Should We Have Overweight Barbie Dolls?

As a tomboy growing up, Barbie seemed to represent everything I hated about girls, distilled into one twig thin, convertible driving, career whoring package of plastic evil.

My two sisters on the other hand, loved to take their Southern belle Barbies for joy rides in their matching hot pink glam convertibles, and spy on Stacy (another non-Mattel doll) who was hooking up with Ken in the hot tub. At one point I think they had a pregnancy scare. All while Ken secretly struggled with his sexuality. (Seriously, what straight guy wears a hot pink ascot?)

Little did my sisters know that a war was raging outside the walls of their idyllic Malibu Dream Houses. Barbie’s unrealistic proportions, which in real life would see her unable to walk with a torso too small to fit all her organs, have sparked controversy as to the place that ‘Overweight Barbie’ occupies on the shelves of toy stores. It wasn’t until Facebook page Plus Sized Modelling posed this idea to its subscribers, however – generating over 50,000 likes in support - that I suddenly became defensive of the reincarnated plastic devil.

Apparently the solution to Barbie’s twig-thin physique is to condone obesity, an epidemic plaguing 1 in 3 children who ‘brush her hair’, and ‘undress her everywhere’. If a doll’s proportions are seen to have such a significant impact upon the body image of young girls, then introducing an overweight doll will only perpetuate unhealthy lifestyle choices, replacing one body image disorder with another.

Is our self-confidence so fragile that we let the dimensions of a doll dictate our happiness? Let’s fill girls of this generation with the confidence to know they are more than how they look, rather than filling their California Dream Houses with overweight Barbie dolls, and hoping that the same message comes through.

If we really want to continue this ridiculous quest for more ‘realistic’ expectations of our dolls, why not start with ‘Mid-life crisis Barbie’? Finally divorced from Ken, Barbie sets off on a road-trip in her brand new pink convertible (courtesy of her ex-husband’s credit card). Includes; Ken’s house, furniture, entire salary and custody of their two children.

And nothing could be more realistic than ‘Hung over Barbie’: All of those ‘come on Barbie lets go party’(s) have really caught up with the drunken doll as she attends weekly Alcoholics Anonymous support meetings. Includes: yesterday’s dress with today’s shame all over it.

It’s time to stop analysing through the mind of an adult and start seeing through the eyes of a child. While a posse of insecure mums complain that their third time child-bearing body isn’t accurately represented by a nineteen-year-old doll, their daughters recognise that just like Dora and Cinderella, Barbie is not a real person.

What we are unable to ignore, however, is that almost 40% of children are experiencing body dissatisfaction, with girls as young as five expressing a desire to be thinner. Despite parents concern, an experimental study in Holland testing the effects of playing with thin dolls found no support to the assumption that Barbie negatively influences body image.

What we do know, however, is that children’s early ideas about weight and appearance are shaped by observing, absorbing, and imitating adult role models. No doubt that mothers who use Barbie as a scapegoat, are also those whose children overhear them asking ‘does this dress make me look fat?’

If we want to change the generation of body-conscious children, we need to stop forcing the blame onto Barbie (after all, she is simply a product of our ‘Barbie world’, which perpetuates this obsession with appearance) and start talking to girls about things other than how they look.

Why not begin with the first person on the moon, who wasn’t Neil Armstrong in 1969, but astronaut Barbie four years earlier? In the 90s she broke the ‘plastic ceiling’ by running for president before any female candidate had been considered in the American ballot. Let’s talk about the nascar-driving-fashion-mermaid-doctor who acts as an agent for change for girls, rather than making her thighs bigger and hoping the same message comes through. 

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