It’s normal for kids to abuse their Barbie dolls

The world of Barbie finally caught up with Dr. Jeanne Randolph. Instead of inspiring total admiration for the beyond perfect, overtly feminine character of the Barbie doll, the toy often triggers aggressive, sadistic play and contempt in the very kids she is marketed to—which Dr. Randolph, to the likely chagrin of Mattel, wrote about over two decades ago. She is pleased with this new, more realistic take on the doll found in the smash hit Barbie movie. Dr. Randolph is both a psychiatrist and a cultural theorist who uses a psychoanalytic lens when looking at icons such as Barbie. Studying Barbie provokes questions about toys' contribution to the health and ethics in kids. Indeed, back in the 1990s, she wrote a chapter for a book, Consuming Fashions: Adorning the Trans-National Body, that included details of a small study she conducted investigating how girls treated their Barbie dolls. The book itself included historical psychological and anthropological aspects of fashion. What she found in wasn’t pretty. Indeed, it was common for girls to cut off Barbie’s hair, paint them, poke or burn holes in them, twist their head around backwards, remove limbs, or even swap their head with other dolls. But, she told the Medical Post, it's healthy for young kids to express aggressive or sadistic behaviours through their toys. It helps them cope with, and understand, their aggression in the long run—better than keeping it all bottled up and having it expressed in something real. One moment, Barbie is a super model, an ideal parent or a brilliant astronaut, the next she might be beating up other toys, joining a biker gang, or holding up banks. Young kids learn about themselves and the world around them through play, she said. For a long time, Barbie was marketed with an image of femininity that was devoid of aggression. Barbie represented a huge cultural shift when she was first introduced in 1959. Prior to that, girls were given dolls that looked like babies, making their play limited to that as moms or caregivers—a fact the new movie points out. Barbie was the first adult doll girls could identify with, Dr. Randolph said. They could expand the roles they played—except she was presented an exaggerated version of some idealized female form with her tall, slender proportions. “In a way, Barbie was asking for it. It’s like the Barbie doll is so perfect, so unrealistic that she incited children to resent her or to be anxious because she’s not real,” she said. Hence some of the destructive behaviour. Yet doing things like removing a Barbie’s head doesn’t mean a child will grow up a sociopath. Often, it’s just because the heads are easy to remove, and more of an exploration of how things work. When she wrote about Barbie for that book chapter in the 1990s, Dr. Randolph wanted to include a picture of the doll. She looked for an advertising image that showed some aggression in Barbie, but the best she could find was an image of a fishing Barbie holding a large, plastic dead fish. The fish had a smile on it. She wrote the toy company that produced Barbie for permission to use the image. “I got a letter back from Mattel’s lawyers. They had read my chapter all about sadism and about how Barbie is asking for it, the doll is too perfect. They said I should seek legal council. They said they entirely rejected the negativity of this chapter and that Barbie is a valuable product which they did not want to be seen in this light,” she said. There was always a disconnect between how Barbie was marketed and how little girls played with her. The chapter was published, and the letter from Mattel was included in its entirety in a footnote. However, the new Barbie movie showed a turnabout in recognition of the dichotomy Barbie represents. It acknowledged the imaginary, perfect world Barbie comes from, the cultural impact of Barbie dolls, that in real-life Barbies are mistreated, that many kids have cynical attitudes about Barbie, and also that some people love her. “The movie is exactly what you would hope for in terms of the image and the humanity of women,” she said. The feminist messages are strong, with powerful satirical punch towards patriarchy. Dr. Randolph noted inclusion of a character called Weird Barbie in the movie, with her defects and complex personality, was interesting, too. In the land of perfect Barbies, she’s the one who most realistically represents what Barbie looks like in a lot of kid’s toyboxes. Over the past few decades, various versions of Barbie have appeared including a pregnant Barbie (dubbed Midge), Barbies from various racialized groups and more. Before the movie, Dr. Randolph said she attributed these diversification efforts to simple marketing. Yet the movie, which takes ownership of how Barbie is actually treated, suggests there may be more to it than that. Other researchers have investigated Barbie too. A study in Body Image in 2019 looked at how young girls reacted to Mattel’s line of Fashionista dolls. These dolls included a range of Barbies with different body types and skin colour. They included a Barbie with Down Syndrome, Hispanic dolls, Black dolls, Ken and Barbie dolls in wheelchairs; and dolls with curvier bodies. The study, conducted in the context of body image research, focused on 84 girls aged three to 10 years who were asked to assign positive or negative traits to a selection of Barbie dolls. The results showed that the girls preferred playing with dolls that had thin bodies and had an aversion towards dolls with larger bodies. As well, they found that girls who had higher levels of body dissatisfaction showed lower levels of negative attitudes towards the original ‘perfect’ dolls. They concluded that “the simple availability of body-diverse dolls may be insufficient to fully combat pervasive cultural messages about body size.”

It’s normal for kids to abuse their Barbie dolls

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics