CHINAFOTOPRESS/GETTY IMAGES
LOSING
HER EDGE
sounds, and never think that he
was going to grow up and rob
banks and use guns,” she said.
Since allowing Barbie into her
home, creating Barbie stories
with her daughter has given them
an opportunity to talk about who
her daughter wants to grow up to
be, Stewart said.
“When I was young, my Barbies were essentially running a
brothel, and I didn’t grow up to be
a prostitute,” Stewart said. “Barbie takes a lot of heat and is sometimes more of a distraction from
things that are actually really
hurting girls. Now, I’m grateful for
any toy that allows me to sit with
my kids and hear what’s going on
in their heads. Today, Fruit Ninja
is much more of an obstacle in my
parenting than Barbie.”
Chidoni also drew the focus to
a child’s experience with the doll.
“If you watch your daughter experience Barbie through her eyes,
it’s very different from the cultural conversation that people have
about Barbie,” she said.
The way that Stewart’s daughter plays with the doll is pretty
typical of most girls, according to
Chin, who has interviewed dozens
of kids about their Barbie-playing
habits for her research.
HUFFINGTON
03.02.14
“Just because the company
markets Barbie with a particularly kind of story, it’s pretty clear
that kids don’t necessarily follow those scripts,” she said, adding that kids do everything from
chopping off Barbies’ heads to
making bowling games to creating
Barbie porn videos.
“They’re pretty complicated
— those darn kids — and they’re
pretty smart,” Chin said. “I’m less
worried about Barbie than I am
the culture that produces Barbie.
At the same time, she is kind of
this lightning rod representative of these things.”
Jillian Berman is an associate business editor at The Huffington Post.
A child looks
at a doll
in front of
the Barbie
flagship store
in Shanghai,
China, in
2011. The
store suddenly
closed on
March 7,
2011, after
just two years.