As promised in last week’s Girl(ish) Talk where I discussed my thoughts on the Barbie movie, I’m going to now talk about my thoughts on the Barbie brand. While the movie does its best to depict Mattel as an evil but ultimately harmless company and the Barbie doll as being genuinely pro-women, it also shows the frustration that many women feel towards the concept of Barbie dolls. That frustration is the most accurate part of the movie to the real interaction that Barbie dolls have with society.
At first, the dolls were geared towards a specific view of femininity. The earliest Barbies were models; they were thin with impossible proportions and were a product of the 1950s culture they came from. Eventually, those dolls started receiving pushback and stopped selling, which caused Mattel to rebrand with more “feminist” dolls that came in different body types and showed women in different careers.
Mattel would like to be seen as a pro-women brand whose products are necessary to create empowered young women. Critics would say, though, that the company is capitalizing off of female empowerment, while actually creating harmful expectations for women. I tend to lean towards the more cynical option, at least when it comes to huge corporations. The leadership at Mattel is only 35% female and is almost entirely white, which detracts from their progressive front. I don’t believe that Mattel is evil, but they aren’t good either. The company might do something to help girls every now and then, but at the end of the day, to keep existing, their primary function has to be to make money. For Mattel, money takes precedence over helping women, over the environment, over social progress. Beyond the long-standing criticism that Barbie is too skinny and is bad for children’s body image, Mattel’s marketing and business model actively harm girls’ empowerment.
They can put smiling plastic dolls in construction costumes all they want, but that won’t do anything to tackle the actual sexism that exists in STEM fields. It’s so easy to dress up a flawless doll in a costume and point to it saying “see, society is progressing, women can do anything these days!” But in reality, girls aren’t avoiding construction sites because they have never seen a woman in a hard hat. The pay gap doesn’t exist because people forget that women can also wear lab coats and hold test tubes. But the real issues behind the manifestations of sexism are too huge and overwhelming. It’s easy to buy into the marketing campaigns telling us that if enough little girls are playing with a slightly curvier Barbie doll, they won’t grow up hating their bodies. But by putting the Band-Aid of plastic social progress over our real issues, we avoid the massive amount of hard work that needs to be done to actually change things for the better. We can’t mass produce social change and we can’t buy a better future for women, because women already know what we’re capable of. We don’t need inspiration, we need support.
