Barbie is one of the most iconic toys on the planet, selling over 1 billion dolls since her introduction in 1959 and becoming a cultural icon along the way. However, Barbie has attracted a fair share of controversy too for representing a body image that is both unrealistic and unattainable. Those at the forefront of the body positivity movement – a movement that promotes acceptance of all body types – argue that this is a major problem, as Barbie dolls promote harmful weight attitudes including thin-ideal internalisation in young girls. Indeed, one study (Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006) found that girls exposed to Barbie at a young age expressed greater concern with being thin, compared to those exposed to other dolls.
Mattel, the makers of Barbie, appeared to listen to these concerns and introduced a new “Fashionista” range of Barbie dolls in 2016, which offer more varied, realistic body types, including curvy, petite, and tall Barbies. Harringer, Schaefer, Thompson and Cao (2019) investigated the impact of these more diverse dolls on 84 girls aged 3-10 years old. They asked the children to point to the Barbie they thought was most associated with ten different adjectives, with 5 adjectives being positive (e.g. happy, smart, has friends, pretty, helps others) and 5 adjectives being negative (e.g. sad, not smart, has no friends, not pretty, mean). All the Barbie dolls, regardless of body shape, were wearing the same clothing and had identical heads to ensure the study was only measuring the girls’ response to body shape. The researchers found that the participants more frequently selected the original doll as representing all five of the positive attributes, while the curvy doll was more commonly selected for three of the five negative attributes (i.e. has no friends, not pretty, mean).
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| The new Fashionista range, offering Barbie in 4 body types |
Following this, the children were then asked which doll they would most like to play with. In this instance, the petite doll was chosen by the most children, with some of the children citing its appearance being similar to their own as being the driving factor. Conversely, girls most commonly identified the curvy doll as the doll that they would least like to play with. When asked why, the most common reason for not wanting to play with the curvy doll related to her body size, sometimes describing her as “big”, “fat”, or “chubby.” Given that the features of the dolls were controlled and only body shape was manipulated, these results indicate a weight bias against larger dolls and positive attitudes towards thinner dolls, attitudes that are likely to generalize to the real world. Despite Mattel’s concerted effort to offer more diverse body types, Harringer et al. demonstrate that the negative attitudes children hold towards the curvy Barbie would stop them from seeking them out in a store. This may reflect the fact that children have become accustomed to, and maybe even attached to, the beauty standards embodied by the traditional Barbie doll.
However, that does not necessarily mean that the new, more diverse range is a lost cause. As Harringer et al. points out, the larger, more realistic body shapes may become more widely accepted over time as children are exposed to a Barbie doll that comes in a range of diverse body sizes. Much as Mattel had marketed the traditional Barbie’s positive traits to further her appeal to children, associating positive characteristics with each of the diverse body sizes may help to counteract negative attitudes children hold towards larger bodies. All in all, Harringer et al.’s study is an important insight to the potentially harmful attitudes about body size in young children. Clearly, there are still concerns that the traditional Barbie has contributed to thin-ideal internalisation in children but the “Fashionista” range seems to be a significant step in the right direction for acceptance of diverse body shapes. Hopefully with time, and effort from Mattel, Barbie will no longer be an icon that represents impossible beauty standards, but an icon that reflects the diversity of body shapes and sizes everywhere.
References
Dittmar, H., Halliwell, E., &
Ive, S. (2006). Does Barbie make girls want to be thin? The effect of
experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5- to 8-year-old
girls. Developmental Psychology, 42(2), 283-292.
Harringer, J. A., Schaefer, L. M.,
Thompson, J. K., & Cao, L. (2019). You can buy a child a curvy Barbie doll,
but you can’t make her like it: Young girls’ beliefs about Barbie dolls with
diverse shapes and sizes. Body Image, 30, 107-113.