Barbie is a Good Role Model

Barbie is a Good Role Model

As a young girl the fondest memory was playing with all my Barbie dolls and having the time of my young youth. Getting new Barbie’s for my birthday and Christmas was the highlight for my friends and I every year, and comparing which dolls the others got with each other. Never once growing up did any of us feel that Barbie was bad for us to play with, or that she was a bad role model. She could be anything that she wanted to be and her friends were all different too. Barbie was just a doll that we could make say what ever we wanted to, and we let our imaginations make each doll have their own personality. Our mothers played with them when they were our age and turned out pretty well, and no one that I have ever come across has ever felt scared from playing with Barbie. When the article “Barbie doesn’t add up,” was read by my self I felt shocked and upset that someone with no experience would be able to say that Barbie was a bad role model for young girls.

Barbie is a toy doll that many girls from any age played with growing up or still do in the present time. As said in the article “Life in Plastic”, “Barbie draws her flock with a heady mix of marketing, magic and the colour pink,” which is trying to describe what exactly is the idea behind what a Barbie is. The Barbie doll has been around since the sixties and has physically changed over the years, but the idea behind this doll has stayed the same. Also Barbie’s physical description of the current time is that she has an “improbable figure- buxom breasts, wafer- thin waist and permanently arched feet waiting to slip into a pair of high- heels [...] the most potent icon of American popular culture in the late twentieth century,” and even though this may sound like a type of doll that young girls would only want to aspire to look like growing up, many girls realize as they grow older that it is just a toy(Life 2). Barbie may just appear to some people as just a toy with the same ideals that she has always had, but she has reformed and become a not to shabby role model.

A way to think of how Barbie’s have played a huge role in many girls’ lives is to think of how young boys that played with toy trucks and plastic tools were to them. Both of these toys were something that both girls and boys liked to play with growing up. While the girls would be inside playing Barbie wit...

... middle of paper ...

...tly to blame for making girls think that they should be sexually successful women modeled after Barbie (Life 3). Many women are blaming everything wrong with those girls in the world that have problems based on how Barbie looks, and that the doll somehow makes these girls think they should too.

There is really only one way to solve this big debate between Barbie and everyone against this plastic doll. Have the mothers talk to their daughters when they are young, and make sure they understand that the toys they play with do not have to reflect what they should look like or be like. For that matter the daughters should not be able to watch TV, movies, or read magazines because for the most part all the girls and older women in the media are all like a Barbie in their own way. The solution is to stop blaming one toy doll that many girls have taken much joy playing with because there are girls in the world that have eating disorders or physical issues with them selves. Why not blame society for having certain ideals of what a girl should look like? Barbie has only been around for 40 years, where girls and women that are self conscious about themselves have been around much longer.