Galia Slayen a student at Hamilton College build a real life Barbie during National Eating Disorder Awareness Week in the US
Did you know “if a Barbie were an actual women, she would be 5’9” tall, have a 39” bust, and 18” waist, 33” hips, weighing 110 lbs and a size 3 shoe” (Slayen, Galia). A real life women built this way would suffer diarrhea and die from malnourishment.
Barbie doll commercials create a negative image in the minds of young girls. These commercials distort the real definition of beauty. Exposure to such media at such a critical time of the human development can be very harmful to these girls in the long run. The images projected through these commercials affect the way young girls grow and perceive the world.
In the book “Landmarks a process reader”, the article “Gals and Dolls: The Moral Value of “Bad” Toys” by Marni Jackson addresses how unethical it is for media to use such imagery to influence young girls into buying their products (Birks 87). She talks about the negative connotations delivered through Barbie doll commercials, which affect psychological development like a low self-esteem and influences the adulthood of young girls. A Barbie doll’s unrealistic body features cause these girls to question their physical appearance, hence, distorting the image of a normal girl. This causes young women to feel the need to change their body in order to meet the expectations of society and look beautiful as defined by the Barbie doll commercials. Ultimately, such commercials are unethical to the society and therefore government should ban such advertisements that use unrealistically proportional models.
