures.