Since her creation by Ruth Handler and the Mattel company in 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts, universally known as Barbie, has metamorphosed into a cultural symbol that far transcends the world of play. As well as being a beloved doll marketed towards little girls globally, she has come to signify changing attitudes toward women, their bodies, and their role in modern society. Most recently, Barbie has graced the big screen and broken box office records in Greta Gerwig-helmed hit film that shares its name with the infamous doll.
Conceptualising the magnitude of Barbie’s influence and determining whether this is overall positive or negative has proven unendingly polarising for sociologists, child behavioural specialists, and cultural historians alike. Barbie is too skinny, Barbie is a role model, Barbie promotes unhealthy body image, Barbie shows girls they can have any career they want, Barbie causes low self-esteem, Barbie is independent and doesn’t rely on a man… it’s an endless debate that we’ve all heard before. Many adult women, having played with Barbie in their childhood, grapple with the dilemma of the doll’s moral value themselves. The question all this really points to, existential as it may be, is: who is Barbie? What messages does Barbie send about womanhood, and are these messages ones we should instil within children?
Those who have expressed concerns or resistance to Barbie have not done so unfoundedly. Second-wave feminism, spearheaded by the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the latter half of the twentieth century, put the doll on blast for the unrealistic body expectations she promulgated and the damaging ideas she promoted to young women. To be fair, their criticisms fell within the time of Barbies not quite as empowering as the likes of today’s President Barbie. 1965 Slumber Party Barbie came with weighing scales that read 110lbs and a book on how to lose weight containing only one instruction: “Don’t Eat!”. The understandable outrage towards this did not prevent Mattel from releasing the doll once again in 1967, this time without the scales but with the book still in hand with its problematic advice.
Safe to say Slumber Party Barbie would never fly in today’s culture, but does that mean Barbie has found redemption in the body ideals she projects? Even without explicitly promoting disordered eating, Barbie hardly champions realistic expectations of the female body, with her minuscule waist, slender ankles, and full, perky chest. A 2021 study by Durham University found that playing with a Barbie just once could significantly impact a child’s body image, increasing the risk of developing an eating disorder. Given that eating disorders presently have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, including depression, we absolutely cannot ignore potential risk factors for young girls susceptible to them, even if Barbie is just a toy.
That said, it would be egregiously unfair to suggest that Barbie is all bad or that she is the direct or sole cause of the crisis of eating disorders across the globe. Beyond her plastic exterior, there is much to be said for Barbie as a role model. In contrast to the Durham study, in 2020, neuroscientists at Cardiff University demonstrated the positive impact of playing with Barbie and the potential for the doll to increase children’s empathy and social processing skills. Arising from a time in which a woman’s role was largely confined to the domestic sphere, Barbie, in her genesis, was a proto-feminist, an independent career woman who could do anything she put her mind to. Let’s face it, with over 200 careers under her belt, Barbie has an enviable LinkedIn profile. Virtually any career path you can imagine- writer, physicist, politician, fashion designer- this doll has done it. Barbie even became an astronaut in 1965, four years before man landed on the moon. The only thing Barbie hasn’t been? A wife or a mother. Even with the creation of Ken, she retained her autonomy and was never forced to conform to a submissive role by his side or compromise her ambitions for a man; it becomes difficult to criticise that.
Additionally, we cannot ignore the evolution Barbie has seen in recent years, with the increased representation of different skin tones, hair types and body shapes. Most recently, Mattel released a range of Barbies with disabilities, including one with a prosthetic limb, one with a hearing aid, and one with Down syndrome. This drive for inclusivity, though it could (and should) have come a lot sooner, is an encouraging glimpse into the future of Barbie. Perhaps, as times themselves are changing, the brand is too. While this doesn’t absolve them of the damage done by the likes of Slumber Party Barbie, it is uplifting to see progress, and it is incredibly touching to witness little girls finally seeing themselves reflected in these new iterations of the classic doll.
Maybe, though, we need to move away from this essentialist view of Barbie. The idea that the doll has a discernible identity, unalterable by what is projected onto her through the mode of play, seems to overlook the massive impact environmental factors have on a child’s interactions with and understanding of Barbie. That is to say, Barbie does not exist in a utopia where little girls’ imagination is untainted by outside influences. A child growing up in a setting where she is encouraged to pursue her ambitions, where her individuality and ability are celebrated, projects this positive sense of self onto her Barbie, who in turn is empowered and free to follow her dreams. The absolute antithesis of this, and the worst-case scenario, sees little girls deface and abuse their Barbie dolls; a projection of diminished self-worth stemming from environmental stressors and, in some cases, abuse. So perhaps Barbie is less of a rigid figure – rather a canvas onto which children can cast their preexisting ideas of selfhood and the female experience. If the surrounding adult influences are empowering ones, so too will they allow their Barbies to be empowered figures.
Similar can be said for Barbie’s physical appearance. A tangible separation may be made between doll and human if the child’s environment celebrates bodies of all sizes and is not infused with the diet culture that fosters eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Unfortunately, the culture is so saturated with a need to be thin, to look a certain way, that an environment absent of these harmful ideas is virtually non-existent. Maybe the issue with Barbie’s unrealistic body, then, is not with the doll herself (whose body, being plastic, of course, is not a real one) but that children are viewing it within the context of the overwhelming onslaught of subliminal messaging about women’s bodies that surrounds them everywhere they go.
One poster for the 2023 Barbie movie masterfully carries the slogan “she’s everything, ” which feels like a fairly accurate observation. Barbie is virtually every career imaginable; Barbie is a role model for young girls; Barbie is a bad influence; Barbie promotes unrealistic body expectations; Barbie champions female independence. All of these convoluted truths are who Barbie is. Barbie is as incongruous as the female experience itself and is problematised even further by the deeply complex social factors that drive interactions with her. And ironically, in her perfect plastic shell, this multiplicity gives Barbie a painfully human quality. Barbie is everything, but she is also everyone.
Featured Image, “Barbie Journal 1992 (Finnish)” by vaniljapulla is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.