The Feminist Barbie seems to be the new-barbie-on-the-block today. A recent advertisement from Mattel, for Barbie, shows the hour-glass figured doll in a more feminist, up-to-date kind of avatar, unlike the previous ones – an aerobics instructor, a rockstar and a doctor.
The commercial opens up with college students filing into a lecture hall while these words flash across the screen: ‘what happens when girls are free to imagine they can be anything?’ The students, who appear to be filmed without their knowledge, are shocked and delighted when their teacher appears before them and she is … a young girl. “Hello, my name is Gwyneth,” she says in an adorable lispy way, “and I will be your professor today.”
The same scenario is played out over and over – a little girl presents herself in a veterinarian’s coat to check on a shocked grown-ups’s cat (“Have you ever seen him fly?”). Then a soccer coach, a museum tour guide and a businesswoman in an airport. The adults gamely play along, smiling at these girls’ indisputable cuteness.
At the end of the advertisement, though, we see that the young ‘professor’ is not in fact in a classroom, but in her bedroom, pretending that her Barbie is teaching other dolls. Final words come across the screen: ‘when a girl plays with Barbie, she imagines everything she can become.’
It’s a heartwarming ad and one that’s not nearly so pink and garish as a typical ad for girls’ toys. After two decades of criticism on the kind of sexism which Barbie promotes, it seems Mattel nows wants to show that Barbie is actually wonderful for young girls, with an ad that pulls on the heartstrings.
In June this year, they came up with Barbie Fashionista, this whole new clothing line where Barbie gets real, with flats, sneakers, pants and midis, the kind of clothes which normal women wear and thankfully this line wasn’t pink at all. And when you combine that with the new ‘feminist’ Barbie, it really seems like Mattel is finally getting progressive.
But is this convincing enough?
The Guardian doesn’t think so. “The ad says, when a girl plays with Barbie, she imagines everything she can become. Except fat, of course. Or not white. Or anything other than the still very standard, horrifyingly-proportioned Barbie,” writes Jessica Valenti.
“Mattel still doesn’t answer a fundamental criticism about the dolls themselves. Should they (little girls) be encouraged to imagine themselves doing so with anatomically impossible body dimensions? With waists that would not fit a woman’s internal organs? With feet that are molded to fit tiny, tiny high heels?,” writes Quartz.
And Mattel did mess it up. Take a look at when they launched ‘Computer Engineer Barbie’ in a children’s book which Mattel claimed was their breaking-away-from-stereotype book. This Barbie had a pink heart-shaped USB drive hanging on her neck, did not know software coding and needed a man’s help to reboot the computer. Even real young seven-year-old girls today don’t need help in rebooting computers, let alone a fantasy ‘computer engineer’.
And the storyline in the book went this way.
“Your robot puppy is so sweet,” says Skipper. “Can I play your game?”
“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”
Likewise with the Presidential candidate Barbie, with “a smart suit in her signature pink … [and] accessorise with a sophisticated pearl necklace and earrings.” But as Jessica Valenti writes, “I don’t want young American girls’ dreams of running for office to be part of a consumerist ploy that reduces political participation to a cutesy doll.”
So yes, Mattel is finally taking a step in what seems like the right direction, but it is not there yet. It is yet to reach the path to feminism, let alone the destination.
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