Marge Piercy's Barbie Doll

Throughout life, many people are told that there are things for boys and things for girls. Girls are often told to focus on their appearance, and how the rest of the world perceives them. Trained to act like beautiful delicate flowers, many are introduced to makeup and haircare at early ages. For centuries, their role was to care for their children and be a lovely wife. These expected behaviors has many people constantly on worried about their exterior appearance. The affect these roles can have on people is discussed in “Barbie Doll” by Marge Piercy. People fear being judged for not being perfect, and it eats away at them until they can no longer stand it. Society dictates the way that people should think, act, and look. From the start the

People often believe that they are not good enough, and that they need to change parts of themselves in order to please others. The desirable qualities people do have can be considered less appealing due to their other unpleasant qualities. The poem’s subject is, “healthy, tested intelligent,/possessed strong arms and back/abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity” (7-9), but feels that those qualities are out shined by her, “great big nose and fat legs”(6). Her appearance makes her self-conscious, and she cannot let go of the comment made by a single classmate. A comment that haunts her from the time she is a young girl until she is an adult. She tries ignoring the comment at first. Acting as if she did not realize that she has these “imperfections”, but she cannot. The comment eats away at her, and she tries her best to do something about her nose and legs, but is not satisfied. She exercises and diets, but it does not give her the results she wants. She gives up on trying to ignore them and fix them herself, and decides to have cosmetic surgery in order to fit the beauty standards placed on her at a young

The girl is so wrapped up in what others think of her that she loses sight of everything else. She is a healthy and intelligent woman, but society has made her believe that those things do not matter, because she is not physically perfect. She spends her life trying to fix the “imperfections” she was born with. She is so focused on trying to look perfect that she is not happy. All she can think about is how everyone around her can see how big her nose is and how fat her legs are. Her happiness is lost to the constant need for validation that society has installed in