lost in sprawl city

"Maybe we love our dolls because we can’t love ourselves,” a friend of mine—an artist who made drawings of dolls missing legs or arms or eyes, that all looked, somehow, eerily like her—once suggested. Perhaps this is the essential truth behind why we make effigies. And maybe this is why we tend to believe that children should have dolls that look like them, or at least that look like what they might eventually become. In 1959, Mattel introduced a doll that was, unlike most other dolls marketed for children, not a baby doll. The doll had breasts and wore makeup and was modeled after a doll sold in Germany as a gag gift for grown men. The man who designed the American version of the doll, a man who had formerly designed Sparrow and Hawk missiles for the Pentagon and was briefly married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, was charged with making the new Barbie doll look less like a “German street walker,” which he attempted in part by filing off her nipples.
In the past few decades, quite a few people have suggested—citing most often the offense of impossible proportions—that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls “provoked rejection, hatred, and violence,” and many girls preferred Barbie torture— by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving—over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were “plastic.” The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. “On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,” one of the researchers remarked. “She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture."

— “Relations” by Eula Biss

(Source: tenderbean)