How can mass culture empower people?

           Today I would like to discuss how mass culture empowers people by deconstructing the music video "Barbie Girl" by Aqua. I would specifically focus on Barbie doll’s promotion of an unrealistic thinness for many young women and discuss how it empower a specific group of people.

To many girls, Barbie, one of the most popular dolls manufactured by Mattel, is not only an 11.5-inch plastic doll, but also a childhood friend, a playmate, or a role model. According to Oxford Dictionary, Barbie is “a doll representing a conveniently attractive young woman or a woman who is attractive in a glossily artificial way” (Oxforddictionaries.com). What makes Barbie notable among young girls is her light skin, slim body, with breasts, a narrow waist, long and hairless legs, candy-apple red lips, flawless makeup, a cheerful smile, and an endless supply of beautiful dresses and other accessories. Having dressed through years as cheerleader, fashion model, super star, and princess, she is a symbol of femininity and a cultural icon of what many girls at early age presumed as beautiful and appealing, despite of some recent critiques on its promotion of unrealistic body proportion. 

           Although the Mattel claims that the design of Barbie doll is never meant to cope with the real body dimension of a living woman, K. Wysocki did a research to give the definitive statistics on the scale of Barbie to real-life dimersion. According to Boston University student K. Wysocki’s research on Barbie,

“Barbie’s neck is twice as long as the average human’s which would make it impossible to hold up her head… Barbie’s legs are 50% longer than her arms, whereas the average woman’s legs are only 20% longer than her arms… If a woman had the same measurements as Barbie, she would not have enough body fat to menstruate (and obviously to have children)” (Lowen).

A standard Barbie doll is 11.5 inches tall and has a body of 6-inch bust, 3.5-inch waist, and 5-inch hips (Winterman). If Barbie is converted into a 5’7”-inch tall life-sized woman, she would have a body of 32-inch bust, 16-inch waist, and 29-inch hips. Weighing 110 pounds and having a BMI of 17.2 and a child’s size 3 foot, Barbie would have to walk on all four limbs and have only half of a liver and inches of intestine due to her disproportional body structure. With frangible 3.5-inch wrists and 6-inch ankles, her fragile body would collapse from heavy lifting (Katz). A BMI of lower than 17 is considered underweight or anorexic. With a body proportion that is entirely not accomplishable and not possible anatomically to almost all grownup women, the design of Barbie Doll promotes this impractical and imaginative body ideal. In other words, if the design of Barbie doll indeed reflects the ideal feminine body structure, the ideal of bodily perfection is going to push us to the extremes in pursuing feminine beauty and one’s nourishment and productivity in our society is going to be degraded to her anatomy and her body display. 

           One may ask, "So what? What does it has to do with politics? And why are you making a simple thing political?". But here I have to tell you that our culture is political. Everything that we do and every choices we make in our daily lives from waking up in the morning to attend to home to deciding what to eat for dinner involves political decision and power relation. Going back to our barbie doll example, if the Caucasian standard of feminine beauty embodied in Barbie dolls is indeed the ultimate truth about feminine beauty, it not only demonstrates a sense of dominance of the Caucasian race, but also our normalization to this race inequality. In her “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”, Bartky states, “The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular” (Barkty, 285). In this quote, Bartky suggests that no one in particular in our society is the one to blame for enforcing the disciplinary control of a woman needing to behave femininely or have a feminine body because we all have been internalized with the dominant standard of feminine beauty our society reinforced in our education and mainstream social media starting from childhood. The overwhelmingly widespread concept of maintaining feminine body and gesture makes a woman beautiful forces her to betray her true self in morals and values and makes her feel guilty for doing something that is not necessarily morally blameworthy such as eating before bed and not going to gym. In our case, Barbie doll is just the agent through which many young girls internalize the social expectation of thinness. The embodiment of the many outrageous norms our society presumed as feminine beauty, the design of Barbie blinds many young girls and shadows the actual healthy anatomy of a female. Thus the drive to become a “life-sized Barbie” is heavily influenced by social norms, not just what a young lady must do or look like to be a successful Barbie or a become beautiful. 

           After all, living in the customer culture where we are pressured into pursing this cultural imagery of feminine beauty, we all become the same people. Wearing the same cosmetic, having the same fashion sense, pursing the same “physical fit” ideal, this sameness not only reflects the dominance of certain gender, race, or culture, but also leads to problematic consequences such as severe eating disorder, compulsive exercising, or even death. A normalizing discipline, the pursuit of the extreme norms of physical beauty becomes an “easy” routine despite of how difficult it is for a lot of women to persist and achieve. I am not tell people to not play with Barbie doll or not to exercise for fitness, but it is rather more important for us to be aware of the politics behind playing with this innocent looking doll.

Bibliography

 Bartky, Sandra Lee. (1990). “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal

Power” Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader. Eds. S. Haslanger and E. Hackett. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

"Barbie." Definition of in Oxford Dictionaries (US English) (US). Ed. John Simpson and

Edmund Weiner. OxfordDictionaries.com, 2013. Web. 16 May 2013.

Katz, Neil. "Life-size Barbie's Shocking Dimensions (PHOTO): Would She Be

Anorexic?" CBSNews. CBS Interactive, 20 Apr. 2011. Web. 17 May 2013.

Lowen, Linda. "After 50 Years, What Is Barbie's Impact on Girls and Women?"

About.com Women's Issues. About.com Guide, 9 Mar. 2009. Web. 16 May 2013.

Winterman, Denise. "What Would a Real Life Barbie Look Like?" BBC News. BBC, 03

June 2009. Web. 17 May 2013.