Q. A doll is a doll is a doll, right?
A doll is a doll is a doll, right?
And the answer given is:
Wrong!
To cater to the Indian consumer Mattel toys Indianised the Barbie with bridal wear and sari but kept the blonde look intact for many models.
Raiford Guins, et al, write in ‘Popular Culture’, Barbie was then called a traditional Barbie, and it was a cultural-cross. A white American with a standard face with slender and tall Euro-American body wearing a shiny sari and a bindi; and she was not called the ‘Indian Barbie’ but ‘Barbie in India’.
By 1996, Mattel made its first genuine attempt to create an authentic Indian Barbie. But the doll had the exact same physique as the standard blonde Barbie with the same height and impossible body measurements. Her pigmentation was deepened only by a slight degree, and her eyes were made hazel rather than blue. The rest was the same — pink lips, coy smile, shining eyes, and the fictitious physique. With no significant increases in its sales, Mattel then promoted the Expressions of India Collection in 1997 as a part of the Leo Mattel joint venture. The Collection was a last attempt at making the Barbie doll look authentically Indian; however, the alterations were merely superficial changes in her dress and jewellery, and that too to just six to eight different dolls based on a few of the Indian states.
Barbie has failed to create the same magic in India that she had created in her mother country and some other parts of the world. Since Barbie was launched in 1959 in the US, she was re- and re-born in many avatars — as an astronaut, a CEO and even a presidential candidate. In 2014, to up sagging sales, Mattel launched the Entrepreneur Barbie, as veterinarian, football coach, astronaut and businesswoman. The company said that its new lines hope to make Barbie a ‘New World charm’, seducing tech-savvy young girls, which it sees as future customers. The company hoped that along with her tablet, briefcase and a smartphone, Entrepreneur Barbie would show girls that there’s more to her than a body. This avatar has been backed by many ‘real’ women entrepreneurs in the US, who serve as her ‘Chief Inspirational Officers’ (CIOs).
The ‘new’ Barbie
Recently, Mattel gave in to years of criticism about the dolls’ looks and launched a new line of Barbies with different body types and skin tones. The iconic doll will hit the shelves in different shapes, from original to petite and from tall to curvy. Barbie will also be available in seven different skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles.
But, will this negate the ‘negative body image’ created by Barbie? Will it make any impact on Barbie’s future sales and the psyche of India’s little girls and mothers?
Probably not!
As Priti Nimani says in her study ‘Globalization Versus Normative Policy: A Case Study on the Failure of the Barbie Doll in the Indian Market’, “For Indians, the issue goes beyond the potential for instilling negative body images in young females. Barbie offends public norms through a way in which her body is hyper-sexualized (even in her slightly changed new avatars). Barbie doll is a silent object that reaches out through her physical characteristics and those characteristics include her clothing, her face, and the one thing that never changes about Barbie, her body. Without her body, Barbie would be nothing.”
It is possible that some mothers may be repulsed by Barbie’s looks and some may buy Barbies that have similar skin colours as their daughters, but will they also buy Barbie’s lifestyle? Answering that is tough.
The new Barbie dolls introduced in January 2016. Mattel, the maker of the famous plastic doll, said it will start selling Barbie’s in three new body types: tall, curvy and petite. She’ will also come in seven skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles.
The Barbie lifestyle
Barbie just did not come with perfect face and figure but also perfect hair, make-up, clothes, the works. She is what our ‘beauty contests’ (also a borrowed concept) represent – stereotyping the perfect beauty, success and lifestyle. Once a girl bought a Barbie, she was compelled to maintain Barbie’s lifestyle, for her doll and for herself. That meant keep buying Barbie’s accessories like dresses, handbags, jewellery, make-up kits, doll houses (with pools), and, of course, more Barbies. Barbie has a commercial soul and did not just bring fun into a girl’s life, she brought ‘unwanted’ consumerism. Little girls spent hours and huge money on make-up, harmful hair dyes — subjecting their young hair to hair straighteners and curling irons — forcing their parents to spend a fortune on branded clothes.
The doll has been held responsible for eating disorders and even deaths. A typical Barbie doll is 11.5 inches, which, at a 1/6 scale, would make her 5 ft 9 inches tall. Her vital statistics have been estimated at 36 inches (bust), 18 inches (waist) and 33 inches (hips). According to a study by the University Central Hospital in Helsinki, Finland, she would lack the 17-22 per cent body fat required for a woman to menstruate. One UK-based woman spent over $1 million in plastic surgery just to achieve that Barbie look. She has become a spokesperson for Barbie, and preaches that in order to be fabulous, you have to be perfect ‘stereotype’.
People have spent millions just to have their houses look like Barbie’s. Socialite Paris Hilton’s (who looks as perfect as Barbie) $200,000 pink car came from the childhood dream to have a car just like Barbie’s. Those who cannot achieve that perfect look and cannot have those material things start thinking of their life as ‘useless’. The looks, the accessories and even the material things are stereotyped. One teenager writes in her essay, ‘This beautiful doll gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “if looks could kill”. Thank you!
The first Indianised Barbie came to India not as Indian Barbie, but as Barbie in India.
Till date, Barbie has failed to charm Indian girls with the Barbie lifestyle (though, girls from urban middle and upper-middle classes do have a fascination for the doll, but that’s a very tiny portion of the populace). Now, revamped, will she be able to work her magic on India’s next-gen girls?
I first saw Barbie in a retail shop in Bangalore when I had gone to buy GI Joe dolls for my sons. Frankly, I was disturbed by her physique. By then I had come back after living a couple of years in Europe but still, an overly sexualised doll with reed-thin body and oversized breasts made me wonder: “What the heck is happening to the world!” I had no idea that Barbie was not just a doll but she was a ‘lifestyle’! I wondered if I had a Barbie instead of my innocent-looking cardboard dolls, what would have become of me. This doll had the power to manipulate young minds, and endorsed a rather dangerous and unrealistic portrayal of female body.
Would I buy this doll for my little girl if I had one? I was not so sure.
Come next generation (after mine), Niyati Joshi, a 20-something from Mumbai had about seven Barbies growing up. She followed the Barbie lifestyle to an extent, like when her father brought shoes, T-shirts and hair clips from the US for her from Barbie stores. She also wanted to have a of the ‘life-sized’ Barbie heads to try different hairstyles, but that didn’t happen. When asked if Barbie’s unnatural figure bother her? “No,” she answered, “I looked at it just as a doll that looked like one of the supermodels I saw on the television!” But did she aspire to look like Barbie? ‘No,’ was the firm reply. “It all depended on one’s upbringing,” Niyati concluded.
When I asked a lady from Pune who teaches Social Justice as well as Justice related to Gender Issues and who is also a mother of a 20-something if she had bought Barbies for her girl? “No, she replied, we never bought any dolls for our girl, and Barbie was so adult looking so this doll was out-of-question.” Many Indian parents might have shared the same sentiment 20 years ago.
In a study called ‘Barbie in India: A Study of Effects of Barbie in Psychological and Social Health’, author Suchtra Saha puts forth one of her most interesting findings: “Barbie creates, recreates, and accentuates already existing divides between the binaries like male-female, fat-thin, sexy-non-sexy, beauty-brain and more. From being a plaything Barbie becomes the game maker!”
The creator of Barbie Ruth Handler thought otherwise. Handler had once proudly stated that “parents thank us for the education values in the world of Barbie…they could never get their daughters well groomed before – get them out of slacks or blue jeans and into a dress…that’s where Barbie comes in. The doll has clean hair and a clean face…dresses fashionably, and wears gloves and shoes that match”.
Perhaps, our little girls have not fallen hook, line and sinker to Barbie’s charms. They, perhaps, want to be the game makers!
An experiment using four identical dolls but with different skin tone
Kenneth Bancroft Clark (July 14, 1914 – May 1, 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (April 18, 1917 – August 11, 1983) were African-American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark also was an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first black president of the American Psychological Association.
The Clarks' were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children's attitudes about race. The Clarks' doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark's master's degree thesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children's self-perception related to race. Their studies found contrasts among African-American children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York. The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. One doll was white with yellow hair, while the other was brown with black hair. The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study. These findings exposed internalized racism in African-American children, self-hatred that was more acute among children attending segregated schools. This research also paved the way for an increase in psychological research into areas of self-esteem and self-concept.
This work suggests that by its very nature, segregation harms children and, by extension, society at large, a suggestion that was exploited in several legal battles. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, including Briggs v. Elliott, which was later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 1954, Clark and Isidor Chein wrote a brief whose purpose was to supply evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case underlining the damaging effects racial segregation had on African-American children. The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional because it resulted in African American children having "a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community." This ended segregation in the public school systems. Regarding Brown, this question of psychological and psychic harm fit into a very particular historical window that allowed it to have formal traction in the first place. It was not until a few decades prior (with the coming of Boas and other cultural anthropologists) that cultural and/or social science research—and the questions that they invoked—would even be consulted by the courts and therefore able to influence decisions.
In 2005 filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll study and documented it in a film entitled A Girl Like Me. Despite the many changes in some parts of society, Davis found the same results as did the Drs. Clark in their study of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the original experiment(s), the majority of the children choose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also choose the white dolls over the black doll.
The clip shown above is from Separate But Equal, a 1991 American two-part television mini-series depicting the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, based on the phrase "Separate but equal". The film stars Sidney Poitier as lead NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, Richard Kiley as Chief Justice Earl Warren, Burt Lancaster (in his final television role) as lawyer John W. Davis (loser of Briggs v. Elliott and the Democratic candidate in the 1924 US presidential election), Cleavon Little as lawyer and judge Robert L. Carter, and Lynne Thigpen as Ruth Alice Stovall. In 1991, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences rewarded the film Outstanding Mini-series award.
Mexico - Barbie Doll
Mexican Doll experiments
In 2012, Mexicans recreated the doll test. Mexico’s National Council to Prevent Discrimination presented a video where children had to pick the “good doll,” and the doll that looks like them. By doing this experiment, the researchers wanted to analyze the degree to which Mexican children are influenced modern day media accessible to them. The video went viral, but was taken down and is no longer available to view on YouTube.
These are among the thorny questions emerging in online forums in Mexico since a government agency began circulating a "viral video" showing schoolchildren in a taped social experiment on race.
The kids are seated at a table before a white doll and a black doll, and are asked to pick the "good doll" or the doll that most resembled them. The children, mostly brown-skinned, almost uniformly say the white doll was better or most resembled them.
One child in the video with mixed-race features says the white doll resembled him "in the ears."
"Which doll is the good doll?" a woman's voice asks the child.
"I am not afraid of whites," he responds, pointing to the white doll. "I have more trust."
Mexico's National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, in mid-December began circulating the video, modeled on the 1940s Clark experiments in the United States. The children who appear in it are mostly mestizos, or half-Spanish, half-Indian, and a message said they were taped with the consent of their parents and told to respond as freely as they could.
Mexicans who saw the video said online that they were dismayed but not surprised by its results, and also offered some criticism for the agency that produced it.
Commenters have noted that the options were "very limiting" by offering only black and white, or good and bad, when in Mexico the majority of the population is mixed-race, mostly European and indigenous, and to a lesser extent African and Asian backgrounds.
"It is a poorly formulated question, it is pretentious," one user said on the website VivirMexico (link in Spanish).
Yet many also said the video reveals a deep-seated prejudice that is taught to children in Mexico from an early age.
In 2010, the Televisa network was criticized for showing actors in black face during the World Cup in South Africa. In May, the case of a black man who died after a confrontation with police in Mexico City led to protests against Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.
Wilner Metelus, a sociology professor and leader of a committee advocating for Afro-Mexicans and black immigrants, said the doll video shows how far the country must go to recognize the prevalence of racism and the need to educate young people.
"The Mexican state still does not officially recognize Afro-Mexicans. There are few texts that talk about the presence of Africans in Mexico," Metelus said. "We need a project in the schools to show that the dark children are just the same as them, as the lighter children. And not only in schools; it is also necessary in Mexican families."
On Friday, the daily La Jornada published a report saying black immigrants in Mexico and the Afro-Mexican minority still suffer racism and discrimination that is not adequately acknowledged by the government (link in Spanish).
"[Dark] skin color is still associated with foreignness," Luz Maria Martinez, a leading anthropologist on Afro-Mexican culture, told the newspaper. "We do not know how to value the indigenous culture, which is very rich, or the African culture, which is as great as any in the world."
This experiment has been revisited many times - this time in Italy
