![]() ![]() Why is one toy that gets played with for such a tiny amount of our life-course assumed to make such a monumental impact on identity? Not that I’ve ever been someone drawn to the idea of role models – and have never had one myself – but where does this assumption come from that children are looking to toys for that kind of inspiration? He configured them into two teams to play Australian Rules, regardless of their camo garb. My brother and his tub of GI Joes, for what it’s worth, weren’t aggressively stopping the spread of Communism in South East Asia either. My Barbies weren’t devising ways to pay their electricity bill, rather, they were living inside the soap opera in my head. As though adult gift givers need to make strategic choices so that the ‘right’ kind of play is engaged with so that, somehow, the right kind of future gets mapped out.Īs a child, my Barbies were only ever involved in one pursuit: dramatic relationship entanglements – think romance, think family estrangements, think treachery – mostly inspired by what I saw on film and TV. There seems to be plenty of presumptions made by adults about what children are doing and thinking when they’re playing with toys. My Barbies were living inside the soap opera in my head – think romance, think treachery. I dimly recall a poodle.ĭecades on and I emerged from the experience as a feminist academic who – for better or worse – doesn’t own a pony or a Corvette or campervan and who isn’t lamenting each month why I must bleed when Barbie doesn’t. But there were shoes, and outfits a plenty. ![]() I don’t remember having any career-centred Barbies. ![]() Between the ages of about five and nine almost all my toy-related gifts were pink and mass-produced by Mattel. I’m not sure whether it constitutes a confession – I’ve never felt any impetus to hide it – but as a child I was a Barbie junkie. Has Hollywood run out of original ideas?Ĭonversely, if we slip Barbie into a lab coat somehow a child can now aspire to a STEM career. As though somehow the toys that children play with or the garments that they don have not only depth of meaning but are imbued with magical properties.Īs though if our Barbie spends too much time in her Dreamhouse a girl might narrow her ambitions to being barefoot and perpetually pregnant. That her foot shape would make it impossible to run from her patriarchal oppressors – as though losing her stiletto arch would have been the doll’s true game changer.Ĭhildren’s toys and clothing have long been preoccupations for those strange bedfellows of radical feminists and conservatives. I’d hear that if she were a real person that she’d be too thin to menstruate – as though menstruating was the only thing 150 gram of plastic can’t do. The rhetoric goes that Barbie set a devastating example for the girls playing with her. ![]() So, the rhetoric goes, Barbie – in all her thinness, her whiteness, her youth and fixation on the frivolities of the feminine – set a devastating example for the girls playing with her. I’m not sure I remember all that much about my late 90s undergrad education, but I have no difficulty recalling a lecture on the evils of Barbie. ![]()
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