Kim Toffoletti’s book chapter “Barbie: A Post Human Prototype”, really got me thinking about Barbie and how she influenced me as a child. Growing up in the late 90’s I am obviously very familiar with Barbie. All little girls had Barbie’s, even the ones who didn’t ask for them. She was marketed as being the perfect woman, beautiful and influential, and therefore became a role model for young girls. There has been much critique regarding Barbie as a role model, claiming that the image Barbie promotes is completely unattainable and contributes towards negative thoughts about body image in young girls, among other things. Despite her disapproval of Barbie, My mom never deprived me of having one, in fact I had many. However as I matured and started to enter an age where I could be negatively influenced by my beautiful blonde doll, my mom made sure to point out the unattainability of Barbie. In my elementary school they offered an afterschool seminar on positive body images which aimed to specifically draw attention to the impossible body type Barbie promotes. Of course my mom made sure I was signed up for this seminar. I am aware of the negative impact Barbie can have and the traits she promotes, however I believe this powerful plastic doll can be used for good and not just evil. This brings me to hipster Barbie.
This Barbie is being used to mock people’s obsession with Instagram and social media. People spend hours of their days making sure they come off a certain way on social media, in order to maintain and grow their followers and gain acceptance through the amount of likes they get. I myself am very guilty of this, my friend and I often (mostly jokingly) compare how many liked we can get on similar photos, crediting more the more likes I get (or more often, she gets) with having more people like us (instead of what time of day it was posted, what type of photo etc). The term ‘do it for the insta’ demonstrated the desire for someone to participate in exciting, cool or artsy activities, not for the experience but simply in order to post it and prove how exciting, cool or artsy our lives are. An Oregon wedding photographer is using Barbie to critique and mock these trends on social media. In this case, Barbie is being used because of her unattainable and ideal persona. The photographer, who prefers to remain anonymous, uses the Instagram handle @socalitybarbie to mock all the hipster and artsy instagrammers that spend hours trying to get the perfect “authentic” shot and even does it better than them. Barbie is being used to show how fake and manipulated all these shots are. As someone who spends a lot of time on Instagram, I find this account to be a hilariously accurate portrayal of almost every popular Instagram account. All these instagrammers take the same pictures and use the same captions while tagging them #liveauthentic. Hipster Barbie demonstrates all the ridiculous ways people unauthentically #liveauthentic.
Here’s a side by side comparison of some of Hipster Barbie’s instagram posts and some of mine, see any similarities? (although I’d like to point out that I don’t ‘do it for the insta’, but if photos of my activities end up on instagram after the fact, so be it)
