The Wall Street Journal article documents the various critiques the dolls have attracted since they hit toy story shelves. Everything from the hair texture of the dolls to their features to their packaging has come under harsh scrutiny.

While the piece is pretty standard fare, one sentence in particular stands out as if it were surrounded by neon lights:

The criticism over Mattel's new black fashion dolls underscores how difficult it is for large commercial companies to please a widely diverse black community with a single image or two depicting young African-Americans.

This is where discussions of representation, politics, and commerce get thorny. One of the reasons that the So In Style Dolls are attracting so much attention is because there isn't an endless fountain of African American images to choose from. It is costly to create customized dolls for every variance in skin tone, facial structure, and hair style. My Twinn dolls, which are created in the image of the child who plays with the doll, retail for close to $150 dollar a piece.

For the toy maker seeking to turn a profit, mass production is generally the way to go. However, due to costs, these designs are limited. So from a business perspective, it would make sense for Mattel to drive money into a few different designs that will hopefully appeal to a broad range of people.

However, a market-based explanation does not take into consideration the long history of exclusion of African-Americans (and other minorities) from other aspects of the American cultural landscape. This exclusion, often intentional, was often rectified by making token gestures - like making sure that there might be one black friend, but ONLY one. As a result, because these opportunities for representation are so few and far between, the reactions come quickly.

And, in light of the societal preference for light skin/long hair, an unintended side effect of doll play is that young girls learn that the features and traits their dolls possess are pretty or beautiful, and often seek to emulate them. Irby-McBride acknowledges this dynamic in a video on the Mattel site, explaining that dolls do influence the behavior of young girls. She made a conscious decision to provide the dolls with younger sisters to encourage mentoring, and had the girls interested in science, math, and music to promote school engagement. However, she did not extend her concern to the physical cues that the girls may get from the So In Style line:

[Irby-McBride] also wanted them to be fun. She loved playing with Barbie's long hair as a child, she says, and Mattel's extensive research repeatedly shows that young girls want their dolls to have long hair they can brush and style. The So in Style dolls also have a hair-styling kit to curl and straighten the hair.

The black women recruited by Mattel to give input during the dolls' production had extensive discussions with the company about giving at least some of the dolls varied and representative hairstyles, says Ms. Johnson, the mother of a 14-year-old girl. Mattel's concession was to make one doll's hair wavy and give one of the little sisters short puffy pigtails.

For a lot of people, particularly those of us who want our children to love and embrace the hair that grows out of their heads before they start making any changes, this kind of oversight undermines what we are trying to teach. If we teach that long, straight hair is beautiful and fun to play with, and there are no representations of short hair, cropped hair, or kinky hair, what kind of message does that send to a child?

In an interesting twist, the WSJ asked doll modification expert Loanne Hizo Ostile (whose work we have featured before) for comment:

Loanne Hizo Ostlie says she also likes the dolls, but thinks Mattel did black girls a disservice by not giving them a more varied, representative look. For more than 10 years, she has been customizing dolls, specializing in creating black dolls from Kelly dolls, Barbie's little sister, and selling them on the Internet.

In the past, she also customized Barbies, but the field got increasingly crowded, she says. Now, she's turned to the So In Style little-sister dolls, painting their eyes brown and giving them "dreadlocks, Afros, cornrows and kinks."

Amazing.

Perhaps full and equitable representation is a bit much to ask from profit-driven enterprises, like Mattel. However, I am encouraged to see doll makers like Stacey Irby-McBride and Loanne Hizo Ostlie, each doing a small part to correct representations that they see as problematic.

Are Mattel's New Dolls Black Enough? [Wall Street Journal]
So In Style [Barbie.com]

Earlier: Dear Mattel: This Is How How You Make Barbie More Diverse

The "burka Barbie" in question is one of 500 dolls, many dressed by Italian designer Eliana Lorena, currently on display at Florence's Salone dei Cinquecento and to be auctioned off for Save the Children in association with Sotheby's. The exhibition, in concert with Barbie's 50th anniversary, has Mattel's blessing.

Anna advised me not to do the show. Not only is she unimpressed by previous segments in which Jezebel was mentioned, she was pretty sure they'd "play the concerned "feminist" card" while in fact getting in more sweeping digs at the pernicious influence of Islam. Indeed, although the doll hasn't generated a ton of media attention, it's been enough to prompt both reflexive anti-Islam rhetoric (ahem, Daily Mail commenters!) and feminist outrage. NOW's Marcia Pappas has apparently released the statement,

As feminists we believe that women must be able to make their own choices and that includes choices about the clothing they wear. But the burka is more than a choice. Women are forced to wear the burka or risk being murdered. Mattel should be ashamed. Making a profit by selling a doll that is clearly wearing a symbol of violence is not acceptable and there should be a public outcry to take this doll off the market.

But there were other reasons that dressing Barbie in a burka wasn't exactly the cause I wanted to get behind, especially on Fox News. A non-Muslim dressing a non-Muslim doll in a burka trivializes it and reduces it to a costume as surely as Barbie's Mackies and bikinis and doctors' coats. Also, the burka in question is scaled strangely - not to mention lime green and vermillion. Perhaps more problematically, the doll is dressed in a burka "or" a hijab, and the two are not the same thing.

But most of all... I don't think it is really that big a deal: it's a single doll. It's not mass-produced. It's presumably not intended for any children, Muslim or otherwise, and doesn't seem to involve any more social commentary than Malibu Barbie does on Proposition 8. That said, whether the designer intended it to be or otherwise, it's obviously a loaded choice: Saudi Arabia outlawed Barbie in 2003, and as the Christian Science Monitor reminds us, "in April 2008, Iranian prosecutor Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi warned in that Barbie dolls are 'destructive culturally and a social danger,'" prompting attempts to ban them from stores, although several Barbie-substitutes have failed to catch on. (Fulla, a more naturalistic fashion doll from the United Arab Emirates, has been successful across the Middle East.) And for many, Barbie can never be de-sexualized.

In the end, I spent so much time debating and deciding that by the time I'd made my decision, the Fox segment had already aired. Too bad: I'd arrived at what I thought was an inarguable thesis: at the end of the day, all Barbies are going to end up in the same place - naked and spread-eagle on the floor.

It's Barbie In A Burkha [Daily Mail]
Burka Barbie To Raise Funds For Save The Children [Christian Science Monitor]
Boycott Burqa Barbie [PajamasMedia]
Burqa Barbie [Fox News]

Many of Ostlie's creations feature shorter hair, textured hair, or curly hair - a hard thing to get right, but the effect comes through beautifully.

The features and styles used on some of the dolls defy easy racial categorization.

Some of the dolls look like they are modeled on women from the real world.

Am I the only one that thinks this doll looks like Brandy?

Oh wait a sec - there was a Brandy doll! And it looks true to life! What did Mattel do, say "fuck this mold" when they were done and lock it away somewhere?

I used to wear a very similar style when I was a child - big, thick braids, though I am sure if I had this doll, I would have begged my mother for this twist style.

This pixie-esque curly do is really cute!

Loving the highly textured hair as well as the skin tone.

Could this be the first genderqueer doll? It's certainly the first one I've seen - and I have a friend I'd love to gift it to.

Okay, that's a trick question. It's hard to make an adequate representation of anything, and have it appeal to a mass market. Interestingly, creator Stacy McBride-Irby came up with the doll redesign out of a desire to have a doll that reflected what her daughter looks like

"They mean so much to me because they did come from a positive place," McBride-Irby said. "My daughter loves the dolls. I've had dads thank me for creating this line of dolls that represent their little girls. These dolls are for girls all over the world."

Over at Racialicious, I had two separate submissions, begging to disagree.

Seattle Slim wrote:

Mattel, you disappoint me. What was wrong with giving these dolls from your S.I.S line natural hair, dark brown eyes, and features that fit with most of the particular demographic, black girls, that you are looking to cater to?

If you guys think that these dolls don't mean shit, might I kindly ask you to check out the Doll test?

You should not be lauded for this, Mattel. I appreciate you thinking of us and all, but you dropped the ball on this.

Even if you wanted to keep these dolls, that's fine. I've already described my grandfather and family history here. Where is MY doll? Where is the doll with the Afro? Where is the doll with twists? Where's the doll with the lowboy? Where's the doll with the dark brown eyes, and the flatter nose, and the voluptuous lips? Where's the doll that has all of those things, not just some? Where's the doll for little girls that look like me?

Let me be more clear, these dolls (except for Kara's crazy lace front) are not terrible. I think they are actually perfect for little girls who have a mixed background. These pretty much cover a broad aesthetic and look like plausibly like someone with mixed heritage. In that respect, these dolls are perfect!

However, for the little black girls that look just like ME with unmistakably Afrocentric features, these dolls appeal to the tried and totally untrue, but respected, hip-hop beauty ideal that has become an "exotic girls only" industrial complex. So not only are young girls bombarded with those images on television, if their parents aren't careful, they are basically kicked while they're down walking through the toy store.

Tami, the editor of Love Isn't Enough, opened by explaining what she likes about the dolls. However, she still had heavy reservations:

Like a lot of women, I am uncomfortable with Barbie and her role in the development of young girls. It's not all Barbie's fault. It is the space she occupies in the universe of things that influence how girls grow up to be women: what goals they ultimately have, how they see themselves, how they judge their self worth and how they define womanhood.

I also have a beef with the word "authentic" to describe the three acceptably "blackified" dolls. Let's face it, these dolls don't represent any sort of break-through in representation of black faces. The skin tones and facial features fall within a narrow range that is acceptable within Eurocentric beauty standards. And to say that their hair is "curly" like that of most black women (as McBride-Irby does in this video on the consumer page for the new dolls) is being a wee bit disingenuous. Most black women have hair that is more kinky than curly in its natural state. (These dolls ain't no nappy heads.) Of course, most black women chemically straighten or weave up, which makes the dolls an accurate representation. Fine, but don't try to market them as some representation of "authentic" black physicality.

I also note, in the linked Mattel page above, the use of vaguely "urban" music, a gold, blingy necklace and a backstory that involves Barbie's friend Grace moving from California to Chicago, where she hooks up with Kara and Trishelle. The story and associated imagery is relatable for many black girls, but not all. What about the many, little black girls who live in the burbs? Of course, these dolls can't be everything to every child. But again, the use of "authentic" is a marketing fail. The urban experience is no more "authentic" to black folks than the rural experience.

This idea of authenticity permeates the whole line - each of the dolls has an optional hair styling kit, which includes a curl spray, clip in extensions, and a curling iron.

(Pause here for a second. The dolls come with activator and a weave. Both! Even Régine on Living Single didn't go this deep and she was checking for a Chocolate Ken!)

The reactions to both the pieces raged back and forth - some people thought we should appreciate the effort, the steps taken, and the fact that a black designer created and conceived the S.I.S. project. Others thought that anything that reinforces eurocentric beauty standards is still damaging, even if it is created by another women of color.

But the strength of the reactions - both for and against the dolls - showed what's really at stake here. While some people might say that all of this attention toward Barbie is silly and misplaced, the fact is Barbie still occupies a certain, exalted place in the cultural consciousness. Even as the Barbie brand is falling out of favor, she remains a symbol of (white) femininity and desirably, and unreachable ideal that far too many girls still find imprinted on their psyches.

The truth is, we don't want to change Barbie, or Trichelle, Kara, and Grace. We want to change the culture that says we must look a certain way in order to be beautiful.

But changing a culture is difficult. And even as we grow up, and leave our Barbies behind (or decided we never liked them in the first place), the painful truth remains: we all want our beauty to be validated.

And in our own, individual way, we're trying to influence the world to do just that.

New Black Barbies Get Mixed Reviews [CNN]
Mattel Falls Short With S.I.S (So In Style) Line Black Barbies [Happy Nappy Head]
I'm Saving My Cheers For New, "Authentic" Black Barbie [Love Isn't Enough]
Barbie So In Style Stylin Hair Grace Doll [Amazon]

"Ever had plastic surgery to become beautiful? Are you proud of your body? Would you like to put yourself to the test?" asks the pageant's website. The competition, which has already attracted 100 entrants, is open to women 18-30 - although there is an older "dame" category, too - as long as they've had "a surgical procedure done under general or local anesthesia."

The pageant, according to its founders (via Reuters), seeks to, ahem, destigmatize cosmetic enhancement which, despite its increasing affordability and popularity, still gets a bad rap. Says its press director, "Unfortunately, people in Hungary are still rather negative about ladies who have had (cosmetic) surgery and there are also a lot of stereotypes going about...We are not seeking to promote extremely large breasts and the like." She adds, "The whole thing is about harmony, that's what the contest seeks to emphasize...Let's not forget that there are ladies who have had new perspectives open up for them thanks to plastic surgery, who could get rid of their complexes with an operation and can now have a more complete life."

Well, uh, sure. Whatever floats your boat. And I guess as long as we're promoting unnatural standards of beauty, there's a lot to be said for admitting they're...artificial. Maybe it makes more sense than the nudge-wink wholesomeness of the typical American varietal. Is it less offensive to find someone's taste wanting than her genetics? And if these women are indeed facing discrimination - I'll admit, something I'd never really considered - then I guess anything that encourages choosing your choices is good?

But, of course, more pageants aren't exactly the way most of us see aesthetic relativism triumphing; objectifying other kinds of figures has never really been the thinking woman's preferred alternative. And what amounts to the promotion of plastic surgery (obviously a lucrative source of money and tourism) - and heralding it as a road to "a more complete life" - isn't really how we see women feeling more confident about their "complexes." It's not like they're making us comfortable with a new aesthetic, after all.

But maybe there's something to be said for cutting the crap and going back to the original goal of pageants: arbitrary physical standards. We ran across a 1959 document that shows how the Miss Universe "winner was picked" and it had precious little to do with world peace. Legs "too irregular?" Shoulders "too square?" Sorry, Charley.





In a way, it seems important to be reminded that this is what pageants were - and are. Especially since they show no sign of going away. Indeed, today's Telegraph tells us that the scourge of the baby pageant has hit Great Britain, with attendant stage moms, pancake makeup and dubious invocations of God, (whom many parents seem to think takes a strong personal interest in the direction of local children's beauty contests) and quotes like this: "It was a long day. Scarlett had an asthma attack the day after – we think it was inhaling others' hairspray. I don't regret it, though; it was a learning experience and she had a lovely time." While these moms are not yet up to American levels of shamelessness - we have, after all, had generations to hone our skills, things like this - "Chloe (8) is used to make-up – she usually does her eyes, her cheeks and lipstick. She's a little young, but I don't mind if she wears it now and then, to go out to parties" - make us think they're going to catch up just fine. In a few years, these girls too can make the choice between the route of "scholarships/self-esteem and self-confidence" or the more frank future heralded by Miss Plastic.

Miss Plastic Hungary Contest Seeking "New" Faces [Reuters]
1950s Beauty Pageant Judging Guidelines [Sociological Images]
Baby Beauty Queens: Mini Miss UK, The UK's First US Style Child Beauty Pageant [Telegraph]

The gallery takes Barbie from Bob Mackie to Oscar de la Rents (not the best look) and back again. Most of these designs come from the late '90s, when Mattel went wild with designer tie-ins, but a few are earlier (Bob Mackie, anyone?) and we like to think they arose from the designers' organic love of America's plastic sweetheart. As for our faves? Well, Barbie looks classically chic in Dior New Look, but you gotta love her power-suited out in Anne Klein - dowdy hair and all. Can the golden anniversary looks really compare? One things for sure - we can't wait to find out. [VogueUK]

Despite the shocking revelations about Barbie's scandalous past, the objections on Babble are the old ones: unrealistic body image. Says Mike Adamick, the concerned dad whose daughter has just received a first Barbie:

A friend's daughter, then 7, told her mother one day that she needed to go on a diet so she could look "more like Sally" — the name she had given to her Barbie. I'm not saying Barbie is the gateway to eating disorders. But I also don't think dieting fits into the realm of playtime. How fun is that to look at a toy and think you're suddenly not good enough? Yay! And our friend's daughter is not the first to bring this up. And I doubt the same emotion overcomes a girl playing with a chubby Cabbage Patch Doll. Some young girls see Barbie, want her body and then destroy their own. After all, isn't Barbie a model for the perfect female?

The opposing argument, "Aw, Just Let Her Have a Barbie," comes from Jeanne Sager, formerly anti-Barbie, who relaxes after her young daughter actually gets a Barbie and falls in love with it.

I didn't even know she knew who Barbie was. She spent hours that night, ripping Barbie's clothes off. Making me put them back on. Ripping Barbie's clothes off. Making Daddy put them back on. Brushing Barbie's hair. Tangling Barbie's brush in knots in Barbie's hair. It didn't matter what I thought. Barbie had found a home. She's now up to three Barbies - all gifts - and I've given up on a lot of my feministic outrage. It's a doll. She has impossibly big boobs and and impossibly small waist. But she's hardly the only doll to be lacking in realism.

When actually confronted with the doll they'd feared, Sager and her husband find it's just that: a piece of plastic, unable to suddenly control their daughter or overcome their influence. "By not making it a big deal, we've managed to make Barbie no more special than her collection of Hess trucks or her art easel." Furthermore, Sager acknowledges that she herself managed to develop all the neuroses and insecurities she hoped to spare her own daughter - without the benefit of Barbie. The funny thing is, by the end of his "anti" essay, Adamick has come to pretty much the same reluctant conclusion. Not only is his daughter fairly disinterested in the doll, but he determines that at the end of the day it's his behavior as a parent that matters more. "I still maintain that I'm not going to buy one...but if another Barbie enters the house, I think I'm the last person who should be making a big deal of it. "

This whole debate made me laugh: when I was a little girl, my conscientiously liberal parents denied me a Barbie. Indeed, my playroom was conspicuously lacking in pink plastic generally, although there was plenty of beeswax and wooden toys. As a result, the Barbie attained forbidden fruit status: it became an obsession, the focus of all my desires. And when I finally received that long-awaited Mattel box when I was five, it held far more fascination than it otherwise would have. After all, it must be special if parents fear it so much! But even with Barbie's seedy past and bad feminist cred, such concerns seem relatively quaint compared to the threats posed by child strumpets like Bratz, or the legions of real children on TV behaving questionably. As these things go, a Barbie can serve as little more than a lesson in poor lipstick shade choices, and the sad fact that plastic hair doesn't grow back. The rest, as Babble agrees, can probably be offset by more normally proportioned grown-ups.

Smackdown [Babble]

Earlier: XXX! Sex Secrets Of Barbie And Ken

It's common knowledge that the iconic Mattel toy was based on a German sex doll, but according to the new book Toy Monster: The Big, Bad World of Mattel, that's not the only taint [Hee hee. -Ed.] in the material girl's past. If Barbie's always seemed suspiciously like a male fantasy, it might be because Jack Ryan, the designer who popularized her, was a "full-blown seventies-style swinger" with "a manic need for sexual gratification" from a parade of hired "Barbie clones," including the bombshell who gave Talking Barbie her voice. Says one friend,

"When Jack talked about creating Barbie . . . it was like listening to somebody talk about a sexual episode, almost like listening to a sexual pervert . . ."

Of course, Mattel founders Ruth and Elliot Handler were somewhat more wholesome; as pop culture known, Barbie and Ken were named for their two kids. The book says that young Ken "grew up embarrassed and humiliated by having an anatomically incorrect boy doll named after him . . . [with] no hint of genitalia." Ken, a closeted homosexual who went on to marry and have a family, died of AIDS in 1994; his sister Barbie seems to have borne up under the weight of being an international sex symbol, albeit reluctantly.

To those of us who loved Barbie, none of this will exactly come as a shock: part of Barbie's appeal was always the taint of the forbidden and adult, a grown-up femme fatale in a world of baby dolls. A child is never Barbie's mom; it's a different, less straightforward relationship. Feminists who've criticized the doll as an unrealistic example of femininity may feel vindicated by the knowledge that she was designed as a sex object by a man whose attitude towards women seems to have been less than, ahem, respectful. And yet, it can't be denied that kids love Barbie, in part because she gives them a certain power over a mini adult. (Or a reason to wreak havoc.) Freud would doubtless have a lot to say about the basic appeal of sexuality; as Ken Handler could probably have told him, a doll is never just a doll.

Sex Secrets Of Barbie And Ken [New York Post]

Earlier: It's Barbie, Bitch