Bye bye Barbie

It seems the world has an increasing number of torture proponents these days, as a British study has discovered that most 7-11 year olds prefer to maim, decapitate, and destroy their Barbie dolls rather than play with them.

“When we asked the groups of junior school children about Barbie, the doll provoked rejection, hatred and violence,” said Dr Agnes Nairn from the University of Bath’s School of Management.

You know, this attitude seems a little extreme, doesn't it? I mean it is just a toy. Sure, it is a toy that has totally corrupted generations of little girls into skewed perceptions of physical perfection, but so what? I admit to doing strange things with my Barbie, Skipper, and Ken dolls, but never out of hatred, only out of fun and curiosity. I freqently let them fall down the elevator shaft of their Barbie townhouse and pretended a time or two that one of them got stuck in the escalator of the fashion plaza, but I also let them have orgies and put them in very strange sexual positions that would be deemed impossible by any human save for a contortionist.

“Of all of the products we asked the children to describe as ‘cool’ or ‘not cool’, Barbie aroused the most complex and violent emotions,” said Dr Nairn.

“The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a ‘cool’ activity in contrast to other forms of play with the doll.

“The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving.”

Of course, I can't say whether or not I would have tried the microwave thing, because such contraptions did not exist when I was a child. But I pretty much steered clear of any activity that would have destroyed the dolls, because, well, I'm not stupid.

Exploring the reasons behind the hatred and violence, the researchers teased out a variety of explanations rooted in the rich symbolism of Barbie. Analysis of the children’s comments indicate that Barbie is hated because she is ‘babyish’, ‘unfashionable’, ‘plastic’, has multiple selves and because she is a feminine icon.

“The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown,” said Dr Nairn.

“It’s as though disavowing Barbie is a rite of passage and a rejection of their past.”

Similar attitudes were expressed to Action Man, but at the same time boys expressed feelings of affection and nostalgia to the toy which were totally absent from discussions of Barbie.

Seriously, isn't this a little much? Since when do 7-11 year olds psychoanalyze their attachment to a toy and what it means? If I was tired of a toy, or grew out of it, it simply went into a box in the attic or in the trash. I never found a need to actually belittle the toy, for god's sake. Even the boys in this scenario are less scary, which leads me to wonder, what happened to the sugar and spice and everything nice that made up the composition of little girls?

One interpretation of this finding may be that whilst Barbie masquerades as a person – she actually exists in multiple ‘selves’ with different dolls and guises.

“The children never talked of one single, special Barbie. She was always referred to in the plural,” said Dr Nairn.

“The girls almost always talked about having a box full of Barbies. So, to them, Barbie has come to symbolise excess. Barbies are not special, they are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected.

“On a deeper level, Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person, becoming an ‘it’ rather than a ‘she’.

“This may go someway towards explaining the violence and torture.

“Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling.”

Whoa there, doggy. Now I really think they are giving these kids too much credit. However, it might be more difficult for me to judge this particular phenomenon, because in my time we had one Barbie, one Ken, one Skipper. You could turn Barbie into different things with clothing, but you didn't have multiple Barbies.

“The children were quite happy to admit that they routinely bought products simply because they were advertised on TV or marketed through their own TV show, but they also had a negative reaction to advertising and marketing targeted directly at them,” said Dr Nairn.

Disillusionment with the product quality was often expressed in terms of value for money - children were angry about being ripped off.

“They understand that children’s products go in and out of fashion quickly and they think marketers exploit this by not only over-marketing but also by over-charging,” said Dr Nairn.

“Children reacted very negatively to companies which they felt ‘tried too hard’; to market a product to them. They felt marketing was a cover-up for a poor product.”

Geez. You know, I never gave that much thought to commercials, so maybe I was an idiot child. If the product looked cool or interesting, I wanted it. If it didn't, I didn't try to analyze the intent of the marketing.

Which leads me to something I've constantly wondered over the past few years - are kids growing up too fast, learning too much about the ins and outs of life at too young an age? Are kids going to grow up to be more cynical and distant because of these things? Yea, ok, I was a "normal" kid who was allowed to be a kid and I grew up cynical and distant, but that is different. But really, why do kids need to think about advertising? What has changed in the last 30 years, going from kids who make their dolls have orgies to kids who mutilate their dolls? Are kids perhaps paying too much attention to societal concerns?

All I know is good, harmless fun meant you had dolls to play with another day. But I guess if you have 12 different Barbies, that doesn't matter. Perhaps the parents should be limiting their kids to just one, and then let's see how the kids react in a similar study. In the end I guess they are right, in a way. If you have too much, what you have doesn't mean anything.