This was long before Bratz or any of that garbage hit the market, and frankly a hell of a lot more tasteful even with the yuck factor attached to it. Lots of kids can't wait to be teenagers, and a doll that taps into that mindset is a surefire hit.
There's just so much wrong about this, and what really stinks about it is that its creepiness taints an otherwise fairly decent concept. Puberty is a lot more complicated than that.Īnd frankly, you shouldn't even have to be a feminist to think this is creepy as all hell. We become abused girlfriends, but not curvy teenagers. A teenager is still goddamned young, alright, and I sincerely hope that I don't have to be the one to explain to you all that, despite what Mattel might say, no, we do not magically become women simply by twisting our arms. But then, on the white instructional part of the image, where they show you have to make this magical transformation from innocent tyke to budding young beauty, they say "for little girl Skipper, turn her arm all the way around clockwise and she's cute and young again!" The problem with this sentence is that it inherently defines teenager as "not young". The words "curvy" and "teenager" should never ever go together anywhere outside of adult websites search results, and even then it's pretty skeevy. They refer to the younger one as "cute little girl!" which is totally fine, but they then refer to the older adolescent as "tall, curvy teenager" and that's.questionable. So I can understand where they'd think that tapping into the literal growing market would be a good idea because it theoretically should appeal to every little girl, but somewhere along the line something went horribly, horribly wrong.įirst of all, let's just examine the wording of this image, shall we? For starters, we've got the very iffy wording choices that define both versions of the doll you get. See, girls are installation art, something to be looked at and discussed by anyone who ever sees them no matter the time or place.
Growing up for girls is weird, and a lot of it has to do with not the changes we go through physically but more so the reactions to those changes, not just from ourselves but from everyone else around us.
So, I'll admit it and say I get what they were going for here. Also I'm a toy blog, not a feminist blog, so there's also that. And I admit, I'm far from the first person to cover this topic, as feminist blogs far more worthy of praise have done it better than I will, but I still feel obligated to weigh in on it in some capacity. Now technically, this toy is from 1975, so while Barbie was indeed a popular toy amongst my peer group, this one was not because, well, I didn't grow up in 1975, so. This brings us to the first toy I'll be covering for this blog. Still, every now and then, I'd feel just a smidge bad for not buying into what the other girls were playing, yet in hindsight, I'm proud of myself and now ashamed of that shame, so. They knew I was weird and they let me revel in it, buying me Beast War action figures and sticky insects that clung to your window. Despite my family being pretty psychologically abusive, I have to give some credit where credit is due they didn't force any sort of role or stereotype on me. Not surprisingly, being a weirdo who liked bugs and ghosts, of course I didn't play with that sort of stuff. When I was a little girl, most girl toys were relegated to child rearing, play cooking or dolls of some kind or another.
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